Activist Faith: Grassroots Women in Democratic Brazil and Chile (review)

This richly detailed and well-written book tackles a complex and under-researched question: What kind of legacy does social movement activism leave behind, especially once the movement itself has declined? Drogus and Stewart-Gambino answer this question by conducting detailed interviews with women who were active in Christian base communities in Brazil and Chile during the "peak" years of activism (basically, the period of anti-dictatorship protests in each country).

The authors' research yields two main findings. First, they confirm what other scholars of social movements and base communities have found, namely, that "activism in the base communities was personally empowering" (p. 5). More significant, the authors find that personal empowerment led to continued activism among the vast majority of women. Here, the authors' findings challenge the common view that popular sector women mobilized under dictatorships but returned to the home under democracy. Challenging this view, the authors find that 72 percent of Brazilian women and 92 percent of Chilean women interviewed remain active, at least at the local level, despite overall movement decline. Given the importance of base communities to the broader popular movements that emerged in Brazil and Chile to protest dictatorships, tracing out what happened to the organizational infrastructure of the base communities sheds considerable light on what happened to popular sector movements more generally after the return of democracy. Additionally, because women comprised the bulk of membership and also formed other organizations around base communities (such as human rights and economic survival organizations), the detailed account provided by the authors also sheds new light on what happened to women's activism after the transitions to democracy.

The book's most important contribution, however, lies in the authors' second main finding. They note that social movements leave their mark on two levels. At the individual level, participants can become personally empowered, which in turn can produce broader changes at the social and political level—ideally, a more active civil society and more democratic national polity. But for individual empowerment to translate into a more democratic civil society and polity, activists need to be engaged in the task of nurturing their organizations and building broader networks and alliances, hopefully networks capable of re-mobilizing should the need arise again. After two chapters that address the emergence and decline of liberationism and base community activism, and a third that explores the ways in which grassroots women are adapting their activism to changing circumstances (often moving into new arenas), the authors devote two chapters to an exploration of the potential for broader alliances across religion (Catholic and Protestant) and across class (middle-class feminists and popular feminists). These two chapters are valuable for the way they bring to light the complexity of these women's identities. As noted in the authors' discussion of their methodology, all of the interviewees are "poor, female, and Catholic" (p. 16). The complex and fluid relationship among these identities is illustrated through a discussion of the relationships (or potential for relationships) between base community activists and Protestant organizations, and popular sector women and middle-class feminist organizations.

Throughout the book, the authors draw crucial insights from their comparison of Brazil and Chile. The comparison allows us to see how legacies of individual empowerment and their potential to create the conditions for organization maintenance and alliance-building are mediated by broader factors such as political culture, national histories, and the relationship of base communities to the Church. In Chile, base communities were more tightly integrated with, and likewise more dependent on, the national Church than in Brazil, which "inhibit[ed] the creation of vital, autonomous networks of social movements similar to those in the Brazilian case" (p. 68). Finally, the greater salience of class tensions in Chile undermines the possibility of deeper linkages between popular sectors activists and middle-class feminists, despite the common concerns shared by the two groups.

In sum, Drogus and Stewart-Gambino...