A proponent of feminist struggle in the world, International Women’s Day is one of the spaces where Black women are commonly excluded, according to some Afro-Latin American feminist leaders, which has ignited the need to Blacken the agendas for March 8. This effort was a necessary development in the fight against sexual violence, racism, sexism, LBT phobia and all other forms of violence which, when intersected, particularly affect the lives of Black women.

“As Black feminism gains visibility and is being refined, and we understand that hegemonic feminism does not account for our experiences, we begin a process that involves understanding, as political subjects, how we organize our advancement in society,” says Valdecir Nascimento, founder of Odara-Black Women’s Institute in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.

This positioning is planted in fertile soil elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, demonstrating a certain alignment of Black women in the Diaspora confronting patriarchal racism.

Mireya Peart is president of Voces de Mujeres Afrodescendientes en Panamá (VOMAP), a grantee partner of VidaAfrolatina. “On March 8, we will march together in alliance with different organizations, highlighting the different oppressions that Black women face in Panama,” she says.

An important event that consecrates the articulation of Black feminism in the region is the meeting of Black Latin American and Caribbean women which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1992. Black feminism began to gain new contours and establish itself in the region, warning that it would no longer accept Black women’s exclusion from socio-political debate.

“This has made it possible to articulate common efforts in the field of diversity at the transnational level,” says Peart, also the Central America subregion coordinator of the Red de Mujeres Afrolatinoamericanas, Afrocaribeñas y de la Diáspora (RMAAD), an organization she helped found as a result of the 1992 meeting.

According to a 2020 study conducted by UN Women and the UN Development Program, Panama does a worse job of upholding women’s rights than any other in Latin America. A 2022 UN Population Fund study documents that Black women experience an even greater dearth of rights than other Panamanian women.

Of the Afro-Panamanian women who participated in the survey, 79.4% said they felt discriminated against throughout their lives; 61% said they did not have access to positions in their work environments due to racism and sexism; and 41.1% said they had been harassed because of their hair in settings such as schools.

Throughout the continent, the picture is no different. A 2019 UNDP report identified Latin America as the region with the highest income inequality of the world, primarily affecting women and historically vulnerable groups, with race as being a determining factor.

From the perspective of Bolivian feminist Paola Yañez Inofuentes, general coordinator of RMAAD, the Black women’s movement in Latin America and the Caribbean is going through a beautiful phase, with the emergence of several Black feminist and decolonial collectives. As a result, there are different positions and expressions of International Women’s Day in the region.

“I have seen how every year there are more Black women who join the [International Women’s Day] march,” says the La Paz-based activist. “But we are not part of the collective construction and discussions of the feminists who call for it.”

In Brazil, Black women’s movements have sought to infuse their agendas into International Women’s Day. As it is an important month for the Black movement, they have also articulated in favor of a collective agenda that encompasses all the important dates for movements in the third month of the year. Among them is March 21, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

“As we seek information about our history, we come to understand that we are not in a position to celebrate March 8 exclusively,” says Nascimento, like Peart, a co-founder of RMAAD. “This month, for example, we have the 21st, which is an extremely important date for South Africa and more than that, it is also a fight against all related forms of intolerance when it comes to race.”

“March 8, for us, cannot be bigger than the 21st.”

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