Latina Empowerment and Border Realities 411
These brief excerpts illuminate how religious, class, and ethnic boundaries were crossed
in women’s border organizing. Spiritual journeys combine with justice concerns and
Latina activism to empower border women and their communities. These common
goals are part of the tenets of global feminism. As Charlotte Bunch (1993: 251) has
exhorted us: “To make global feminist consciousness a powerful force in the world
demands that we make the local, global and the global, local. Such a movement...
must be centered on a sense of connectedness among women active at the grassroots
in various regions.”
CONCLUSION
The research drawn on in this chapter speaks to and enriches feminist scholarship in
that it shows the potential in global feminist approaches. Community-based activist
research shows that “community is created in and through struggles against violence
and for social justice and economic security, as well as through casual interactions
with people who share some aspects of [their] daily lives” (Naples 1998: 337). This is
important, because “as a dynamic process, the social construction of community offers
the possibility for redefinition of boundaries, for broadened constituencies, and for
seemingly unlikely alliances” (ibid.).
The study of the greater El Paso/Juarez area suggests that the role of women’s reli- ́
gious organizations is central to border women’s mobilization success. Catholic, Jewish,
and YWCA women’s groups provide organizational skills, information, and other re-
sources that are integral to Latina centered women’s NGOs on the border. Consequently,
today, the experiences Latinas have and the work they do alongside non-Latinas in
NGOs, creates a forum for the “chispa” – the spark – the passion for a type of women’s
politics to flower that requires a global view of the women’s movement. In the process,
Latinas engage with other communities of women and forge new opportunities for
creating important alliances. That they are forming alliances with religious groups is
part of the larger Latino/a story within the evolving U.S. ethnic and religious mosaic.
Thus, as argued earlier in the chapter, women’s activism in the Latina/o commu-
nity emerges from but is not decoupled from larger community problems – economic
exploitation, racism, poverty, and violence. But that the activism evolved into women
centered goals speaks to a type of politicization that Latina/o ethnic communities must
confront. Women’s subordination, marginalization, and exploitation are problems
women face both within and outside their ethnic communities. Consequently, what
this chapter shows is how “women are politicized and drawn into local political battles
in a myriad of ways that reflect a wide diversity of personal and political concerns as
well as varying constructions of community and social identities” (Naples 1998: 344).
This research highlights why, how, and with whom Latinas came to construct commu-
nities of resistance and underscores the potentials for global feminism.