I've Traveled Through Latin America For Two Years. In the Land of Machismo, Teen Feminists Are Paving the Future.
When one thinks of feminism and its prominence in some areas of the world, Latin America is not likely to be top of mind, but in her travels throughout the region, Katherine Plumhoff met many young women fighting for women’s rights and change in a place known for its veneration of machismo.
photo credit: Priscilla Du Preez, via Unsplash
I thought I’d come to Central and South America and experience the worst sexism of my life. I knew machismo, or the attitude that men are superior to women that contributes to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles in the region, would be hard to escape, and that I’d need to be extra careful as a solo female traveler, but I refused to compromise on my dreams to travel and explore the region just because I’d get catcalled.
I arrived in Santiago two years ago. In the time since, I’ve traveled through Latin America alone, with friends, and with my partner. I’ve experienced a lot of the wolf-whistling and talking-down-to I’d expected, but I’ve also experienced something I’d never imagined: exposure to a truly trailblazing community of young feminists hailing from all over Latin America, but especially well-organized in Argentina, seeking to secure their rights and change their culture.
I’ll focus on three recent feminist campaigns developed in Buenos Aires, where I was based for a good part of the last year: #NiUnaMenos, or #NotOneLess, a campaign against gender-based violence; #AbortoLegalYa, or #LegalAbortionNow, a wave of support for abortion rights; and Lenguaje Para Todes, or Language For Everyone, a campaign to eliminate gender bias in the Spanish language.
#NiUnaMenos and a collective against gender-based violence
Fourteen-year-old Chiara Paez had been missing for three days. On May 11, 2015, her body was found buried in the garden of her 16-year-old boyfriend’s house in Rufino, Argentina. She was pregnant. She had been forced to take medication to end her pregnancy and was then beaten to death. Her boyfriend, who had been helped by his mother, pleaded guilty.
This horrifying story is one of many in Argentina, where a femicide takes place every 29 hours, but the particular details of this case sparked a protest that has continued and grown for the last four years, led by impassioned youth.
Using social media and a bare-bones publicity campaign — which included asking actor friends to publish photos with signs reading #NiUnaMenos, a phrase written by Mexican feminist and activist Susana Chavez Castillo — several feminist organizers planned a march on June 3, 2015 in Buenos Aires. 300,000 people attended, and journalist and organizer Hinde Pomeraniec explains what drove them: “What we wanted was not… some form of collective venting of frustration. We wanted to ask for concrete action [and] criticism regarding the way these cases are presented, often focusing on the lifestyle of the victim, revictimizing them again and again because of the way they dressed, the men they dated or the kinds of photos they posted on Facebook. And it was also a call for solidarity. We need to help women experiencing domestic violence out of the spiral.”
These women were pushing to be part of the public dialogue about their very own lives. In the years since the first march, #NiUnaMenos has expanded to other countries in Latin America and the world, led by women similarly motivated, and, while the movement was started by a group of adult journalists, the majority of participants in the 2018 march were adolescents, reported Argentinian paper El Pais. The kids are alright, indeed.
#AbortoLegalYa and young, green feminists
When I left Buenos Aires to keep traveling, I tied a green handkerchief to my backpack.
The handkerchief is a callback to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who have protested the disappearance of their children during Argentina’s dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 by marching in the central square of Buenos Aires every week wearing white kerchiefs tied around their hair.
My pañuelo verde, or green handkerchief, is a modernized symbol of female courage and solidarity, and its message is simple: it means I support legal, safe, and free abortion and a women’s right to choose.
Tens of thousands of women and allies around Argentina and the world have a handkerchief just like mine. Women bring them to class, hang them from their apartment windows, and tie them around their wrists. Unfurled, they read "educación sexual para decidir, anticonceptivos para no abortar, aborto legal para no morir," or "sex education to decide, contraceptives not to abort, legal abortion not to die,” the three facets of the #AbortoLegalYa campaign, which organized in advance of a bill that went to the Argentinian Senate in August of 2018. The bill was rejected, with 38 votes against it and 31 votes in favor of it, but it will likely go to the Senate again under new president Alberto Fernández.
In the eight months I’ve been on the road, a dozen young feminists have come up to me, pointed out my green handkerchief, and showed me theirs. Every time, we’ve connected about our shared belief that women have the right to determine their own futures.
Lenguaje Para Todes and words that leave no one behind
English is easy once you get the hang of all its irregular verbs and weird pronunciations. We don’t use grammatical gender. There’s no need to memorize which kitchen objects get a “la” and which get an “el” or to change the ending of adjectives to match the gender of whatever they’re describing.
That’s not the case in Spanish, where every noun is gendered and the default for a mixed group of people or things is automatically the masculine version. Spanish-speaking feminists have long protested this deference towards the masculine, and teenagers in Argentina have given the movement a lift, incorporating it into their legal abortion demonstrations and student government campaigns.
Natalia Mira, an 18-year-old in Buenos Aires, was profiled by the Washington Post last month for her work advocating for gender-neutral language at her school and in Argentinian discourse.
Though Mira’s work has been written off as overly-sensitive nonsense by dissenters, she has a real point: the World Bank found that gendered languages can have significant impact on societies, including the reduction of women’s participation in the labor force and support for the unequal treatment of women.
A continent united by the strength of its future
The overarching feeling I’m left with after these two years in Latin America is this: the youth are the future in Argentina and Ecuador and Chile and Mexico and in every country in every part of this wide world. Seeing the progress these particular youth have made and the goals they’ve set in the midst of a culture that has historically repressed women even more than my own — and as an American, that’s saying something — is inspiring. It makes me want to get right back out and march.
Katherine Plumhoff is a writer and traveler focused on telling stories about women who inspire. She has spent the last two years in Latin America.