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The women of the Alliance have decided that Vieques is our house and therefore we will defend it. For too long, our house, Vieques, has been raped, robbed, burned, mutilated, mistreated by military forces, which brought damage to the population for 60 years. This is why we are determined and unafraid to put our house in order. I want to [invite] all of you women who hear this message to unite in one voice, to unite your voices with ours, because the only requirement that you need to belong to the Alliance, to be part of this blessed struggle, is to be a woman, to have the desire to be free and above all to want to live in peace. For this, in the name of all the women of Vieques, thank you, thank you very much. We move forward together declaring in unison: Ni un tiro más, ni una bomba más para Vieques! (Not one more shot, not one more bomb for Vieques!) (Sobá 2000, n.p.) Vieques is a fifty-one-square-mile island municipality of Puerto Rico, located six miles off its southeast coast. For roughly six decades the U.S. Navy controlled more than two-thirds of the island’s land and used Vieques for live-fire practice, air-to-ground bombing, shelling, artillery fire, ship-to-shore bombing, and maneuvers. Conflict simmered between the U.S. Navy and the , island residents , who lived wedged between an ammunition depot and a maneuver area. After years of tension and periodic protest, a social movement coalesced when a stray bomb killed a civilian security guard. Four years of mass mobilization, thousands of arrests for civil disobedience, and international political pressure and media attention halted live-bombing exercises on Vieques Island in . Women emerged as new leaders in the Vieques protest, organizing behind the banner of the Vieques Women’s Alliance (Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses). This organization rallied opposition to the live-bombing exercises by emphasizing 157 9 Because Vieques Is Our Home: Defend It! Women Resisting Militarization in Vieques, Puerto Rico KATHERINE T. MCCAFFREY ——————————————————————— ——————————————————————— CH009.qxd 5/28/08 7:38 PM Page 157 the health and security threat that military forces and training practices represented to islanders. Although conflict between Vieques residents and the U.S. Navy extended back to the s, and protest spanned decades, it was only in  that women first organized along gender lines and asserted a distinct female voice in protest. In this chapter I explore why Vieques women decided to organize as women to resist militarization. Baldez notes that “women do not inevitably organize as women simply because they are women,” but when “women mobilize as women, they tap into common knowledge about gender norms that portray men and women as categorically different” (, ). Vieques Women’s Alliance activists embraced an ideology that celebrated women’s roles as housewives as they struggled for a Vieques “clean” of the navy. Banging pots and pans, distributing white ribbons for peace, and demonstrating with megaphones at the gates to the base, Vieques women declared that they were acting in defense of their homes: “Vieques is our home, we want it clean, we want it neat, we want it in peace. . . . Navy get out!” Mobilizing along lines of gender requires a common vision of what it means to be female. On the surface, the vision of women’s identity embraced by the Vieques Women’s Alliance seemed to emanate from conservative, even essentialist , notions of women’s roles and potential: the woman as housewife. But the Vieques Women’s Alliance cannot neatly be dismissed as a “feminine” mobilization , concerned only with defending women’s roles as mothers and wives rather than resisting inequality. The Vieques women’s movement follows a path of Latin American grassroots feminism that collapses the difference between “feminine ” and feminist agendas, mobilizing “traditional” roles while forging new political spaces and collective identities for women (see, e.g., Schirmer ; Stephen , ). The Vieques Women’s Alliance suggests the fluidity between so-called feminine and feminist movements, and the diversity of perspectives within grassroots mobilizations. The movement also demonstrates how women’s participation can expand and contribute to the success of social mobilization. The Alliance succeeded in rallying new segments of the Vieques population to take political action and contributed to the dramatic expansion of Vieques’ movement to end military occupation and destruction of the island. In this chapter I consider first how women’s protest in Vieques was rooted in subsistence...

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