Latina Empowerment and Border Realities 405
consciousness. While symbolic forms of resistance are important, it is in collective ac-
tivism that Latinas have nurtured a more effective political voice. Thus, moving from
cultures of resistance to organized protest awakens a different type of consciousness
and activism. It is this latter form of collective empowerment that I emphasize here. It
includes forming alliances with and becoming politicized in a number of organizations
including faith-based organizations.
Lara Medina (1997) notes the historical significance of Las Hermanas, a twenty-
five-year-old national organization of mostly Latina Roman Catholics that promotes
women’s equality within religious institutions and society at large. Medina points
out that, as a religious-political organization, Las Hermanas was effectively the first
crossover organization that brought the Latina gender and ethnic struggles of the 1960s
and 1970s into the religious realm. Between 1971 and 1980, Las Hermanas influenced
church politics by promoting women for leadership positions, pushing women’s ordi-
nation, promoting women’s right to choose on the question of abortion, and partici-
pated in secular political movements that focused on women’s issues. Las Hermanas has
also focused specifically on issues affecting grassroots Latinas, including sexuality and
domestic abuse. Medina’s study of Las Hermanas is among the first to examine issues
integral to understanding Latina religious-political organizing. Significant in Medina’s
work is the link she identifies between group identity, protest strategies, feminist models
of leadership, and religious agency.
In broader terms, Carol Hardy-Fanta (1993) offers insight into this gendered process
of political mobilization based on her study of Latina/o political mobilization in Boston.
She states:
A key issue within the debate about gender differences is whether there is an essen-
tial divide between the public and private dimensions of politics. For Latina women,
much more than the men, the boundary between these supposedly distinct spheres
of life is blurred or indistinct. With their emphasis on grassroots politics, survival
politics, the politics of everyday life, and the development of a political conscious-
ness, Latina women see connections between the problems they face personally and
community issues stemming from government policies. (1993: 18–19)Most notably, Latina activism emerges as Latinas’ political consciousness is awak-
ened in their everyday lived experiences. This also explains why Latinas in particular
would ally themselves with women’s religious groups as they have on the U.S.–Mexico
border. They go to women’s faith-based organizations for help in confronting, for exam-
ple, domestic violence or for help with economic problems. In these settings, they meet
other women like themselves, participate in programs that empower them, develop
skills to confront their own problems, and in the process, often emerge as community
activists.
BORDER REALITIES
Latinas on the border are affected by U.S.–Mexico relations, including immigration
policies, border politics, and their own continuing ties to families south of the border.
Barrera (1979) and Acuna (1988) suggest that these relations are linked to the legacy ̃
established in the region when the U.S. border officially crossed into Mexican territory
beginning with the Texas War of Independence (1835–6) and the signing of the Treaty of