Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women's Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration

5. Fighting for Rights in Latin America, Jeff

∑ fighting for rights in latin america Jeff In Latin America in the twentieth century, people came on the political scene in a new way. Not only did real people, working and poor and hungry people of all colors, make claims to the economic and political rights of citizenship, but some national leaders began to recognize those claims and redefine national identity to reflect this. At times from the colonial period through the nineteenth century, ordinary, often poor, Latin Americans—peasants, small farmers, Indians, domestic servants, women, slaves, blacks, factory workers, unemployed youths, students, small artisans, and shopkeepers—were able to stir up trouble or make themselves heard, but they were not recognized as having a right to political voice and equality. The running of the nation and the enjoyment of its economic benefits, from capital cities to the smallest town halls, were the province of elites.∞ This changed dramatically when mestizo peasants took up arms in 1911, bringing revolution to Mexico and overturning the oligarchic status quo. The new postrevolutionary government would henceforth speak for the rights and needs of Mexico’s poor peasants and workers. And in the 1930s and 1940s, the Mexican government redistributed more land than any other government in the Western Hemisphere before or since. President Lázaro Cárdenas supported peasants in protecting their newly acquired land, upheld the rights of workers against factory owners, and expropriated the extensive holdings of U.S. oil companies—though these gains were undercut from the beginning as Cárdenas insisted on centralizing political control in his own hands and stifling the autonomy of labor unions and grassroots peasant organizations.≤ In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, ordinary people in Latin America made their voices heard in country after country, making claims to economic and political rights and having those claims recognized. In general, these efforts were less violent—and the results in national policymaking less comprehensive—than in Mexico. But across the hemisphere, grassroots pressures and prescient leaders brought the claims of those previously excluded to center stage. In Brazil, black culture became a central component of national identity in the 1920s, as samba became respectable and celebrated and promi- fighting for rights in latin america 51 Women’s movement demonstration. Photo by Noraci Debona; used with permission. nent artists and scholars identified racial mixing as the backbone of the country ’s strength and creativity, positions taken up on radio shows and carried far and wide across the immense nation. These were startling turnarounds in a country that had held slaves until 1888, longer than any other nation in the hemisphere, and marginalized Afro-Brazilians immediately following abolition . As Brazil began to modernize in the 1930s and 1940s under the dictator Getulio Vargas, factory workers gained access to a Brazilian social-welfare network and were recognized, despite poverty and lack of education, as citizens . Like the freed slaves, however, they were citizens with strictly circumscribed political rights and clearly defined social roles.≥ In Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s, Juan and Eva Perón welcomed the 52 chapter five descamisados, the shirtless workers of Buenos Aires, from the outlying districts to the city center. In a massive demonstration in support of Juan Perón, as workers streamed by the astonished residents of the fashionable downtown, a student perfectly captured this entry of the people on the scene: ‘‘From where did they come?’’ the student wondered. ‘‘So they really existed? So many of them? So different from us? Had they really come on foot from those suburbs whose names made up a vague unknown geography . . . ?’’∂ The Peróns raised wages, promoted equal pay for women, and created vacation colonies for workers, even as they closed down newspapers and silenced opponents to maintain power. In the years following World War II, military and civilian modernizers across Latin America envisioned national economic growth that would include all citizens in a modern and materially secure future. Promises of participation and economic security were more rhetoric than reality, but the words were powerful. Almost everyone had a right to political voice and a decent material life as members of the nation, leaders stated in one place after another in the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, there were no legal procedures to guarantee these rights, and material benefits reached only a fortunate few among the masses. In an autobiographical account of life in...