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

11. Movements in Democracy, Jeff

∞∞ movements in democracy Jeff In one of the lessons in our curriculum, we use video interviews with the women of the mmtr to get students talking about what it means to form a movement. At the end of a class we taught to sixth graders in Massachusetts, a student who had barely spoken all year, according to her teacher, summed up the lively discussion. The student spoke softly and intently, much as the women in Ibiraiaras might speak at a meeting, and her teacher leaned in from the back of the room to hear. ‘‘Each woman,’’ the student said, bringing her hands from beneath her desk and folding them neatly on its surface, ‘‘is motivated by one thing, but they all connect to women’s rights. Gessi’s is being a leader and getting women’s rights. Mônica wants rights, but she also wants to help her family. Elenice, she wants an education, and she wants rights. And it all combines together, and if all women do that, they’re probably going to get rights, if they keep working at it. They can’t give up.’’ In preparing to bring our curriculum back to Brazil in 2007, we gathered together everything we could find related to the curriculum itself and the teaching we had done with it. To a binder overflowing with lesson plans we added letters to the women from students who had taken the course, photos of workshops we’d run for teachers, and videos of classes, such as the one in which the sixth grader had so aptly captured the multiple aims of the women in the mmtr. Before leaving the United States, Emma and I considered the obstacles that shape the work of field researchers as they move back and forth transnationally, from the unequal power of researcher and subject to the hubris of studying and interpreting the inner workings of a group to which one does not belong.∞ When you hand someone a piece of writing or a lesson plan that says, ‘‘Here is your life,’’ there is no response you can or should be able to count on. In my previous travels and research, I had encountered warmth and mutuality , understanding these as gifts one has to look for and earn. I gained knowledge from those with whom I achieved an ongoing and shared pleasure in analyzing the world. But these interactions told only part of the story. In the detective work that is ethnography, key insights follow from games of cat and mouse, adversarial conversations, suspicions, denials, and surprises. In Sananduva and Ibiraiaras people were willing to talk to me from the beginning, but I movements in democracy 137 Women’s movement meeting. Photograph by Jeffrey W. Rubin. heard the same story over and over again. Then as things began to change, I brought my daughter with me, and we moved together beyond the official story of the women’s movement to the more-subtle and even contradictory ways that gender and politics entered women’s daily lives. When we returned with the curriculum in 2007, we presented our work to women in the same kitchens and union halls where we had first learned about their organizing and ideas. They thought the curriculum was subversive in its aim of exposing students to activism, and they saw how much work had gone into it. ‘‘Look what Jeffrey and Emma have done,’’ we heard over and over. This was especially gratifying since until we created one ourselves, we had no idea what went into producing a secondary school curriculum. Only now do I begin to understand the interconnected tasks of coming up with ideas, translating them into lessons, learning from everyone you can get to talk to you, and transforming all of that into a physical product, with tabs and a binder, unit outlines and lesson plans, so that you can place it in people’s hands and they can use it to teach. The day after we arrived, with the plastic floral centerpiece back in the center of Gessi’s table after lunch, the laundry folding on hold, and the warm winter sun pouring through the corner windows, we had a few minutes all together: 138 chapter eleven Gessi, Ivone, Vania, Emma, and I. As always, we plunged into discussion of matters at hand, usually recent events in Ibiraiaras or the women’s movement, Brazilian politics, or work and...