a e cici

In Struggle
to Change the
World:
Women,
Reproduction,
and
Resistance in
Latin America
The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, the deep
economic and political crisis in Venezuela, and the victory
of a center-right candidate, Mauricio Macri, in Argentina's
2015 presidential elections all indicate that a phase
in Latin American politics is coming to an end. What is
ending is the illusion, harbored by many, that the emer-
gence of "progressive," left-leaning governments could
transform the politics of the region, implement reforms
that social movements for decades have been fighting
for, and promote social justice. On balance, these objec-
tives have not been achieved. Following the example of
Venezuela's "Bolivarian revolution," the governments of
Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Néstor Kirchnerand Cristina
Fernåndez de Kirchner,and Luiz Indcio Lula da Silva have
transferred some of their countries' revenues to the pub-
lic sector with welfare programs providing subsidies for
children's education and other basic necessities.In this
way, the most extreme forms of poverty have been allevi-
ated. But these measures have been a far cry from what
social movements had expected.Taking Brazil as an
people
example, it is calculated that at least thirty million
Lula gov-
have benefited from the welfare programs the
expenditures have
ernment adopted. But social welfare
transferred to the
amounted to only a tenth of the money
that have contin-
mining and agribusiness companies
country's politics. As
(Jed to play a hegemonic role in the model of economic
the
extractivism has continued to beadvocated by the move-
development, the land reform dos Trabalhadores to
ments that brought Lula's Partido the concentration
realized. 2Instead,
power has not been worst on the continent,
one of the
of land in a few hands, Indigenous peoples' lands
has continued to increase, and
attack in the name of modern-
have come under direct violence has not been reined
ization. Meanwhile, police in Rio de Janeiro alone
in; according to official statistics,
 some 5.130 people, mostly black, homeless youths, were
killed by the police between 2005 and 2014. Such facts
may explain "hy, despite the unconstitutional, fraudulent
character of Roussef€s ousting being widely condemned
relatively few people from the lower classes have gone
to the streets to demand her reinstatement. To quote a
member of the Brazilian Väes de vaio group whosechild
was killed by the police in Säo Paulo in 2006, "l will notcry
for Dilma, because for us in the fave/as the dictatorship
never
With local variations, the Brazilian modelof
"progressive" development, with its mixture of welfarism
and extractivism and its reliance on export-oriented
economies as the foundation for a more egalitarian dis-
tribution of wealth, is the path that has been adopted by
the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina. As
Alberto Acosta and Decio Machado point out,

Progresswe governments are no exception. While they artic-

ulate an anti-imperialist, populist, nationalist rhetoric,cen-
tered on ISoosting] internal consumption, they foment the
expansion of international extractivist capital.... Progress,
growth, and development are the pillars on which the gov-
emments considered most radical are basing theirprojects
for the future.

Chavism too, though more supportive of popular power,

has relied on petroleum extraction to subsidize its social
programs, failing to give them a long-term economic
basis not dependent on the vagaries of the global com-
modities market.
But while so-called progressivism has failed
to keep its promises and we now witness an institutional
takeover by the right in Brazil and Argentina, it wouldbe
a mistake to conclude that radical change has cometo
an end in the region. In Latin
America and beyond, social
mobilization has reached such a level of
intensitythat a
social theorist as acute as the Uruguayan RaÖl
has argued that, "entire societies, not just socialZibechi
move-
ments, have been put in movement. Millionsof men
and
women from below, driven by necessity, have mobilized
for two decades and, by doing so, have changed not only
the world but also themselves." What is especially sig-
nificant is that, in resisting the onslaught caused by the
extension of capitalist relations, cooperative forms of
existence have been created that provide a vision of what
a noncapitalist society might be like. Women have been
the main protagonists of this change. As I write,more
than 70,000 women from across South America are meet-
ing in Rosario, Argentina, for the Encuentro Nacional de
Mujeres, held every year in October and now in its 31st
edition. Their objective is to discuss what has to be done,
and what strategies to adopt to change the world. Such
massive mobilization, coming at the moment of a realign-
ment in Latin American institutional politics, is not only a
sign of the wide gap now existing between official poli-
tics and the politics of grassroots social movements;it is
also an expression of the leadership role that women are
and
playing within the popular resistance to national
global capital. oppres-
While women's resistance to political
been a constant in
sion and economic exploitation has the earliest days
Latin American history, starting from new levels since
reached
of colonial domination, it has region was first exposed
the 1970s, the decade when the of globalization and
to the devastating consequencesmost directly suffering
those
the neoliberal agenda. As affecting their commu-
the consequences of the crises
response created more autono-
nities, women have in that are weaving back
mous forms of social reproduction economicpoli-
that brutal
together communal threads
 Women

the max n
p-cotagonxsts

of
thus

change.
cies and state terrorism have broken. Women's activism is
presentlya major force for social change in Latin America
and an inspiration for feminist and other movements
across the world. In challenging the destructive forces
of capitalism, patriarchalism, and ecological destruc-
tion, women are constructing new forms of existence that
reject the logic of the market and recenter politics on the
reproduction of everyday life, channeling the power of
the affective relations that have traditionally character-
ized the domestic sphere into the production of social sol-
idarity. Their efforts are redefining what we understand by
"the political" and "democratization," and they are recod-
ing feminism, turning everyday social-reproductive work
into collective action that transforms neighborhoods into
communities of resistance to capitalist exploitation.

Rural Women's Struggle for Land, Territory, and the

Common Good

As is commonly recognized, women's new political pro-

tagonism has arisen in response to the economic crisis
that has embroiled Latin America since the mid-1970s,
after the economic restructuring imposed on most of its
countries by the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank under the guise of "structural adjustment."
In both rural and urban settings, women have formed
the primary resistance to the mass unemployment and
impoverishmentthat followed from the dismantling
Of the public sector and the policy of import liberaliza-
tion, which destroyed the local economies. Their activity
has moved in two different directions. On the one hand,
women have engaged in intense struggles to defend
their "common goods"—lands, forests, and waters, as
well as neighborhoods threatened by gentrification—
 and with them the world of cultural values, knowledge
systems,and social identitiesthat are destroyedwhen
the land is poisoned and communities are displaced. On
the other hand, they have gone outside their homesin
search of new forms of employment and income, most
often through migration, whether to metropolitan centers,
other countries, or to the streets, where they have given
rise to a new micro-economy of trading and selling, in-
cluding the sale of sex.
These developments are not surprising.
Women play a central role in ecological struggles because
they are those most affected by dispossession and envi-
ronmental degradation as those responsible for the
reproduction of their families. It is women who must deal
with those who become sick because of petroleum con-
tamination, because the water they use to cook, wash,
and clean is toxic, and because of malnutrition dueto
the loss of land and the destruction of local agriculture.
Thus womentoday stand on the front lines against the
transnational mining and agribusiness corporations
that invade rural areas and poison the environment.As
the Ecuadorian scholar-activist Lisset Coba MeTahas
pointed out, it is women who in the Amazonian region
lead the struggle in defense of water. 6They are also the
main opponents of petroleum extraction, aware that it
undermines their productive activities and "exacerbates
machism"; for the wages the oil companies pay to the
men they employ deepen gender inequalities, boost alco-
hol consumption, and intensify violence against women,
We cannot feed oil to our children," says the Kichwa leader
Patricia Gualinga, from Sarayaku, a village in the AmaZ0-
nian forest. "[WJe don't want alcoholism, we do not want
prostitution, we do not want men who beat us. We do not
want this life, because even if they give us schools, bath-
rooms, and houses with zinc, it takes away ourdignity.
we do
schoolSS_s
 Such opposition has brought women into
direct confrontation with President Rafael Correa, which
peaked on October 16, 2013, when one hundred leaders
of Indigenous women'sorganizations walked from
their lands in the rainforest into Quito, their children in
their arms, in response to Correa's decision to abandon
his conservation plan and begin petroleum extraction in
the Yasuni National Park, home to one of the most diverse
ecosystems on earth. They were following the example of
thousands of other women who, one year earlier, had like-
wise marched to the capital to defend the waters of their
territories against a mining project contracted by the
Correa government with the Chinese-owned company
EcuaCorriente. But in a show of arrogance and disrespect,
consistent with his reputation as the most misogynist of
Ecuadorian presidents, Correa refused to receive those
protesting the oil project. 9
In Bolivia, too, Indigenous women have un-
masked the government's "progressivism," in particular
Morales's proclaimed defense of Pachamama (Mother
Nature), leading marches in 2011 and 2012 against the
construction of a highway that, according to the govern-
ment's plans, was to traverse the Isiboro Sécure National
Park and Indigenous Territory.As is often the case, the
women provided the support infrastructure necessary
for the marches, from food to blankets; and they orga-
nized the cleaning of the camps built along the road in
an arrangement that ensured that the men participat-
ing would do their share. 10Peasant/lndigenous women,
together with feminist networks like the Marcha Mundial
de las Mujeres,were also at the heart of the Cumbre de los
Pueblos, a gathering of social movements that last met in
Rio deJaneiro in June 2012, on the occasion of Ri0+20, the
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development
held twenty years after the UN Earth Summit of 1992.11
 One characteristic of these new
women's
movements is the process of political radicalization they
reflect. Increasingly, women are aware that theiractiv-
ism must not only protect the lives of their communities
against the activities of transnational companies and
fight—for example, for food sovereignty or against the
genetic engineering of seeds—it must also transformthe
model of economic development into one respectfulof
human beings and the earth. They see that the problems
they face stem not solely from specific policies or compa-
nies but are rooted in the mercenary logic of capitalist
accumulation, which presently, with the promotion of a
"green economy," is turning the cleaning of the environ-
ment into a new source of speculation and profit.
A further aspect of this radicalization is the
growing assimilation by rural/peasant/ Indigenous
women of the issues raised by popular feminism, suchas
the devaluation of domestic work, women's right to con-
trol their bodies and reproductive capacities, and the
need to resist the growing violence against women.This
process has been sparked not by ideological consider-
ations but by the very contradictions that women have
experienced in their everyday lives, including withinthe
organizations in which they participate. Women recog-
nize the integral connection between the mercantilization
of nature and the mercantilization of their bodies and
know that capitalism promotes a model of development
that generates violence against them. A first obstacle
many have encountered in their struggles has been
of
the discrimination they have suffered at the hands
com-
their male family members and even their own male
rades in arms.
whose
Typical is the case of Zapatista women,
commu-
crucial role in the depatriarchåhzation of their
Klein's
nities is becoming ever more apparent. As Hilary

arent.
Compafieras (2015)and Mdrgara Milldn's
Des-ordenando
el géner/éDes-centrando la naciön? (2014) well
dOCU-
ment, women have directed the course of Zapatism from
the first days of its existence, joining the first groups that
gathered in the mountains of Chiapas when still very
young, in order to change their living conditions as much
as to fight institutional oppression. It was through their
initiative and on the basis of their ideas and demands
that the movement's Women's Revolutionary Law was
adopted in 1993 which, as Klein points out, "[g]iven indig-
enous women's reality in rural Chiapas at the time
represented a radical stance and ... implied a seriesof
dramatic changes." The law's ten points established
women's right to participate in the revolutionary strug-
gle in any way they desired, according to their capacity;
to decide the number of children they have and care
for; to choose their partners and not enter into marriage;
to participate in communityaffairs and hold positions
of authority if freely and democratically elected; and to
occupy positions of leadership in the organization and
hold military ranks in the revolutionary armed forces. In
the words of Klein, the adoption of the law was a "water-
shed moment" that "transformed public and private life
how-
in Zapatista communities."14The women realized,
Women's
ever, that their work was not over, and after the
Revolutionary Law was made public, some traveled
its appli-
promote
throughout the Zapatista territories to
by Klein:
cation. In the words of one quoted

stopped—you know? We kept working and we will

It never generation of children, of young
keep working with the next of
to leave behind the bad ideas, the bad customs
people,
grandparents.... [W]e can say that Zapatista women
our Revolution-
their rights are. They know about the
know what still turning what was
written,what
[but)... [wle are
ary Law analyzed into a reality.
what was
was defended,
f ced 011

to
c hi Idcen
In St Lutqqle to the

The fight to ban alcohol actually long pre-

dates the San Cristöbal uprising, with Zapatista women
identifying drunkennessas a cause of violence against
them years earlier. 6The significance of this initiative is
summed up by a group of women interviewed by Klein at
the Caracol in Morelia, one of the five sites of the Zapatista
government:

When women began organizing it was because we were

suffering so much with our husbands. We saw many women
being abused and beaten by their husbands, and we had
to do something about this situation.. In the organization
women'slives have changed and we are not as oppressed.
Before when men drank being abused was part of
women's lives, but not anymore.... We marched with ban-
ners and we went to the town hall to pressure them to enact
a dry law. There were about 250 women from different com-
munities. We yelled and shouted. 17

After the ban was passed in 1994, checkpoints were insti-

tuted around the region to prevent alcohol from com-
ing into it. The women continued to organize marches to
enforce the ban and in one case smashed the windows of
a place where men had gathered to drink beer. 18
A further sign of a rising feminist conscious-
ness is the emergence of a new critical stance among
Indigenous women toward the patriarchal structuresthat
govern their communities' property relations, and espe-
cially the transmission of land, which often occurs in a
patrilineal fashion. This "differential inclusion"19has major
consequences, as Gladys TzulTzul,an Indigenous scholar/
activist from the Totonicapån area of Guatemala, points
property,
out, "with regard to the registration of the family's
meaning
the guardianship of children, and the symbolic
20Womenwho
of having children outside of marriage." children's exclu-
their
marry outside their ethnic group risk
communally shared land.
sion from access to the clan's
Thus women have vigorously insisted on their rights in the
communal assemblies, the marches, the feasts. The chal-
lenge, Tzul Tzul argues, is how to change this custom with.
out resorting to the individual titling of land, the strategy
advocated by the World Bank since the Fourth WorldCon.
ference on Women in Beijing in 1995, which legitimizes the
trend toward land privatization. In their efforts to con.
struct more egalitarian relations in their communities, the
women of Totonicapån are not alone. Indigenous women
recognize that patriarchalism poses a danger to commu-
nitarian societies, because the inability of the male lead-
ership to change leads to women's exodus from the land.
Ironically, then, what many men may interpret as an act of
hostility, the rejection of male supremacy in all its forms,is
the necessary condition for greater cohesion in the com-
munity and a stronger commitment to its future.
A strategy women in the Indigenous move-
ment have used to end their marginalization has been the
creation of autonomous women's spaces. One example
is the Hijas del Ma(z, a space of encounter of Ecuadorian
women from peasant and Indigenous communities from
the coastal areas, the mountains, and the Amazonia.
"Much has changed in the lives of our people," says Blanca
Chancosa, one of its founders. "[Men] have migrated.
[and] those who have remained ... are the women.This
means we need to know more to move on This is why
we need a women's space in which we can discuss our
ideas." 21A similarly autonomy-seeking strategy to boost
women's social participation has been the formationof
peasant movements consisting exclusively of women,
An example is the Movimiento de MujeresCampesinas
de Brasil that, according to Roxana Longo, "seesitself
of
as feminist and recuperates the theory and practice
the feminist movement."22Formed in 1983 as rural POP-
ulations began to feel the negative effects of the "green
 revolution," 23this alliance of women variously involved in
agricultural work has fought to change the social identity
of peasant women—to have them recognized as workers
and as citizens (many had no identity cards) and to gain
for them the right to social security. In 1995, it formed a
national networkof peasant women'sgroups and women
from mixed peasant movements that succeeded in win-
ning paid maternityleave and struggled to defend pub-
lic health care. It also engaged in a variety of protest
actions against the activities of transnational corporations,
knowing that their presence meant the end of their com-
munities;for when the land is poisoned and dies because
of the use of chemicals and monoculture, local production
vanishes, as does the community's history and culture.
As political participation has increased, so
too has women'sawareness of the need for self-educa-
tion and political formation. These are now common ele-
ments in most women's organizations, as they confront
social forces whose logic is shaped at an international
level and requiresan understanding of international pol-
itics. Combined with the self-confidence gained through
social activism, such practices have created new forms
of subjectivity that contrast with the image of the peas-
ant woman still propagated by international institutions—
anchored to the past, cognizant only of practices on the
way to extinction. Peasant women in South America are
far from being concerned solely with their local cultiva-
tion rights or their families' well-being. They participate
in assemblies where decisions are taken, challenge the
government and police, and see themselves as the cus-
todians of the land, as they are less easily co-opted than
men, who are often seduced by the wages promised by
governments and transnational corporations—wages
that give them more power over women, feeding into a
macho CUIturethat encourages violence against them.
25

617
 One factor that encourages women'sroleas
custodians of the land and communal wealth is that they
play the greater role in the preservation and transmis-
sion of traditional knowledge. As tejedoras de memoria,
"weavers of memory," as Mexican theorist-activist Mina
Navarro puts it, they form an important dispositiveof
resistance, because the knowledge they sustain and share
produces a stronger collective identity and cohesion in the
face of dispossession. Crucial in this context is the partic-
ipation in the new movement of Indigenous women, who
bring with them a vision of the future deeply shaped by
connection with the past and a strong sense of the con-
tinuity between human being and nature. It is with refer-
ence to the "cosmovisions"that typify Indigenous cultures
in Latin America that some Indigenous feminists have
coined the term "communitarian feminism," where the
concept of the common is understood to express a unique
worldview with a specific conception of space, time, life,
and the human body. As Francesca Gargallo reportsin
her Feminismos desde Abya Yala (2012), communitarian
feminists, such as the Xinka feminist Lorena Cabnal of
Guatemala, have contributed new concepts such as
body-territory, which looks at the body as on a continuum
with the land, with both possessing historical memory
and both equally implicated in the process of liberation.
While they champion their ancestral origins, however,
communitarian feminists nevertheless reject the patriar-
chalism of Indigenous CUItUresas much as that planted
by the colonizers, as well as what they describe as "ethnic
fundamentalism." They reject the heterosexist elements
of Indigenous cosmogonic beliefs, their gendered dualism'
and see their task as constructing new, liberated cosmo-
visions that consider human beings and the body as liv-
ing in harmony with the trees, the stones, the mountains•
In this way, communitarian feminism is not just the de-

ot just th-
 fense of an already established world of cultural values
but rather the production of what in a different political
vocabulary we could describe as new commons; that is,
new forms of cooperation, wealth sharing, and solidarity.

Women's Struggle and the Production of the Urban

Commons

The struggle in the campo continues in the city, as the men

and women who are displaced from the land form new
communities in urban areas, taking over public spaces, con-
structing shelters,roads, bodegas, all through collective
labor and communal decision-making. Again, women
have taken a leading role in this process. As I have written
elsewhere, it is in the peripheries of the sprawling mega-
cities of Latin America, in areas mostly occupied through
collective action and in the face of permanent economic
crisis, that women are creating a new political economy
based on cooperative forms of social reproduction, estab-
lishing their "right to the city" and laying the ground for
new practices of resistance and reclamation. 52
The best-known example of this "silent revo-
lution"has been the spread of urban farming, a global
phenomenon pioneered in the 1970s by women in Africa
who, expelled from rural areas and forced to urbanize,
began to cultivate vacant plots of public land, transform-
ing cities' landscapes and blurring the division between
rural and urban. 35
Equally important has been the socialization
of socially reproductive activities, like shopping, cook-
ing, and sewing. This process began as a counter to the
effects of the austerity programs that, as early as the
1970s, were imposed by governments and international
economic agencies like the IMF and the World Bank on

619
 working-class communitiesin the name of economic
recovery and repayment of their national debt. After the
1973 nulitary coup in Chile, for example, women in pro-
letarjan settlenoents,paralyzed by fear and subjectedto
a brutal austerity program, pooled their labor and
resources, beginning to shop together and cook together
in teams of twenty or more in the barrios where they lived.
Born out of necessity, these initiatives produced far more
than an expansion of limited resources.The act of coming
together, rejecting the isolation into which the Pinochet
regime was forcing them, qualitatively transformed their
lives, giving them self-esteem and breaking the paraly-
sis induced by the government's strategy of terror. It also
reactivated the circulation of information and knowledge
that is essential to survival and resistance, and it trans-
formed the concept of what it means to be a good mother
and wife, contributing to its redefinition as going outside
the home and participating in social struggles. Through
these initiatives, the work of social reproduction ceased to
be a purely domestic and individual activity; housework
went into the streets alongside the big ollas (cooking pots)
and acquired a political dimension.
These politics did not evade the notice of the
authorities, who came to view organizing popular kitch-
ens as a subversive, communist activity. In response to
this threat to their power, police launched olla-smashing
raids into the barrios. As some of the women involved in
the popular kitchens recalled:

Sara: [WJith 300 people involved it was difficult to hide

what was going on. They came and turned the food stores
Upside down, they made us stop cooking and took all the
leaders prisoner.... They came many times but the kitchen
went on
Olga: The police came: "What's going on here?A communal
kitchen? So why are you doing it if you know it is prohibited?"
 "Because we are hungry." "Stop cooking!" They satd it was
political. The beans were half-cooked and we had to throw
them all away.. sThe police came many times. but we man-
aged to keep the kitchen going. one week in one house, the
next week in another

It is generally agreed that such survival strategies boosted

the community'ssense of solidarity and identity and
demonstrated women's capacity to reproduce their lives
without having to be completely dependent on the mar-
ket, helping to keep alive the popular movement that had
brought Salvador Allende to power after the coup. By the
1980s, it was strong enough to mount a successful resis-
tance to the dictatorship.
Chile was not an isolated case. Similar initia-
tives, creating furtherautonomous and collective forms of
social reproduction, have proliferated in Peru, Argentina,
and Venezuela. According to Zibechi, in the 1990s in Lima
alone there were 15,000 popular organizations, providing
glasses of milk or breakfasts for children and organizing
soup kitchens and neighborhood councils. In Argentina,
the piqueteras—proletarian women who, together with
their children and many young men, took an important
role in response to the catastrophic 2001 economic crisis
that for months paralyzed the country—organized road-
blocks, built encampments, and assembled piquetes
(barricades) that sometimes lasted more than a week.
Paraphrasing what Zibechi writes concerning
the famous Madres de Plaza de Mayo, we can say that
the piqueteras "understood the importance of occupying
a public space." They reorganized their social-reproduc-
tive activities in the street, cooking, cleaning, taking care
of children, and maintaining social relations, in the process
communicating to the struggle a passion that strength-
ened and enriched it. 58Significant is the testimony of the
Cuban social science researcher Isabel Rauber:
 The
stcuggle
the
c ampo

continues
the
city .
 From the beginning, from the first pickets.. the presence
of women and their children was crucial. Determined not to
go back home without something to put in their pots. the
women went to piquetes to defend their lives with teeth and
nails. Determined to achieve their objectives. they immedi-
ately participated and guaranteed the organization of daily
life on the barricades, which often lasted more than a day. If
tents had to be set up, if it was necessary to take turns watch-
ing over the security of the piquetes, to prepare food—for
sure together with the men—to construct barricades and
59
defend the positions taken, there were the women.

What Rauber underlines—which,I would argue, applies

to many women'sstruggles today in Latin America
and beyond—isthat, as neoliberalismunleashes a geno-
cidal attack on people's means of subsistence, the role
of women in the struggle becomes more fundamental.
Women recognize that the struggle against it must be
rooted in the activities that reproduce our lives, because,
in the words of a (male) militant Rauber quotes, "[Elvery-
thing begins in our daily life and then is translated into
political terms. Where there is no everyday life, there is no
organization, and where there is no organization, there
is no politics."
Rauber's view is confirmed by the account of
the piqueteras movement by Natalia Quiroga Diaz and
Ver6nica Gago, who have argued that the economic cri-
sis of 2001 induced "a feminization otthe economy and
together with it a deprivatization of the resources neces-
sary for reproduction." 41As soon as the official economy
collapsed, when many companies and even the banks
shut down, so that people could not retrieve their savings,
a different, "feminine" economy surfaced. It was inspired
by the logic of domestic work but organized collectively,
in public space, and in ways that made visible the polit-
and social value of reproductive work. As
women occupied the streets, bringing their pots and pans
to the roadblocks and their neighborhood assemblies;
as barter networksand various types of cooperatives
were set up, a subsistence economy emerged that en-
abled thousands to survive and, at the same time, rede-
fined what value is and where it is produced.
Although the piqueteras movement has since
demobilized, its lesson has not been forgotten. On the
contrary, what was a response to an immediate crisishas
become in many Argentinian proletarian neighborhoods
a broad social reality, part of a more lasting social fabric.
As Marina Sitrin has documented, years after the rebel-
lion of 2002, neighborhood assemblies and the forms of
collective action and cooperation that were born in the
piquetes continue. It is in the villas of Buenos Aires that
we best see how the refusal of immiseration and dispos-
session that animated the piquetes can turn into the con-
struction of a new world. 5Here one meets women who
live in a situation in which every moment of their everyday
lives becomes an instance of political choice, as nothing
is due to them and nothing is guaranteed; everything is
gained through negotiation or struggle, and everything
must be continuously defended. Potable water and elec-
tricity must be contracted with the state, as must some
of the materials necessary to build the roads and pre-
vent the rain from turning the streets into rivers of mud.
But the women who struggle to obtain these resources
do not expect or indeed allow the state to organize their
lives. Cooperating with each other, determined not to be
defeated and to escape social and economic impover-
ishment, they are creating new spaces that belong to no
one, in which to collectively make decisions concerning
the reproduction of everyday life, including the provision
of services for all who contribute. As Zibechi describes the
situation in Villa Retiro Bis, one of the thirty-one villas in
Buenos Aires:
 in the popular
Here you have ne;ghbcrs who have lunch and socialize in
k:chers... ct ntght stud/ in a primary school,
precarious spac-
the house cf women. .. Certa;nl / they are
•t have t•s with the State and the market, but
thing is that they are
they cre rnir;ma!, marginal. The main self-management,
undertakings sustained by mutual aid,
cccqerctcn, fraternization.

When I visited the same villa in April 2015,

the womenwere proud of what they have achieved.
our
"Everything you see,"they told me, "we have built with
hands." And I could see—walking along streets that they
had helped to pave, visiting the comedores populares
(popular kitchens)where, working on rotation, they
served hundredsof meals daily, attending a performance
of the Theater of the Oppressed they had organized
that this space in which they walked was their space, not
the alien territory we usually traverse in which we have no
stake and no means of control. When, prior to my visit, the
city of BuenosAires constructed a wall to prevent a fur-
ther expansion of the villa, the women immediately tore
part of it down, because, they said, "we want to be able to
move freely and refuse to be enclosed."
While the crisis of subsistence ag riculture that
neoliberal politics has produced has often resulted in the
formation of partially self-managed encampments such
as those found in the villas, in Bolivia a more common phe-
nomenon has been the proliferation of street vendors
who, in "incalculable numbers,"have occupied urban
areas and transformed them into ciudades mercado,
"market-cities," mostly through the "incessant work of
thousands and thousands of women."46Confronted with
displacement from rural lands and the impoverishment of
their communities,many proletarian women have taken
their reproductive work outside their home and "trans-
formed the markets into their daily living space" where
 "they cook, take care of their children, iron their clothes,
watch TV, visit each other, all in the bustle of buying
and selling."
As Marfa Galindo of the Bolivian anarcho-
feminist organization MujeresCreando points out, Bolivian
women's struggle for survival has ruptured the universe
of the home and domesticity. It has broken the isola-
tion characteristic of domestic work, so that the figure of
the woman shut away in the home is now a thing of the
past. In response to the precarization of labor and the
crisis in male wages, a culture of resistance has emerged.
Women have appropriated the streets, "converting the
city into a domestic space" 48where they spend most of
their time selling wares (food, smuggled goods, pirated
music, etc.) that "cheapen the cost of living for all the
population," organizing with other women, and confront-
ing the police, in this process "reinventing their relation to
society." Mujeres Creando has contributed to this new
female appropriation of the urban space, opening a
social center, the Virgen de los Deseos (Virgin of Desires)—
which Galindo has described as "a reproductive machine,"
owing to the manifold activities that take place there—
and providing services that are especially intendedfor
street women,such as day care, food vending, a radio
transmitter that women use to broadcast news about
their struggles or denounce abuses they have suffered,
and the publication of political-educational materials.
Selling goods in the streets may not seem a
radical activity. But anyone who is familiar with the intri-
cate social relations that have to be created, especially
in our time, to be able to occupy public space in a way
not authorized by the state knows that this impression is
mistaken. For the women who make up the majority Of
vendedores ambulantes to create such conditions that
enable them to spend much of their day in the street,
ensure the solety 01their trorrjottock
by the police—and work peacefully Withcoch other,
coordinating the shored usc of space ond tircj': well
cleaning activities and pricing, o sub%tontiolornount of
negotiation and policy making is required.Once occorn•
plished, these efforts create o counterpower that the
authorities cannot ignore. It is for this reo%onthat, e
the world, governments mount "clean-up" cornpoign »,
using the pretexts of sanitary irnprovement and beauti-
fication to destroy presences that threaten their urban
plans, and that by theiroccupation of public space, their
very visibility, pose a threat to its authority.
One example of the threats to which ambu-
lantes are exposed is the criminalization of the Uniön
Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes "28 de Octubre"
(UPVA), an organization of market sellers now mostly led
by womenand based in the Mexican city of Puebla,
which was recentlydeclared a public enemy by President
Enrique Peha Nieto. With some of their male relatives
and organization leaders in jail or threatened with death
in a country sadly famous for its high number of politi-
cal assassinations, the women of UPVA persist in their
work. They function as mothers, wives, and street vendors,
given that they have to care for those imprisoned and for
their children while also spending long hours at work, all
while taking on the work of political organization. The
scenario makes for a hard life of constant worry, with no
time for rest or recreation. Yet, as is common in women's
organizations, what one hears in their words is pride for
what they are accomplishing, and the individual and
collective growth they experience, in their understand-
ing of the world, their capacity to resist intimidation, and
their respect for themselves and other women. It is in the
words of such women that one sees the possibility of a
different world, where commitment to social justice and
 cooperation merge in a new conception of politics that
is the antithesis of the one generally recognized. A mea.
sure of the difference is the organizational practices the
wornen of UPVA have adopted, which are inspired by the
principle of horizontalidad and an insistence on collective
decision-making, often realized through neighborhood
assemblies in which all can participate.

Will these powerful new women's movements succeed in

resisting the onslaught of the expansion of capitalist rela-
tions? Will they have the power to contest the attempts
to recolonize their lands and communities? The answers
to these questions are of course unclear. What is certain,
however, is that in moments of acute crisis, when the con-
stitutive mechanisms of the capitalist political econo-
my have collapsed, women have stepped forward and,
through their collective efforts, have guaranteed basic
forms of social reproduction and broken the wall of fear
that had imprisoned their communities. When a political
and economic crisis "normalizes," the alternative econ-
omy that women create is often slowly dismantled, but
never without leaving behind new forms of communal
organization and a broader sense of possibility.
Thus, as Raél Zibechi has often noted, in the
villas ofArgentina, Mexico, Peru, as in the peasant/lndig-
enous, Afro-descendant communities of Latin America,a
new world and a new politics are in the making, which
even the unleashing of genocidal violence, especially
against women, cannot suffocate. It is a world that gives
a new vitality to the now much-abused notion of the com-
monst resignifying it as not only a wealth to be shared
but a commitment to the principle that this life we have
should be a Vida digna de ser vivida; a life that is worthy
of being lived. At its center, as Raquel GutiérrezAguilar
has written, are the reproduction of material life, its care,
and the reappropriation of wealth collectively produced,
organized in a way that is subversive; for it is based on the
possibility of "articulat[ing] human activity and creativity
for autonomous ends." 51

Notes Collectivo Miradas Criticas del Territorio desde

el Feminismo, pp. 42 45.
Unless othenuse noted. all translations are by 8 Patricia Gualinga, "La voz y la lucha de las
the author. mujeres han tratado de ser minimizadas," inter
view by Collectivo Miradas Criticas, in La Vidaen
1 Ihis title is inspired by a statement by el ccntw.l' el crude l',Jjc'tierra, pp. 48-50.
Sempreviva Organizaqåo Feminista (SOF), a fem 9 On the march of the Amazonian women
inist organization based in Sao Paulo, stating that leaders to Quito, see "Conversatorio con Ivonne
"the struggle to change the world and change the Ramos," interview by Collect ivo Miradas Criticas,
life of women is part of the same movement." in la Vidaen el centnwelcrudo hajotierra, pp. 82 85;
2 "Extractivism" is the term commonly see also pp. 69 76.
used in Latin American literature to refer to the 10 Ilelen Ålvarez, " La Marcha de la Mujeres,"
policy now dominant in the region whereby 6 '2012
econonuc development is centered on the ex 11 On the participation of women's organi
traction and export of raw materials, with devas zations in the Cumbre de los Pueblos, see Sempre
tating consequences for the environment and the viva Organizaqåo Feminista, En lucha contra la
Ines of people in the areas affected. As Horacio mercantilicacion de la Vida:La presencia de la Marcha
Machado Araoz has written, extractivism is Mundial de las Mujeres en la Cumbre de los Pueblos
"a legacy of the colonial logic the face of im Såo Paulo: SOF, '2012
penalism in our time . a) systematic expropri 12 Hilary Klein, Compatieras: Zapatista's
ation of vital energies. of life as such. in all its Women's Stories(Oakland: Seven Stories Press.
forms and dimensions ... habituating people to 2015 , p. 72.
pain, hunger, and death." Aråoz, "Los dolores 13 Ibid., p. 71.See also Mårgara Millan, Des
de Nuestra América y la condiciön neocolonial: ordenando el género/jDesu•entrandc' la nacivn."• El
Extractivismo y biopolitica de la expropriaciön," zapatismo de las mujeres indigenasy sus consequen
Observatorio Social de América Latina 13, no. 32 cias (Mexico City: Ediciönes del Lirio, 2014),
(Nmerntxr 2012), pp. 53-56, 63. pp. 74-81.
3 The Mäes de Maio is a Brazilian group 14 Klein, Compaieras. p. 72.
that formed after a 2006 incident in which police 15 Ibid., p. 73.
retaliated for the killing of two policemen by or- 16 On the Zapatista women's mobilization
ganizædcrime by killing hundreds of people in against alcohol, see ibid., pp. 61-60.
a favela of Såo Paulo; official statistics put the 17 Ibid., p. 62.
death toll at 600 people, but the Måes de Majo 18 Ibid.. p. 66.
put the figure at twice that. In 2016, on the anni 19 Gladys Tzul Tzul, Sistcmas
versary of the massacre, the group published a comunal Indwena: Mujeresy tramas de pa rentescv'cn
booklet, *Pala N. 3, Guerriera: Especial Måes de Chuimeq'ena'(Guatetnala, 2016). pp. 71 70.
Maio, J') aijos, contra o terrorismo do estado." 20 Ibid., p, 168,
4 Alberto Acosta and I)ecio Machado, 21 Blanca Chancosa, "Saramanta Warmikuna
U
"Ambientaijzmo y conflictos actuales en America (I I(jas del Maiz), un espacio de aliadas naturales,
latina," ObjervumorjoSocial dd Atnér/ca Lilina 13, interview by Collectivo Miradas Criticas, in la
no, (Mwcrnber 2012), p. 82, pp. 51 53.
S in Resistance:A 22
Raüj Zjbechj. Terr//ories Roxana I ongo, El Je las mu
Canvgraphy ef lutin American Social Mopemenis fres en les secules: desa
(Baltimore; AK Press, 2012), p. 7, Aires: America l.ibre. 2012), pp. 151ff.
6 Lisset Coba Mejia, "Agua y aceite: La lhe called green resolution is a broad
sostenibiljdad de la vidå en crisis en la Amazonia," agricultural effort promoted by the United
nordel Guanto,no, (January 2016),p, Nations, the United Slates, and the Food and
7 Esperanza Martinez, "La actividad Agriculture Organization as the solution to ag-
petrolera exacerba el machismo,"interview by ricultural impoverishment in the Third World,
Collectivo Miradas Criticas del Territorio desde consisting in the extension to former colonial ter-
el Feminismo, in la Vidaen el centrey el cruåo ritories of the industrialized agricultural method
&aJoderra: El Yasunjen clave Feminis/a (Quito; already applied in Europe and the U.S.Involving
 e ict s,
and "CC(I.S,
in (ho'
h it Philippines). Ibid
led 10a ihec oi land as ssvll 1 veronica
as (he expulsion al cas oi snjall la Cle y Gago
lan€lossnet s, ho nol (he expense 'titl,1.J'
ante
19, no. 45 (J la
cd (01'IliC liiliehase oi (he ness' Il ne 2014)
on Ill is M
nual hnologtcs, l•oj-a itique ol' (he green A. Silrin,
Every
( I ,onclon: Zed
)ks, 2()1'2),
j 'illa is the given in
pp. 81-81
Il (l'cnang: encajiiljliicllts set up generally Argentinato
PI), and Slitsa, pellecl the ru ral areas as well by peopleex.
1 ( 1989; repr., as immigrants.
Raul Zibeeiii,
I ondon: Books, .40, las pra/l( •as cm,mclpalorias
45. ciones (lescleAbajo, (Bogotå: Edi
p.
I on o o, las "lhe I heater of t he Oppressed
pp. 150 57, in the was created
Brazilian
actor, educator,
M 11abel \Åaret, l.as act isiclacles ext rac (heater director August() Boal. It is and
a
as conueften a la gente en esc lavos," jn(erv jew theater ill which the spectators becomepolitical
onists, helping 10 resolve the problems protag
posedby
the actors by acting thenl out.
a ITO, la c,'/b'l/t!.• 46 Lucia Linsalata, Quando manda la
c, cl asam-
capitalista dc I'll u: l," comuni/ariopopularcn Bolivia(Mexico City:
( Puebla: Bajo "Cierra SOC '2015).pp. 64-65.
l"clleaones, 2015), p. '204. Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid. p. '248. 48 Maria Galindo, "La pobreza, un gran ne-
l' rancesca rgallo. gocio," Mujer Pulp/ica, no. 7 (La Paz: Casa Virgen
(Buenos Aires: \tnerica libre, p. '227. de los l)eseos, 2011),pp. 11142.
pp. 230 37, '245. 49 Ibid., p. 114.
50 Ibid.. p. 249. 50 O
llie group took the name 28 de Octubre
51 Silua Federici. "Conunoning the City," to commemorate those injured and killedin a
no. I Spring 2()17). iGolent raid the police conducted againstthe
lhe reference here is to DavidIlarvey's vendors ol' open air street market on that datein
Rcl'c'lCities: th,• Right l/h' Ci(r l/h' Urban 1973,which led to the torching ofdozens ofstalls
w ( london: Verso. 12). and the burning to death of an infant. Anaccount
55 lhis is how the Ethiopian political econ of the raid and the activities of the organization
omist Fantu Cheru describes this phenomenon is given by Sandra C. Mendiola Garcia, "Vendors,
'Mth reference to African urban centers. See Mothers, and Revolutionaries: StreetVendors
Cheru, "1he Silent Revolution and the Weapons and Union Activism in 197()Puebla Mexico,"Oral
of the Weak:Transformationand Innovation History Forum 33 pp. 126.
from Below," in The Global Resistance Reader, ed. 51 Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar,"Politicasen
Louise Amoore (New York: Routledge, 2005), femenino: Transformaciones y sumersiones no
(Decem
pp. 74-85. See also Silvia Federici, "Women, Land centrada en el estado," Ccwtrapuntü,no. 7
Struggle and Globalization" and "Feminism and ber 2015),pp. 126-27.
the Politics of the Commons,"in Revolution
at
['oint Zero: Ilouseuvrk, Reproductionand Feminist
Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), pp. 132 33,
46.
See Jo Fisher, Che Kitchen Never
Stopped" Women's Sell' Ilelp Groups in Chile's
Shanty Towns," in Out o/ /he Shadows: ll+men,
Ro/s/ance, am/ lådi/ics it/ Latin Anwrica (London:
American Bureau, 199%), 16 Cf.
josher, Kitchen Never Stopped,"'
ppZ2
Zibechi, '230 39.
Raul Zibechi, dc' la rt'l'l/dl/a
Argentina: socie/a,l en m,'j'imien/o (J,a Plata,
Argentina: Lelra I.jbre,
Isabel Rauber, "Mujeres piqueteras: El
caso de Argentina," in Économidmondi,llisce;el
identilås de genre, ed. Fenneke Reysoo (Geneva:

630
Zapa tis ta ( EZI-N) Women s
Revolutiona-cy Law
NEws
Chlapas, Mexico:

New Year ls revolution

F•tirm
pan of •
NAFȚÂ pro

â' the Worid

'bout have
lard arvi
cm NAFTA â by
of
UȘ came

Arm' (EZI-NI
NAFT A W—eșe,
by ÂFT A
• aur
de
has

He'* rare
C*erhajf

04
Ă AFTA
of Indłgenous of NAST Â

â SĂ) cd Roy

The Zapatistas' (EZLH) Wrxrerťs P,evoiĂ7sary

ÂFTÂ Save

The frontlines in Chiapas

Car—