Dignity and Economic Survival: Women in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Work of Helen I. Safa

Helen Safa in Monte Hatillo public housing project, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1971.

Photo by James Weber.

Notions of dignity underpin the ways women, men and children deal and maneuver through their inequitable and often oppressive social situations in the Caribbean and Latin America. How they manage to garner food, shelter and clothing, as well as educate themselves, and work on behalf of others around them are central themes of Helen I. Safa's career and are echoed by scholars whose work appears here. There is nothing like working towards a common goal as members of a network of scholars committed to economic justice, human rights and gender equality. Further, the contributors to this issue were drawn to this project by their relationship to their mutual mentor and or life-long friend Helen I. Safa. Like the workers, miners, community leaders, and peasant and poor women, men and children they studied, this assembly of scholars both women and men, differing in age, race and national origin, understand the imperatives of collective action and collective consciousness. These necessary elements bring about social change in social movements, and are critical analytic tools for considering the lives of people represented in scholarly production.

The ideologies of social change expressed here are merged with feminism—a woman-centered/gender-centered view that actively seeks justice, human rights and gender equality. This perspective is exemplified in Safa's career as a scholar, leader, mentor and "networker" par excellence. Safa serves as the lynchpin, or resource, for this network as the members who are represented illustrate.

Some of the articles in this special issue are devoted to Safa as a person and as an expert in the area of women, work, and family studies. Other contributions acknowledge Safa's expertise in an indirect fashion. Nonetheless, there is a distinctive emphasis on the role that feminist social science/anthropology and political economy plays when gender relations are used as explanatory mechanisms for women's inequality in culture and society in the region.

This Introduction provides a map by which to navigate the multiple layers of gender relations, social inequality, economic survival and women's activism in both Safa's scholarship and in her scholarly life more generally. Therefore, one goal is to provide something of the historical context within which Safa's scholarship emerged. Another is to take this context to the particular, illustrating connections on both intellectual and personal levels. Through their membership in a network, individuals find support and perform as sounding boards for each other's own work. Safa has maintained crucial intellectual, political, and personal ties throughout her career and continues to develop other relationships across succeeding generations of researchers. The overwhelming mutual respect that links the contributors of this issue is what academic camaraderie is all about.

Mexico City, Before and Afterwards

For most Latin American and Caribbean women scholars, planners, and activists, the real momentum for change was recharged, or started in the first place, after the 1975 International Women's Year (IWY) conference held in Mexico City. True, there had been other meetings of women from around the globe and across the hemisphere where they voiced their political views. At the 1947 Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres convened in Guatemala City, women demanded that post-war investment should finance health, education, social services and the infrastructure and not to arm the military. However, none of those earlier meetings turned up the volume of women's activism, as did the activities and foment surrounding the IWY. Furthermore, the Mexico City conference fueled the political power of the decade—the United Nations' Decade for women (1975-85)—that gave international exposure and legitimacy to women's issues and agenda. Women workers, researchers, planners, activists, and intellectuals across the Americas mobilized against gender inequality and for social and economic change, human rights and justice. What propelled this outpouring of scholarship, research, national planning and the like, were the possibilities that feminism offered...