Lideres Campesinas: Grassroots Gendered Leadership, Community Organizing, and Pedagogies of Empowerment

The roots of Organizacion en California de Lideres Campesinas (Lideres Campesinas) are farm-worker women who create a better future for themselves and their communities. The organization is based on the idea that farm-worker women are leaders that can be empowered to solve the problems of injustice in their own lives and communities. This ethnography addresses three areas of research, including Lideres Campesinas's history; changes in terms of leadership, empowerment and community organization; and documenting the organization's pedagogical model. The ethnography chronicles Latina farm workers in California who have developed programs recognizing campesina expertise and nurturing leadership among campesinas who organize their families, communities, and workplaces. These narratives speak to the new forms of empowerment created by Lideres Campesinas and new tools the women have obtained in creating new kinds of community by taking action in their twelve local site committees

Rethinking Queer and Trans Latinx: Latinx Talk Mini-Reader #4

Latinx Talk Mini-Readers offer a curated selection of essays and creative work previously published on our site and our predecessor site, Mujeres Talk, on specific themes and topics, followed by a set of discussion questions relevant to the readings. We hope these resources contribute to growing knowledge in and of Latinx Studies, expanding dialogues on critical issues, and turning ideas into praxis. These mini-readers are made for classroom and community use. Mujeres Talk published from 2011 to 2017. Latinx Talk has been in publication since 2017

Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms

This article examines the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentros as critical transnational sites for the collective re-imagining of feminist politics in the region. Paying special attention to the most recent regional gathering, held in Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic in 1999, we analyze the major political and philosophical debates that have emerged during twenty years of Encuentros: 1) shifting conceptions of movement autonomy and feminisms\u27 relationship to the larger women\u27s movement and to other actors in civil and political society, the State, and international institutions; 2) controversies generated by the movements\u27 recurrent crises of inclusion and crises of expansion ; and 3) debates centered on differences, inequalities, and power imbalances among women, in general, and among feminists, in particular. While this essay explores how the Encuentros have marked feminist debates in the region, it also argues that they are, in themselves, productive transborder sites that not only reflect but also (re)shape Latin American and Caribbean feminist discourses and practices

Farmworker Women’s Organizing and Gendered Grassroots Leadership

Líderes Campesinas (formally known as Organización en California de Líderes Campesinas) is the only statewide women farmworker’s organization in the country. With historical roots stemming back to a 1988 Coachella Valley organization called Mujeres Mexicans, Líderes Campesinas gained nonprofit status in 1997. With headquarters in Pomona, California, the group has more than five hundred members who are organized through twelve local committees throughout the state. The organization works to improve the dismal working conditions in the fields and packing houses and also educates women farmworkers on pesticide exposure, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment and assault

Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Activism

Maylei Blackwell tells the story of how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and California moves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales

Mapping Indigenous LA: Place-Making Through Digital Storytelling

Digital Humanities Seminar 2016: Places, Spaces, Sites, University of Kansas, October 1st, 2016: https://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2016 Maylei Blackwell is at UCLA.Mapping Indigenous LA is a series of story maps that uncover the multiple layers of indigenous Los Angeles through digital storytelling and oral history with community leaders, youth and elders from indigenous communities throughout the city. A map of Los Angeles does not tell the story of its people. In a megalopolis like Los Angeles, this is a story that is often invisible to policy makers and even the city’s notion of itself as a global crossroads. This story includes layered, sedimented cultural geographies of Indigenous Los Angeles that includes the Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam who struggle for recognition of their sacred spaces and recognition as a nations, American Indians who were removed from their lands and displaced through governmental policies of settler colonialism, and indigenous diasporas from Latin America and Oceania where people have been displaced by militarism, neoliberal economic policies, and overlapping colonial histories. When we consider Pacific Islander and Latin American Indigenous Diasporas, Los Angeles has the largest indigenous population of any city in the US. While many would argue that there is not one Los Angeles but multiple LAs, what is less known is that there are multiple indigenous LAs whose histories are layered into the fabric of the city. Indigenous LA is about how the original peoples of the Los Angeles- basin (and islands) relate specifically to this land and how subsequent relocations and migrations of indigenous peoples have reworked space, place, and the meaning of these new racialities and concepts of indigeneity