Afrodescendent Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Debts of Equality

This ECLAC report treats inequality affecting Afro-descendant women as a structural inheritance of slavery and colonial rule, not as a collection of personal disadvantages. It organizes the analysis around economic, physical, and decision-making autonomy, connecting labor markets and pensions to health, violence, political representation, and the struggle for recognition as individual and collective rights-holders.

The intersectional approach is essential. Regional averages for “women” can conceal racial gaps, while statistics on Afro-descendant populations can conceal gendered labor and violence. The report shows why anti-racist policy without gender analysis and gender policy without attention to racial hierarchy both reproduce partial visibility. Data gaps themselves reveal whose lives institutions have not been designed to measure.

Because it is a regional policy report, it cannot replace the intellectual and organizing traditions of Black women across Brazil, the Caribbean, the Andes, and Central America. Its value is different: it assembles evidence that movements can use to challenge claims that formal citizenship has resolved racial inequality. It also encourages readers to understand autonomy materially—as time, income, safety, health, land, services, and political power.