The Particularism of Human Rights for Latin American Women of African Descent

Starting in the late 1990s, communities of African descent in Latin America engaged in a wide-ranging, regional political mobilization for the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Of specific interest in this article is how Black feminists in Latin America asserted an important new engagement with human rights through discursive and political mobilizations of vulnerability and precarity. For Black women activists, preparing for the world conference provided an opportunity to contribute to a discernable platform for African descendants in Latin America that was beginning to form. The primary purpose of this article is to understand what happens when the precarious have an opportunity to advance alternative conceptualizations about the meaning of human rights. Their antiracist feminist engagements underscore both the social meaning of precarity for Latin American women of African descent as well as the particularism of human rights.