Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Edited by Elizabeth Maier and Nathalie Lebon, Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean documents four decades of organizing across radically different political settings. Its contributors follow movements through the dictatorships of the 1970s, Central American uprisings, urban campaigns for housing and basic services, feminist institution-building, engagement with public policy and formal politics, and resistance to neoliberal globalization. This long arc prevents “the women’s movement” from appearing as a single organization or ideology: activism is repeatedly remade as states, economies, and the meaning of citizenship change.

The collection’s subtitle joins two tasks—engendering social justice and democratizing citizenship—that are often separated. Women enter politics through survival work, human-rights defense, labor, racial and Indigenous struggles, neighborhood organizing, and explicit feminist campaigns; each route opens different possibilities and exclusions. Democratic transition can create legal access while leaving economic violence and unequal care work intact. Professionalized NGOs can translate demands into policy while distancing leadership from grassroots constituencies. By tracing these tensions under neoliberalism, the book asks whether institutional recognition redistributes power or merely gives movements new responsibilities without adequate resources.

Any regional anthology risks compressing major differences among the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and Mexico, and coverage inevitably reflects which movements entered academic and policy archives. The book should be complemented by newer work on Afro-descendant, Indigenous, queer, trans, disability, migrant, and digital organizing. Its historical range nevertheless makes it valuable for comparative reading. For FemRes, it demonstrates that citizenship is not only a legal status granted from above but a field reshaped by collective action—and that feminist democracy must be evaluated through material living conditions, internal movement accountability, and the capacity of marginalized women to set political priorities themselves.