Resourcing Black Feminist Organizing in Latin America and the Caribbean

This resource is one step in a participatory research journey that began in 2019. Led by Jeannette Tineo Durán, a team of Black feminist researchers from Latin America and the Caribbean explored Black women's activism and organizing across their regions – also termed Abya Yala. Between November 2019 and August 2020, they charted activism across 17 countries and five sub-regions they grouped as follows: the Andes, Brazil, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Southern Cone.

To put our commitments to self-determination and community leadership in practice, it was important that the research team reflect the communities we sought to learn from. To that end, Tineo Durán assembled a powerful cadre of 16 Black women academics, artists, and activists from the regions to collectively produce it. Using participatory methodology from decolonial and intersectional perspectives that brought together Black feminist perspectives across borders, the researchers did not approach participants as subjects but rather as collaborators in the production of knowledge. Both the researchers and the participants' knowledge and experience were integral to the analysis. 

Most work was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with research disrupted by public health responses across the 17 countries. Participants were heavily impacted, not only by the virus but also its economic consequences and state policing of quarantine measures. Some planned in-person research activities such as workshops, forums, and meetings were conducted virtually.

The original Spanish-language research – Mapeo de Feminismos Negros en Abya Yala (2021) – is a rich and deep resource, including detailed reports on each of the mapped countries/sub-regions. It is a contribution to the Black feminist call for documentation, translation, and sharing of Black feminist knowledge. As FJS and Wellspring disseminate the research to a philanthropic audience, the researchers are sharing it with a wide audience of activists in the regions and publishing their own book for movements.

This microsite draws from translated summaries of the Mapeo developed by consultants Carla Murphy and Chriss Sneed. As we concluded the analysis, we saw an opportunity to include perspectives from a wider range of philanthropic actors so we conducted a small survey of seven private foundations in May and June 2022 and five follow-up interviews in December 2022 and January 2023.