These past few weeks, I focused on working on a part of my project that I had yet to fully explore. As I mentioned before, most of my work had been focused on exploring transnational feminist first wave movements in Latin America. through my research for the short essay I began exploring the idea that the reason as to why Latin American feminists aimed to create a movement alongside Iberian women, and how this idea of a shared experience could have been influenced by the experience of colonisation of Latin America by Spain and Portugal.
I began by reading a book by Susan Midgen Scolow titled ‘The Women of Colonial Latin America”. This text focuses on exploring gendered relations in Colonial Latin America and the idea of the patriarchal family unit. Nonetheless, it also explores how the arrival of Iberian Women, who had begun to arrive as settlers in the 1560s fundamentally changed the experience of womanhood in the Americas. These women brought with them a culture deep rooted in Roman Catholicism, a culture in which both womanhood and masculinity were heavily tied to concepts of honour, and a deep attachment to the family unit, all values which I still see are very much interwoven in Latin American and Iberian culture today, even more so than I had when studying other Early Modern Gender histories. (Sidenote: the fact that I can form links with gendered attitude taking place in mid 16th century demonstrates that there is something fundamentally flawed with gender in Latin America in the 21st century… a bit concerning to be honest.)
However, what was particularly interesting to me was how the author explored the experiences of Indigenous and African women who were also present during the colonisation. Although growing up I knew of the atrocities which Indigenous women in particular had suffered, from mass rape to their subjugation into prostitution, concubinage and even slavery by male Iberian colonisers had never been a secret. Yet, this chapter sort of made me question the history education which I had received in Spain – which in taking Spain’s role as the ‘Colonisers’ had failed to truly explore the atrocities suffered by Indigenous and African Women.
Although these gender-race interactions are not the main focus of my Project, I am almost angry at myself for failing to ‘keep it in mind’ even as I was doing most of my research. At the end of the day, although they experienced racist attitudes from North American women (and also the fact that the literature regarding early Latin American feminists is very scarce), the women with participated in Transnational feminist movements in the early 20th century were all white, and most if not all were a part of the upper and middle-upper classes. They are by no means the subaltern within Latin America, and I am starting to believe that it is a deserve on my part to write a gender history which fails to consider, or even keep in mind, Indigenous and African women in Latin America.
Although I do not want to expand the scope of my project project too much (we all know where that spiral leads to and I have deadlines to meet!) I am very glad that I came across this book. I hope that reading more about the colonial experiences of Latin American women will help me formulate better links between the roles of race and gender in defining these first wave transnational movements, and that I will develop and piece of work which is more conscious regarding these disparities even if they are not the main focus of my work. Perhaps this could be an interesting direction from which to take this work later on. This is after all, a work in progress.