In the current context of the amplification and expansion of neoliberal and neo-developmentalist socio-economic policies in the Latin American and Caribbean region, characterized by the extractive exploitation of natural resources and the precariousness of life and local social environments, we observe a deepening of repressive policies toward popular sectors and their demands. Beyond the devastating effects on ecology, society, and politics, Virginia Vargas warns of the expansion of “repatriarchalizing policies” that entail not only a setback in terms of rights and access to public policies aimed at protecting and strengthening the social and political rights of women and sexual minorities, but also the deployment of particularly extreme and cruel forms of violence against grassroots organizations, activists, and leaders of territorial communities. Within this framework, bodies and sexualities occupy a significant place in the geopolitical realignments of the multilateral order, as well as in the most recent debates on rights, women, and sexual minorities.

Given this panorama, women's and feminist movements are critically reformulating their practices and strategies for intervention and struggle, reclaiming themes, organizational forms, and actors from previous political processes and imagining alternatives for the present and the future. The emergence of transnational organizations and networks in the region around various issues on the feminist and women's agendas has revitalized popular struggles with new approaches to strategies for action and organization to resist the onslaught of neoliberalism. In turn, these reemergences critically recover and reformulate the political practices and articulations of the recent past, particularly those that, during the second half of the 20th century, focused on the conquest and expansion of social and political rights.

Thus, the demands and struggles surrounding women's personal autonomy (binding divorce, access to reproductive health, among others) or access to the political sphere (parliamentary and institutional representation quotas, specific spaces within the framework of public policies, etc.) are spurred on by demands related to the persistence of structural inequalities linked to the intersection of gender with race and class, as well as the resurgence of extreme forms of sexist and patriarchal violence. The growing importance within feminisms and women's movements in the region of groups and organizations of Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, and what is known as popular feminisms, compels a refocusing of the struggles against state inaction and impunity in the face of femicides, high maternal mortality rates linked to clandestine abortion, the persecution and murder of local leaders in conflict zones and regions of extractive development policies, the impoverishment and social precarization of neighborhoods, setbacks in policies of integration and expansion of rights for sexual dissidence groups and women, among other forms of inequality and violence in the region.

The recovery and revision of slogans developed by feminisms, popular movements, and human rights movements of the late 20th century constitutes a collective task of discussion and critique, which fosters new horizons where feminisms and women's movements have an increasingly important place and role. The Green Wave, with its global expansion, synthesizes the accumulation of demands and struggles of feminist movements and sexual dissidence.

It is within this general framework that we propose this Working Group “Network of Gender, Feminisms and Memories of Latin America and the Caribbean”, in order to articulate the networks of knowledge production on feminisms in the region and their political memories, recognizing their rootedness and national and local specificities, as well as the multiple levels of oppression and exploitation that permeate the experiences of women and sexual dissidents (gender, race, class). 

This reconstruction of feminist history takes as its starting point the 1970s, a pivotal moment in the feminisms of Latin American and Caribbean countries. In 1975, Mexico hosted the First International Conference on Women, promoted by the UN, thus launching the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985), which brought together women from various countries in the region. This process had a specific impact on each nation and contributed to the (re)emergence and expansion of feminisms during the 80s, often within the context of transitions to democracy. It was in this decade, as a form of regional crystallization, that the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encounters were born, taking place every two or three years in different countries of the region and continuing to this day. As early as 1987, a division emerged between what would be identified as "historical feminism" and "grassroots feminism," or the broader women's movement. Various national gatherings were also promoted, including the First National Women's Meeting held in Argentina in 1986, which continues to this day.   

From the mid-1970s onward, the struggles of feminism and women's movements across our continent helped to highlight the subordination and oppression of women, the relationship of this situation to other social factors, the specific demands in our region, and the recognition of women as subjects of specific rights. Specific organizational structures and gatherings also developed.  

Working Group (WG) “Network of Gender, Feminisms and Memories of Latin America and the Caribbean” (Network) brings together different research teams and researchers who study memory processes from a gender perspective and/or are dedicated to the reconstruction of the memories of women and the feminist movement in the different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The Network has two main purposes. On the one hand, to contribute to the creation of an Oral History Archive that documents the history of feminist activism and the women's movement. On the other, to promote regional exchange, strengthen existing academic ties, provide meeting spaces, offer institutional support, foster exchange among researchers, strengthen the work of local teams, and contribute to the consolidation of the field of gender and memory studies.

Finally, we aspire to make visible the experiences of the different organizations, their reflections on the forms of intervention and political action in each specific national context, as well as the work of building transnational and regional networks and articulations in order to highlight the active participation of this multiplicity of organizations in the social and political struggles of the region.

In our region, during the mid-80s and early 90s, social movements emerged as significant social spaces in response to the decline of more traditional forms of modern organization and mediation, such as political parties and trade unions. This process of social fragmentation and crisis of representation provided the context in which new social actors arose with proposals for new public agendas, based on demands for expanded rights, leading to a process of civic engagement over the last few decades (López, 2002). 

We are interested in highlighting the role of the women's movement and feminist organizations which, while introducing increasing demands for greater democratization of social relations and claims for their recognition in the public arena, constituted a source of transformation and development of public debate and new forms of participation and political action, positioned in the expansion of the institutionalization of a perspective anchored in rights (human, social, civil, etc.).

In this sense, the Working Group's proposal falls within the field of studies on social movements in Latin America from a gender and sexual diversity perspective, which is also related to studies on the construction of political memories in the region. This transdisciplinary framework articulates developments in oral history, anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as a broader reflection on the politics of memory linked to democratization processes in Latin America following contexts of human rights violations and state violence. 

Laurence Klejman and Florencia Rochefort (1985) argue that constructing feminist memory is difficult, a historical reconstruction that, according to the authors, is marked by chaos and discontinuity. From their perspective, feminism does not seem to demonstrate a need to reconstruct the memory of its past struggles; either amnesia prevails, or it emerges episodically in response to new events. This difficulty in systematically reconstructing its own history, they maintain, leads to feminism's inherent fragility. 

According to Passerini (2016), this fragility of feminist memory and of the women's movement is due to the anxiety to innovate and its need to re-found itself, which leads organizations and movements to distance themselves and not recognize themselves in the antecedents of the past.  

Regarding the reconstruction of memory processes, oral testimonial archives have been recognized as indispensable vehicles for valuing “other memories” or “subaltern memories,” linked to the histories of social and political struggles of counter-hegemonic sectors (Spivak, 2010; Beverley, 2004 and 2012). In this sense, it is no coincidence that oral history has been used in a large number of research projects by and about women (Passerini, 1992). 

With strong precedents in the reconstruction of memories linked to the European experience of the 20th-century Jewish extermination and the importance of survivor testimonies (Bacci and Oberti, 2014; Ricoeur, 2004; Portelli, 2004; Calveiro, 1998), testimonial practices have been recognized as central elements in the development of social and cultural histories since the late 1950s in Latin America. This narrative genre constitutes a highly relevant social and political practice, linked to the denunciation of injustices and social inequalities, state violence, and the violence of dominant social sectors, and above all, to the construction of a legacy for subaltern sectors in the public sphere (Oberti, 2009 and 2015; Jelin, 2002 and 2014; Arfuch, 1995). 

Thanks to the act of remembering, it is possible to establish a connection with the past that helps us interpret the present and guide the future. This is a task we usually perform individually, but one we can also carry out collectively, as a feminist movement. To this end, feminism must also be concerned with creating spaces of memory and generating collective experiences of commemoration, which serve to transmit not only intellectually, but also emotionally, our collective past. I consider this work to offer women the possibility of generating fundamental feelings of recognition and identification, both in the construction of individual subjectivity and in the creation of collective bonds. The feminist movement, from its plurality of experiences and the diversity of the women who comprise it, possesses a rich, valuable, and plural collective memory, which it must safeguard by documenting it and preventing it from being forgotten. This task requires conscious effort, both in strengthening documentation centers and archives of women and feminism, and in participating in the processes of constructing historical memory.