Radical Forms of Community Care: Testimonios of Mexican and Puerto Rican Women in Chicago

Background and Purpose: This paper draws from a larger project, Chicago Latina Trailblazers: Testimonios of Political Activism, that features the testimonios of 14 Mexican and Puerto Rican women in Chicago who were activists from the 1940s to the present. Despite long histories of engagement and leadership in social justice movements, Latinas have been understudied, particularly in the Midwest. Furthermore, Latinas are rarely represented in scholarly explorations of social movements. Latinas have a history of engagement in intersectional and/or a broad array of social movements, at times building bridges between movements or creating their own space within movements. Understanding radical forms of community care within the Latine community necessitates leveraging feminist theoretical frameworks outside of the U.S. Thus, we draw on Latin American feminisms that conceptualize collective spaces of community care as opportunities for political organizing. Their collective stories demonstrate how their activism and contributions are rooted in their personal lives and extended to forms of community care.

Methods:

This was a community based participatory project that involved the women in all steps of the process with regular group meetings where decisions were made collectively. This paper uses the methodology of testimonio, defined by Latina feminists as a process of recovering experiences otherwise left untold or silenced. From this framework, lived experience is an essential aspect of research and the testimonio is an intentional source of empowerment. This process reflects the tradition of women of color who honor the autobiographical voice as a methodology of feminist scholarship. The process of testimoniar, is about the telling of and reflecting on personal stories, connecting them to the larger group struggle.

Results: Using their testimonios, we provide a framework for leadership and organizing grounded in their lived experiences and intergenerational collaboration. The Latina leaders represented in this project shared collective experiences of learning, taking risks, and developing their ideas into concrete projects, motivated and inspired by one another. The Chicago Latina Trailblazers (CLTs) took their experiences of marginality and racialization into a collective experience of resistance and resilience. The CLTs engaged and many still engage in this work with joy and love, a perspective essential for a lifetime of social justice work in a context where this continues to be “unfinished business.” This perspective is grounded in a vision regarding what community change meant to the women and their care for the community at large, but more importantly, the people who are a part of the community.

Conclusions and Implications:

This paper builds on the understanding of the ways that different forms of resistance, relational knowledge, and community care impact activism and oppositional consciousness. The women share their individual testimonios to tell the collective experiences of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, documenting histories of oppression, resistance, and resilience. The community spaces they created provided an avenue where community care included strategizing and organizing to address the social issues they faced as mother, leaders, and community members.