‘Vem Marchar com a Gente’/Come March with Us

Figure 1.

Marcha logo, designed by Afro-Bahian artist J. Cunha.

This issue’s cover features a powerful photograph of Dona Tiana (Sebastiana Geralda Ribeiro da Silva), a grassroots activist from the historically black territory Quilombo Carrapatos da Tabatinga in the state of Minas Gerais, delivering an impassioned speech during the first-ever national Marcha das Mulheres Negras contra o Racismo e a Violência e pelo Bem Viver (Black Women’s March against Racism and Violence and for Living Well, hereafter the Marcha), held in Brasília on November 18, 2015.² The actual march on the nation’s capital, drew between 5,000 and 20,000 women and a few hundred men from across Brazil, was the culmination of an unprecedented nationwide mobilizational process spanning several years (beginning in late 2011, the U.N.’s International Year for People of African descent) and encompassing all regions of this country of continental proportions. Considered a major turning point and veritable watershed in Afro-Brazilian women’s activism by organizers, participants, and observers alike, the Marcha involved every conceivable sector of Afro-descendant women’s organizing and many women from the mixed-gender Brazilian Black movement as well. It therefore merits a special place in Part I of our special issue on Afro-descendant Feminisms in Latin America.

Though many Black Brazilian feminist and women’s movement activists and organizations form part of national networks such as the Articulação de Organizações de Mulheres Negras (Articulation of Black Women’s Organizations), the Fórum de Mulheres Negras (Black Women’s Forum), the Federation of Domestic Workers, the Black Lesbian National Seminar, and the National Front for Women in Hip Hop, the Marcha sought to reach out to all Black women involved in all sorts of social change efforts in an exceptionally wide range of places and spaces, urban and rural, governmental, religious, trade union, academic, and artistic sites, and many more. As captured in their slogan, “Vem Marchar com a Gente” (Come March with Us) and spelled out in the “call to action” or “Manifesto” released in July 2014 and reproduced in translation in this issue, Marcha organizers worked especially to draw in women “who had never attended a meeting of hegemonic feminism” to engage in “constructing the Marcha,” starting from wherever they were situated, no matter where they worked and wherever they were active, in whatever ways, forms, and venues they were organizing for racial, gender, and social justice. (Group interview with Black feminist organizers of the Marcha, Salvador, Bahia, 11 May 2014.)3

The Marcha process explicitly called on the full range of both organized and heretofore unorganized sectors of Afro-Brazilian women and their allies (of whatever genders and races) to join them in loudly proclaiming Black women as subjects of their own lives, of a transformed racially and gender conscious citizenship, of new forms of “living well” with nature, the environment, and one another. The Marcha’s recognition of diversity within racialized, gendered difference was central to its strategy and is vividly illustrated in the following excerpt from one of their earliest outreach messages:

We are especially interested in mobilizing: Black girls, adolescents, and young women, from the cities and the rural areas; Black nurses, teachers, domestic workers, quilombolas [quilombo/maroon community residents], Black prostitutes, Black women doctors, those linked to religions of African origin …Black women whose sons and daughters have been assassinated by the police, Black washerwomen, cooks, construction workers …nerds, punks, emos, Black women athletes, artists, atheists …rappers, funkeiras [participants in funk music culture], DJs, graffiti artists, Black women street cleaners, businesswomen …Black lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, Black fashion models, Black landless women, those affected by dams, homeless Black women …That is, all Black women, including, and principally, all who are or have been discriminated against by neighbors, doctors, dentists and others, and who have felt powerless in the face of such enormous oppression.

The exquisite images from the Brasília event included below, taken by Brazilian feminist photographers Claudia Ferreira and Adriana Medeiros, provide just...