Women Ethnicity And Nationalisms In Latin America

With case studies covering Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico, this is the first book to explore the links between gender and nationalism in the context of Latin America. It includes contributions from Latin American scholars to offer a unique and revealing view of the most important political and cultural issues.

This book presents a comparative analysis of the organizing trajectories of indigenous women’s movements in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia. The authors’ innovative research reveals how the articulation of gender and ethnicity is central to shape indigenous women’s discourses. It explores the political contexts and internal dynamics of indigenous movements, to show that they created different opportunities for women to organize and voice specific demands. This, in turn, led to various forms of organizational autonomy for women involved in indigenous movements. The trajectories vary from the creation of autonomous spaces within mixed-gender organizations to the creation of independent organizations. Another pattern is that of women’s organizations maintaining an affiliation to a male-dominated mixed-gender organization, or what the authors call “gender parallelism”. This book illustrates how, in the last two decades, indigenous women have challenged various forms of exclusion through different strategies, transforming indigenous movements’ organizations and collective identities.

Review: "Predictable postmodernist analysis of Ecuador's national identity. Examines gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. Case study of nation's development out of inchoate space"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

The relationship between gender and nationalism is a compelling issue that is receiving increasing coverage in the scholarly literature. With case studies covering Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico, this is the first book to explore these links in the context of Latin America. It includes contributions from Latin American scholars to offer a unique and revealing view of the most important political and cultural issues. The work opens by outlining four dimensions in the relationship between gender and nationalism. These are: the contribution of women to nation building and their exclusion from it by the state and its institutions; the role of women in contemporary ethnic and nationalist movements; the place of the female body in the myths and traditions surrounding the nation; and the role of women in forging the intellectual and artistic culture of the nation. It then provides both theoretical and empirical explorations of these themes, with chapters covering the debate on multiculturalism and gender in the construction of the nation, the struggles of ethnic women to participate politically in their communities and studies of the first Mexican filmmaker, Mimi Derrba and the indigenous heroine Dolores Cacuango from Ecuador.

This collection brings together innovative historical work on race and national identity in Latin America and the Caribbean and places this scholarship in the context of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions regarding race and nation in the Americas. Moving beyond debates about whether ideologies of racial democracy have actually served to obscure discrimination, the book shows how notions of race and nationhood have varied over time across Latin America's political landscapes. Framing the themes and questions explored in the volume, the editors' introduction also provides an overview of the current state of the interdisciplinary literature on race and nation-state formation. Essays on the postindependence period in Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Peru consider how popular and elite racial constructs have developed in relation to one another and to processes of nation building. Contributors also examine how ideas regarding racial and national identities have been gendered and ask how racialized constructions of nationhood have shaped and limited the citizenship rights of subordinated groups. The contributors are Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, Lillian Guerra, Anne S. Macpherson, Aims McGuinness, Gerardo Renique, James Sanders, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Barbara Weinstein.

This book analyzes how Latin American countries modified their institutions to promote the inclusion of women, Afrodescendants, and indigenous peoples.

After the Decolonial examines the sources of Latin American decolonial thought, its reading of precursors like Fanon and Levinas and its historical interpretations. In extended treatments of the anthropology of ethnicity, law and religion and of the region’s modern culture, Lehmann sets out the bases of a more grounded interpretation, drawing inspiration from Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, and from a lifelong engagement with issues of development, religion and race. The decolonial places race at the centre of its interpretation of injustice and, together with the multiple other exclusions dividing Latin American societies, traces it to European colonialism. But it has not fully absorbed the uniquely unsettling nature of Latin American race relations, which perpetuate prejudice and inequality, yet are marked by métissage, pervasive borrowing and mimesis. Moreover, it has not integrated its own disruptive feminist branch, and it has taken little interest in either the interwoven history of indigenous religion and hegemonic Catholicism or the evangelical tsunami which has upended so many assumptions about the region’s culture. The book concludes that in Latin America, where inequality and violence are more severe than anywhere else, and where COVID-19 has revealed the deplorable state of the institutions charged with ensuring the basic requirements of life, the time has come to instate a universalist concept of social justice, encompassing a comprehensive approach to race, gender, class and human rights.

The result of a collaboration among eight women scholars, this collection examines the history of women’s participation in literary, journalistic, educational, and political activity in Latin American history, with special attention to the first half of this century.