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Foreword sonia e. alvarez This exceptional collection is the fruit of the very processes it analyzes: the growth and vitality of Latin American and Caribbean feminist organizing and scholarship over the course of the past four decades and the concomitant configuration of vibrant, multifaceted feminist academic and activist fields spanning the Americas and beyond. While privileging the voices of feminists from South and Central America in translation, this book is the product of ongoing transnational, transdisciplinary conversations among feminists working to bridge North and South, politics and culture, the academy and the movement. Indeed, Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean grows out of the always lively and productive debates enacted in an arena that has done much to facilitate transnational processes of feminist translation across the Americas: the Gender and Feminist Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), a space that has fostered a diverse and expansive network of scholars and activist-intellectuals engaged in sustained dialogue across geopolitical, disciplinary and other borders.1 This first truly comprehensive anthology on Latin American women’s movements and politics features essays by consecrated founding mothers of the field and newer voices alike. Taken together, they offer a richly detailed and analytically discerning overview of feminist cultural and political interventions in the Latin American and Caribbean region. Unprecedented in breadth and depth, the collection provides a vivid, multidimensional picture of the heterogeneous arenas, actions, and actors found today among the wide-ranging expressions of feminist and women’s movement organizing across the region, while affording unparalleled insight into trends in evidence in a number of countries. The editors’ incisive introductory essays and those in the opening section on globalization, women’s work, and female-headed households, moreover, offer an overview of the complex socioeconomic, political, and cultural context in which women’s struggles for citizenship and social justice have unfolded over the past four decades. Perhaps the most noteworthy of the region-wide trends documented in the chapters that follow is the pronounced visibility and expressive expansion of what the editors and contributors variously refer to as third-wave feminism, complexidentity feminisms, or the feminism of shifting identities. The very women whom the hegemonic feminism of the so-called second wave viewed as “others”—poor and working-class women, Afro-descendant and indigenous women, and lesbians— have translated and radically transformed some of its core tenets and fashioned other feminisms, “feminismos con apellidos” (Ríos et al. 2003) that are deeply xi entwined, and sometimes contentiously entangled, with national and global struggles against all forms of inequality and for social, sexual, and racial justice. As is in the case of the United States, moreover, the wave metaphor is rendered problematic by the narratives collected here, as black women, lesbians, and those “othered” are shown to have been on the frontlines of feminist organizing for decades, even when they often enacted their feminisms in autonomous or mixed movement spaces. These diverse feminisms—together with young women from all social groups and classes who proclaim themselves feministas jóvenes, with agendas distinct from earlier generations—have produced effervescent movement currents that proffer trenchant critiques of enduring inequalities among women, as well as between women and men of diverse racial and social groups, thereby expanding the scope and reach of feminist messages and revitalizing women’s cultural and policy interventions across the region. To be sure, one clear outcome of these profound and productive critiques of hegemonic feminism has been what we might call the sidestreaming of feminist politics—a second trend amply in evidence in the essays assembled in Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. “Trickling up, down, and sideways,” as in Fiona Macaulay’s apt depiction of Brazil’s “multinodal women’s movement” and “gender-policy community,” feminism in many, if not most, countries in the region today not only has been “mainstreamed” so that it extends vertically across different levels of government, traverses much of the party spectrum, and engages with a variety of national and international policy arenas; feminism also spreads horizontally into a wide array of class and racial-ethnic communities and social and cultural spaces, including parallel social movement publics. An emergent and internally heterogeneous pueblo feminista—to borrow Graciela Di Marco’s evocative characterization of the “popular feminism” embraced by Argentinean piqueteras (picketers), women workers in recovered factories, and mothers who organize against police brutality—is brought from the margins to the center of feminist analysis in this anthology and is...

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