WORLD WORLDWIDE SPAIN News Journal Update - (en) Spain, CNT, #435 - breaking up? Borders - Tatiana Romero (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 I don't know if Feminism, singular like this, is capable of breaking

borders. ---- I don't know if he wants to, but I don't know if it suits
him either. Of course I'm talking about a specific feminism, the one
named One, Great and Free, in which, because they don't fit, they don't
even fit because of how reduced they are. However, we are deceived, at
least a little, if we think that there is another feminism, like this in
the singular and with a capital letter, which does not benefit from
borders. Or rather, we deceive ourselves if we think that whiteness and
white Feminism do not benefit from borders. I don't know if we are even
capable of imagining a world without borders. Because the border is not
just a fence, a wall, an ocean or a desert; it is much more than a no
man's land (actually it belongs to capital) in which human beings are
shot with impunity.

I grew up in a country with death on its two borders, to the south with
Central America and to the north with the United States. For as long as
I can remember I have heard news such as: "border patrol shot at a
migrant van", "rancher shoots to kill a migrant", "they drown in the Rio
Grande while trying to cross", "group of migrants gets lost in the
desert" and so it could go on. My memory is plagued by those headlines,
my body marked by the borders that I myself have crossed in conditions
diametrically opposed to the ones I recount. And yet, I carry the
borders on my skin wherever I go. And no, I think that it is not
convenient for Feminism to break borders; I don't remember where the
feminist ladies were when they murdered migrants on the northern border
of Mexico, but I also don't remember them laying their bodies down when
police violence tried to prevent the passage of the Migrant Caravan on
the southern border a couple of years ago.

We deceive ourselves if we think that whiteness and white Feminism do
not benefit from borders. I don't know if we are even capable of
imagining a world without borders. Because the border is not just a
fence, a wall, an ocean or a desert; it is much more than a no man's
land (actually it belongs to capital) in which human beings are shot
with impunity.

Of course, I remember Las Patronas, a group of women from Amatlán de los
Reyes, Veracruz, who, day after day for 30 years, have been waiting for
La Bestia, the freight train that crosses Mexico from south to north,
with bags of food and water bottles ready to be thrown at the migrants.
These women do not name themselves as feminists and yet their practice
is profoundly anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist. I remember the early
years of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, an organization of mothers of
disappeared persons in Ciudad Juárez, denouncing the border as a
femicide space. I remember the Zapatista compañeras promulgating the
Women's Revolutionary Law, where not once did the word Feminist or
Feminism appear.

20 years have passed since then and the necropolitics of the borders has
intensified and the business has become more profitable and I keep
asking myself where are the Feminists? Where are they here, in the
territory of the Kingdom of Spain, which is where I live today. I do not
remember where they were at the end of June 2022, when the
concentrations in rejection of the Melilla massacre, and if they were, I
do not remember them demanding responsibilities beyond those days. But
neither do I remember them fighting against the CIEs or for the repeal
of the Immigration Law, and if I don't remember them it is not because I
have a bad memory, nor because I myself have been in each of these
fights and have any kind of virtue. morality to judge where and why the
Feminists have not been. I don't remember them, just as many other
migrant and racialized compañeras don't remember them. It is not
convenient to blow up any border, because borders, in addition to
establishing the privilege of first class lives, those that deserve to
be lived and mourned, reinforce the fiction of the native population, of
us against the others, it also generates wealth. Wealth on the border
with all its devices of war and wealth in the cities where the bodies of
black, brown, indigenous women are exploited and turned into capital.

And yes, I know that there will be those who are reading this and tell
me that the class: the class, compañeras, is also racialized. What in
some spaces is still chanting: "native or foreign is the same working
class" as it turns out not. But it is also that thinking in terms of the
native/foreign pairing contains within itself a racist and xenophobic
thought, no matter how well-intentioned there are in chanting it and no
matter how much they believe that they are being "allies", because it
continues to alienate a huge population that is the one that sustains
the reproduction of material life and that should continue to be foreign
and if possible in a situation of administrative irregularity.

According to ILO data, today there are 67 million domestic workers in
the world, 80% of them are women, of which 80% correspond to women of
color. Many of these women are organizing globally to demand rights and
not just labor rights. They talk about migration, racism, sexism and
sexist violence. Capital accumulation and global care chains.

We went through a health and social crisis, the covid pandemic, in which
the essentiality of domestic and care work became visible, in which
while many of us were at home, women, especially racialized and
migrants, circulated through the city of an invisible way to sustain the
world and even so not a single person was regularized in the Kingdom of
Spain, where were the Feminists during the worst moments of the
pandemic? They were not outside of congress demanding the regularization
of all those essential workers.

According to ILO data, today there are 67 million domestic workers in
the world, 80% of them are women, of which 80% correspond to women of
color. Many of these women are organizing globally to demand rights and
not just labor rights. They talk about migration, racism, sexism and
sexist violence. Capital accumulation and global care chains. The
organizations of women domestic and care workers is not something new
(the first union of domestic workers dates from the 30s of the 20th
century and was made up of black women in the USA) and they are possible
because many of them have organizational and political activisms from
their places of origin. They bring with them ancient forms of resistance
that come from centuries of colonial exploitation. Anti-patriarchal and
anti-capitalist practices that I'm afraid many white Feminists would not
recognize as Feminism.

So, can Feminism break boundaries? I think the answer is not for me to
give it to me. I think that perhaps if they move from that place of
privilege where they look down on us with a lot of condescension, I
think that if they listen to us, if they recognize our genealogies and
our contributions to feminism, if they learn from our resistance
strategies but not from an extractivist way, that whitens our speeches
and puts white privilege back in the center, if not from an exchange of
knowledge and knowledge, I believe that if all this happens and it is
recognized that the work to break borders is long, tiring and that Many
of us will lose our lives in it, I think that perhaps then there will be
room for our world projects. Esther Mayoko Ortega recently told me that
the question is whether they will be willing to abolish Feminism.
Nothing better than your words to close this text, are you, compañeras?

https://www.cnt.es/noticias/rompiendo-fronteras/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca