1 The Green Tide

1. The Green Tide: An Excellent Discussion Trigger 

This course’s section is meant to discuss on the actions taken by some contemporary feminist movements in Latin America within the frame, and beyond, of the so-called Latin American Green Tide (Marea Verde): a series of Latin American feminist social movements for the women’s reproductive rights over the last years. The Green Tide, an idea that consists of wearing green bandanas and that originated first in Argentina in the early 2000’s and soon after adopted by several feminist movements, hit its watershed point when in multiple Latin American countries decriminalized abortion.

After the Supreme Court of the United States overturned a precedent that mandated abortion access federally and multiple U.S. states began restricting abortion access as a result, abortion rights protesters in the United States also began using green as their symbol, as explained in this fabulous Samantha Schmidt’s text/photo work.

By presenting this topic in the light of what’s been happening recently as for the Green Tide is a great way to get started with this section. There are several good small updated texts for students to get into this topic, e.g., this piece on the reproductive rights movements in Mexico by Rebecca Robyns, Center for the Reproductive Rights’ webpage, or this podcast by NPR titled nothing less than “What the U.S. can learn from abortion rights wins in Latin America.”

2. Neoliberalism: The Evil Root 

A good way to keep the discussion on this so important topic in your classroom is, as always in the current era, by recalling the establishment of Neoliberalism as an economic system and an ideology in the Americas. To be precise, with the establishment of maquilas on Mexican border cities such as Tijuana (close to San Diego) and Ciudad Juárez (close to El Paso).

As Rita Laura Segato has researched, the current violence that women face has mainly to do with a sort of pact between men supported by the capitalist system expressed through neoliberalism, just as the Mixe linguist Yásnaya A. Gil has proposed.

As David Harvey has also been insisting in since the publication in 2005 of his well-known book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (here an overview of it by Keskin), Neoliberalism was established as a way to exploit as much as possible both human and natural resources. Thus, the process of liberalization of markets, propped up by neoliberalism-multiculturalism bonds, opened the doors to foreign investments into US while enforced the borders to assure migrants stay in their countries and be poorly paid by global enterprises looking for cheap workforce.

3. Feminicide: What All Must Be Against

In Latin America in general, and in Mexico in particular, this phenomenon is portraited in the Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s documentary Maquilapolis (2006) that depicts the way global enterprises took full advantage of the 1994-started North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the sense that Sayak Valencia has pointed out: it’s been a mean to exploit not only women’s bodies but it’s also served push men to become killers so as to both get the most of the capitalist system and to reaffirm themselves as part of the hegemonic masculinity.

Such a violence triggered the phenomena analyzed firstly by Marcela Lagarde under the idea of feminicidio (term adopted by the Diana Russell’s concept femicide) and, later, by Rita Segato as femigenocide –in order to aggregate that it’s the State what triggers such a violence. All of this can be seen in the documentary Mujeres de Juárez (Women from Ciudad Juárez) by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social based on Mexico City.

In the Latin American literature field, two of the most renowned writers such as the Mexican Sergio González Rodríguez and the Chilean Roberto Bolaño have researched and written on this topic. González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto (Bones in the Desert) coined the term Feminicide Machinethat describes the deep ties between the nineties neoliberalism in Mexico and patriarchal system that end up exploiting women’s bodies. As broadly studied in different literary critic pieces, Bolaño wrote, in his one-thousand-pages novel 2666, the way State, Finance, US and Mexican Government, and society are intertwined in violence against women’s bodies that Ciudad Juárez epitomized, as shown in this Juan Velasco and Tanya Schmidt’s paper.

4. Feminist Movements and Art

Movies and Videos. This current violence against women happens not only in Mexico of course, but in Latin America as a whole. And most of all, it is what many current resistance feminist movements are against nowadays. The widely known Green Tide is an expression of the latter, though it aims at the decriminalization of abortion in Latin America. Deep down, it represents a fight against all the violence women must face every day in all Latin American countries, including Brazil. The birth of this can be seen in the documentary Que sea ley (Let It Be Law, 2019) by Juan Solanas, reviewed by Deborah Young, as well as in the documentaries Aborto en Colombia (Abortion in Colombia, 2021) by Nicolás Cuenca Rodríguez, Fly So Far (2021) by Cecilia Escher, Las libres. La historia después (The Free Women. The Story Continues, 2014) by Gustavo Montaña. All of them were studied in this paper by Verónica Garibotto.

Literature. In the literary field, there are many excellent feminist Latin American writers. Among those whose work is closely related to this topic, the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza and the Argentine Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s novels for what they’ve proposed has had a deep impact in a whole generation of authors, whether men and women.

Lucía Elena Cavalo’s text examines the Cabezón Cámara’s Le viste la cara a dios (You Took God for a Fool!), a novel about 24-hours rapping a table dancer suffers in a Men’s Club and the way the overcame it.

Mario Federido David’s work on Rivera Garza’s El invencible verano de Liliana (Liliana’s Invincible Summer) proposes a way to think of the femicide that Rivera Garza’s little sister, Liliana, was victim of: he proposes to think of it as an encounter between intimate mourning and the collective dimension of patriarchal violence.

Another work that could be used to address the variety of contemporary feminist writers is this one by María Jesús Llarena-Ascanio on the work of several novelists that address with pretty different styles and approaches the phenomena in different Latin American regions.

Performance. Many of the recent feminist artists groups that have also expressed against these ways of violence. On the one hand, the Mexican feminist collective Las hijas de violencia created an street performance viewable here to confront catcall and sexual harassment in Mexico City’s streets; this has been analyzed in depth by Madison M. Snider, and, on the other hand, the #OperaciónAraña performative action conceived by the Ni Una Menos collective in Argentina and co-organized with the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion and women from the Subway Workers Trade Union, together with more than seventy feminist groups, what you can know more about in here.

There is also the way more famous Chilean collective LasTesis who created what has become a battle-song-and-performance Un violador en tu camino (A Rapist in Your Way) and have even written a book Set Fear on Fire (buyable here) launched in 2023 in cities from Latin America and in US such as New York: the presentation took place in the CUNY-Graduate Center as you can read in here.

The LasTesis’s case is interesting since their performance went viral on 2019, the same year when the Chilean uprising happened in Santiago’s streets and ended up in the defenestration of the president Sebastián Piñera. All of this was nothing less than in Chile, the country where in 1973 US initiated its experiment to set in motion neoliberalism in Latin America and beyond.

Open Resources

Aguilar Gil, Yásnaya Elena. “Tequiologies: Indigenous Solutions Against Climate Catastrophe.” Youtube, uploaded by Berkeley Center for New Media, 7 Feb. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/live/ZGEKAWBu2do?si=c7Oo6NIvr0HQsVrt.

Ascanio, María Jesús. “Bodies Becoming Pain: Unusual Strategies of Dissent in Some Transnational Latin-American Women Writers.” Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico, 2020, Vol. 8, Num. 1, pp. 113-134, https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/brumal.675.

Cavalo, L. (2017). “Violencia sexual y agencia femenina. Quebrar ‘el guión de la violación’.” Question, 1(56), e015.

“Set Fear on Fire! Book Launch + Conversation with Colectivo LASTESIS (Chile).” CUNY  Center for the Humanities, https://centerforthehumanities.org/programming/set-the-fear-on-fire.

Chang, Ailsa, Jonaki Mehta, and Justine Kenin. “What the U.S. can learn from abortion rights wins in Latin America.” 7 July 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/07/1110123695/abortion-roe-latin-america-green-wave Accessed 29 Jan. 2024.

Cortes Rocca, Paola and Cecilia Palmeiro. “#OperaciónAraña: Performance and Feminist Avant-garde.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2022, 1-17.

Fernandes Câmara, Heloisa. (2015). “A máquina feminicida: homo sacer e campos em Ciudad Juárez.” Revista Profanações, Vol. 2, No. 2, 97-110.

Funari, Vicky and Sergio de la Torre. “Maquilapolis.’ Youtube, uploaded by Noe Pimienta, 3 Feb. 2014, https://youtu.be/WUQgFzkE3i0?si=BxPkyvvSSJLpMftw.

Garibotto, Verónica. “Uneven Reproductive Landscapes: The Abortion Documentary in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 58, Issue 3, September 2023, pp. 685-693.

Keskin. 2009. “Book Review of A Brief History of Neoliberalism.” Societies Without Borders 4 (1): 94-95. https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/swb/vol4/iss1/7.

“Latin American and the Caribbean.” Center for Reproductive Rights, https://reproductiverights.org/our-regions/latin-america-caribbean/.

Lusvardi, Amber. “Confronting feminicidio in Mexico: Pioneering, Anthropologist and Activist Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos.” Gender and Development, 2023, Vol. 31, No. 1, 247-249.

Mario Federico, David. (2022). “Feminicidio, feminismo y escritura testimonial.” RevIISE – Revista De Ciencias Sociales Y Humanas, 20(20), 179-187.

Ravelo Blancas, Patricia. Mujeres de Juárez. Youtube, uploaded by Alberto García, 5 Oct. 2016, https://youtu.be/PgX8O_lZ9QU?si=2ILjIIqWj_q2Fyk3.

Robyns, Rebecca. “‘Marea Verde’ Feminist Collective Defends the Right To Decide in Mexico: ‘Sick and Tired of Seeing Our Sisters Go to Jail’.” 10 Feb. 2022, https://msmagazine.com/2022/01/10/marea-verde-feminist-mexico-abortion-legal/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2024

Russell, Diana E.H., “Defining Femicide: Speech given at the UN Symposium on Femicide: A Global Issue that Demands Action. Vienna, Austria: November 2012.” DianaRusell.com, November 2012, https://www.dianarussell.com/defining-femicide-.html Accessed on 26 Jan. 2024.

Schmidt, Samantha. “How Green Became the Color of Abortion Rights.” The Wachington Post, 3 July 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/abortion-green-roe-wade-argentina/. Accessed 29 Jan. 2024.

Segato, Rita Laura. La guerra contra las mujeres. Traficantes de Sueños, 2016.

Stajnfeld, Sonja. (2012). Cuatro imágenes del mal en 2666 de Roberto Bolaño. Revista Fuentes Humanísticas, 24 (44), 69-82.

Valencia, Sayak. “NFTA: Capistalismo Gore and the Femicide Machine.” Scapegoat Journal 6, Winter/Spring 2014, http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/06/Scapegoat_06_Valencia_NAFTA%20Capitalismo%20Gore.pdf. Accessed on 26 Jan. 2024.

Velasco, J., & Schmidt, T. (2014). Mapping a Geography of Hell: Evil, Neoliberalism, and the Femicides in Robero Bolaño’s 2066.” Latin American Literary Review, 42(83), 97–116.