Latina Empowerment and Border Realities 409
decided to channel their efforts into programs focused on women’s development. As
recounted by Sister Ida, after soliciting funds mostly from women’s [religious] congre-
gations throughout the United States, they were able to open El Centro. They got to
know and form partnerships with the local social service agencies and subsequently
developed programs to train women aspromotoras de salud(promoters of health).
El Centro is one model for women’s mobilization in the region. As its mission state-
ment states, El Centro has become a mutual U.S.–Mexican culturally based community
of women who work in the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez region. More generally, “As women ́
on the US/Mexico border, they stand in solidarity with women throughout the world
who actively seek peace with justice for the earth and for people.” Their goal is to
work to transform the social structures that oppress or limit women, and they begin
by focusing their activism on local projects. For example, El Centro’sValores y Vida
program focuses on building women’s self-esteem and challenging the assumptions of
traditional family structures and women’s subordinate roles in them. The goal is to
provide opportunities for women to discuss alternative family structures where women
do not have to be subordinate to men. Other Centro programs are geared to address
women’s economic marginality – identifying the sources of economic exploitation and
developing strategies to combat them. It is by offering programs where women discover
alternatives to their subordination and exploitation that organizations like El Centro
become empowering organizations for border women.
By challenging the Latino family structure and critiquing other social institutions,
namely religious institutions, Latinas/Chicanas/Mexicanas who join these NGOs or-
ganize to increase their political mobilization. They promote a nonpatriarchal action-
oriented spirituality as part of a social activism that questions existing patriarchal struc-
tures affecting their lives. For example, women at El Centro articulate their rejection
of church institutions that value keeping families intact without confronting family
violence as a social problem, a problem that disproportionately affects women and
children. As one woman put it after discounting her priest’s advice to return to her
husband after a brutal beating, “how can a church, an organization, or society, judge
me because of what it teaches us,” – expecting women to put up with the violence for
the sake of keeping families together.
There is also the questioning of other oppressive social structures that produce eco-
nomic and political marginalization. One of the characteristics of El Centro is the num-
ber of women who come from “colonias,” the rural and unincorporated subdivisions
of U.S. cities located along the U.S.–Mexico international boundary. Colonias are char-
acterized by substandard housing, inadequate plumbing and sewage disposal systems,
and inadequate access to clean water. They are highly concentrated poverty pockets
that are physically and legally isolated from neighboring cities. El Centro’s programs
help these women to transform their everyday lived experiences and their spirituality
into local border activism and to maximize efforts through effective networking with
other women’s NGOs in the region.
Many of the organizations in the cluster I studied are affiliated with religious groups,
including Catholic women’s congregations, a local Jewish women’s organization, and
the YWCA. The interviews I conducted with organizers reveal that women’s NGOs
on the U.S.–Mexico border are linked both by local and transnational concerns for
women’s rights and human rights. Alliances among and across women’s NGOs focused
on “being together” around women’s issues rather than being divided by nationality.