Q&A with Cynthia Orozco about Mexican American Civil Rights Activist Adela Sloss-Vento

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901–1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last

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presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento’s achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader. 

Cynthia E. Orozco's Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist is the first comprehensive biography of a formidable civil rights activist and feminist whose grassroots organizing in Texas made her an influential voice in the fight for equal rights for Mexican Americans.

Give us the elevator pitch for your research and the resulting book.

Adela Sloss-Vento was one of the most important Latina civil rights activists of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the rise of the Mexican American civil rights movement before 1960 and the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She operated independently in predominantly male environments: civil rights activism; politics; and, as an essayist, public-affairs journalism. Even though she lacked a college education, lived in rural South Texas, was married with two children, and worked as a jail matron, she left an unprecedented array of writings in English and Spanish. She even wrote the presidents of the United States and Mexico offering advice. She was unique.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

I met Adela Sloss-Vento in 1978, when she was seventy-five and I was college sophomore conducting research on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the oldest and most important Latino civil rights organization in the nation. She had written a book on Alonso Perales, its founder and her co-activist. Sloss-Vento helped me by sharing her archives, which dated back to 1927. At the time, she did not mention the central role she herself had played in the Mexican American civil rights movement and even the Chicano movement. Thirty-three years later, I saw some of her writings in the Perales archive and realized how important she had been.

What lessons can activists learn from Adela Sloss-Vento’s work in grassroots organizing in Texas?

While Sloss-Vento’s efforts toward racial desegregation, women’s rights, labor justice, and immigrant rights did not result in any change in state or federal legislation, she provided a voice for all these interests during the era of Jim Crow/Juan Crow and before the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. With every op-ed, letter to the editor, or letter to an official, she made a political statement—a statement few other Mexican American women were making. Her tenacity is most impressive.

How did Sloss-Vento advance her progressive views rhetorically and how was her voice unique and impactful?

Sloss-Vento never studied government, social sciences, or literature at a university; as a public intellectual, she appealed to morality and Christianity. She believed in democracy and justice, even criticizing European fascism during World War II and calling for true pan-Americanism for Latinos and Latin America.

In what ways did some of the long-forgotten archives you consulted in your research challenge outdated scholarly trends?

There is not enough research on “organic” public intellectuals, those who never received college degrees. Before the internet, to be a public intellectual activist meant really having something valuable to say and saying it repeatedly. Sloss-Vento reminds us that sometimes we are surprised by those whom society underestimates—in this case, Mexican American women.

Cynthia E. Orozco is a professor of history and humanities at Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement and coeditor of Mexican Americans in Texas History.

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Q&A with Rachel Elfenbein on Gender and Labor in Bolivarian Venezuela

Rachel Elfenbein's Engendering Revolution: Women, Unpaid Labor, and Maternalism in Bolivarian Venezuela is the first in-depth study of the overlooked yet pivotal role played by poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor, maternal gender role, and organization in propelling and sustaining Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. It demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution during Chávez’s presidency cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations.

We asked Dr. Elfenbein a few questions about her book. Engendering Revolution is out now.

Describe your research and the resulting book. 

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In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark constitutional provision formed part of the larger Bolivarian state transformation project aiming to construct a new social contract between the state and society by expanding poor and working class—or popular-sector—participation and inclusion. This new social contract privileged popular participation in community service delivery and political mobilization. Because of their primary responsibility for household and community care work, popular women became key to this contract. The Bolivarian government recognized their centrality, asserting that the revolution had “a woman’s face.” In other words, the government was aware that there was no revolution without popular women’s participation.

My book brings to light a crucial tension at the heart of the Bolivarian revolution during Hugo Chávez’s presidency: state recognition of the centrality of poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor and maternal gender role to the revolutionary process rendered them vulnerable to state appropriation. To paraphrase one feminist activist, the state wanted popular women’s work, but not their power.

State recognition of the importance of popular women’s unpaid labor to national development created new opportunities for popular women’s organizing and their articulations with the state. The state instituted several programs that recognized some popular women’s unpaid labor, lightened and/or socialized their care burdens, and improved their and their families’ welfare.

Women's meeting with President Chávez, Caracas, 2012

Yet the Bolivarian government included popular women by drawing on the extant hegemonic gender role of women as mothers and resignifying it in service of the revolution, producing a revolutionary maternalism. While honoring popular women, the government’s revolutionary maternalist approach relied on and deepened the gendered division of labor. The government expected popular women to be both mobilized and contained for what it saw as the revolution’s broader interests.

My book shows that during Chávez’s tenure, the Bolivarian state forestalled initiatives to legislate homemakers’ social security, and many homemakers could not access it. I contend that popular women performed much of the unpaid social and political labor necessary to build and sustain the revolution, even as many of them remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

My argument is developed by combining field research on three understudied areas of Bolivarian Venezuela: 1) the legal codification of women’s labor rights; 2) political mobilization around those rights; and 3) the lived experiences of women in the popular sectors. It is built from one and a half years of qualitative research with popular women, feminist analysts and organizations, social security analysts, state archives, and state women’s leaders and institutions in different geographic regions of Venezuela.

How did you get interested in the subject of your book?

My interest in this subject began far from Venezuela, when I was living and doing work around gender violence, labor, HIV/AIDS, and public health in southern Africa. I witnessed how poor and working-class women’s unpaid labor was vital to household and community survival in the face of structural unemployment, the HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis pandemics, and neoliberal state restructuring. In community after community, many poor women were organizing and doing so much of the necessary care work that held communities together. Yet a lot of that work went unrecognized and unpaid, and left the workers who carried it out themselves vulnerable to poverty, disease, and gender violence. I became interested in institutional mechanisms to recognize such work and socially protect the workers who carry it out as a means to mitigate their vulnerability. And that is when I heard of Article 88 in Venezuela’s 1999 Constitution, which recognized the value of unpaid housework for society and entitled homemakers to social security. I wanted to find out what Article 88 meant for the poor and working-class women in Venezuela largely carrying out unpaid labor.

How was the Bolivarian government able to leverage poor and working class women’s political participation during Chávez’s presidency?

The Bolivarian government’s approach to poor and working-class women’s political participation was not uniform. That said, the government was populated by leaders who knew that popular women, their labor, and their organization by and large sustained the revolution. The government knew that women voted more than men, that women mobilized politically at grassroots levels more than men, and that women organized more than men to meet community welfare needs. As government officials often asserted, “the revolution ha[d] a woman’s face.” Because of this awareness, the Bolivarian government progressively created a range of popular women’s organizations through which it incorporated thousands of women across Venezuela into the revolutionary process. Many of these new state-directed women’s organizations provided social and economic assistance to popular women and their families as well as opportunities to engage with the state, other women, and their communities in new ways. Yet these new organizations rendered popular women’s unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to clientelistic use by the state. Popular women were more vulnerable to state authorities’ political direction and manipulation when they depended on the state for resources, like cash transfers, because the state could more easily control them, their organization, and their mobilization. It’s important to note that these clientelistic exchanges were not about traditional vote buying, as most popular women already supported the Bolivarian government. This was their process, a process that they helped to build and in which they saw themselves represented by Chávez and the revolution more broadly. Rather, the clientelistic exchanges were for popular women’s continuous political organization in support of the Bolivarian government and its interests.

At the same time, the broader political context of intense and constant political polarization hampered popular women’s organizing for their own rights and power. Many popular women—whether or not they were in state-led organizations—felt that they must unify to defend the government in the face of ongoing domestic and international opposition threats.

International Women’s Day parade, Coro, Falcón, 2012

Describe the broad tenets of the Latin American Left’s promotion of popular power and social justice. 

The Left came to national power in the majority of Latin America at the beginning of this century by recognizing popular and social movement demands to redress long-standing inequalities exacerbated by neoliberalism. The institutional Latin American Left did not promote a unified social justice program throughout the region; it varied nationally and sub-nationally. However, across the region, the Left prioritized redressing inequalities by reversing (some) neoliberal policies and reintroducing states’ progressive interventionist roles in markets and societies. Central to such interventions were expanded social spending and social protection programs. Yet the Left largely relied on a sustained primary commodity boom, and extractive industries in particular, to finance its pro-poor policies. And it largely relied on poor women’s unpaid labor to sustain its expanded social policies, which my book underscores in the case of Bolivarian Venezuela. This is why in Venezuela during Chávez’s tenure, poverty was massively reduced but the gendered burden of poverty did not change: women continued to bear it disproportionately. In other words, Bolivarian Venezuela’s and much of the Latin American Left’s reliance on natural resource extraction enabled large-scale social redistribution, yet Venezuela and most of the Latin American Left did not commit to large-scale social redistribution of reproductive labor.

The institutional Latin American Left also sought to politically incorporate groups historically excluded from liberal democratic institutions and constitution- and policy-making processes, such as the popular sectors, women, and indigenous peoples. A number of countries governed by the Left, such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, rewrote their constitutions, enshrining new rights for previously excluded social groups, such as homemakers’ right to social security in Venezuela. In most countries governed by the Left, redressing political inequalities included the creation of new institutions for participatory democracy. In Bolivarian Venezuela, the government instituted a number of new participatory democratic mechanisms in order to promote popular power.

What context might be missing from current coverage of Venezuela’s instability and how might that affect women and families?

Broadly speaking, current coverage in the Global North of Venezuela’s crisis tends not to situate it within the broader geopolitical and historical context shaping it. Specifically, much coverage of the Venezuelan crisis tends not to note how US sanctions and a US-led oil embargo have crippled the Venezuelan economy. Venezuela historically has been, and remains, heavily reliant on the oil industry for foreign currency. The Bolivarian government inherited an extractive economy, and despite its aspirations and initiatives to sustainably diversify the economy, Venezuela has remained a petro-state, heavily dependent on importation of essential goods. The Bolivarian government renationalized the oil industry, and has since used oil revenues to fund basic public services—like healthcare, housing, and subsidized food—for many people and communities throughout Venezuela. Currently, with very limited public oil revenues, the Bolivarian government is struggling to guarantee basic welfare. This is not to deny the domestic factors shaping the economic, social, and political crisis in Venezuela; rather, it is to highlight that the US-led intervention has severely compounded the mutually reinforcing crises in the country.

The current coverage of Venezuela’s crisis has rightly highlighted how it has been devastating for poor and working people in Venezuela. Yet it has largely ignored how the crisis itself is gendered; that is, how it affects poor and working-class people differently based on their gender and their positioning within the gendered division of labor. Research from past crises in Venezuela and many other countries has shown how poor women tend to bear much of the burden, because of the gendered division of labor, gender inequalities in the public and private spheres, and gender roles that charge them with the bulk of household reproduction responsibilities. In times of crisis, poor women tend to have to do more work with fewer resources in order to ensure their households’ survival. My book reveals that the Bolivarian revolution during Chávez’s tenure did not transform the gendered division of labor; it reinforced it, and in many cases, deepened it. The revolution preserved the normative underpinning of maternal altruism, while resignifying it as revolutionary. Because of the lack of transformation of the gendered division of labor in Venezuela, poor women, their maternal gender role, and their unpaid labor continue to be essential to ensuring households’ and communities’ subsistence during this crisis, especially as the state is no longer capable of meeting many welfare needs. And much of this labor that is so crucial to weathering the crisis remains invisible.

An independent scholar, Rachel Elfenbein holds a PhD in sociology from Simon Fraser University and was a Fulbright scholar to Venezuela. She was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s 2018 Helen Safa Award for the research featured in Engendering Revolution. She works as an educator, researcher, facilitator, and counselor with civil society organizations in North America and southern Africa.

www.utexaspress.com

Queer Brown Voices for Pride Month

During the opening reception for the Association of American University Presses's 2016 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Executive Director Peter Berkery delivered some remarks on the tragic shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. After reading an excerpt from a collection of poems by Reinaldo Arenas published by the University of Florida Press, Peter said these words:

University presses play an essential role in the care and feeding of civil society by cultivating and publishing books like this one, works that engage unflinchingly with serious issues like the hateful and persistent persecution of gay and transgender people and the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.

Recognizing the overwhelming impotence of moments of silence, the last few awful days have led many of us to ask ourselves “What can I do to fight the ignorance, the hatred, the violence?”

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Most of the victims of the Orlando massacre were Latina/o. Statistically, LGBT people of color are more likely to be targets of violence than whites. Histories of LGBT activism often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or they ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history.

Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

We are excerpting a portion of Salvador Vidal-Ortiz's introduction here. Vidal-Ortiz is an associate professor of sociology at American University, where he also teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

Brown Writing Queer: A Composite of Latina/o LGBT Activism

By Salvador Vidal-Ortiz

One Of Many Beginnings And Many Voices

A pink map of the Americas upside down—that was the first visible sign for me that a Latina/o LGBT/queer presence in the United States was strengthening. The year was 1993, and many of us attended the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. That map was a T-shirt from the Latino Caucus of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). In 1993 as we arrived in Washington, D.C., for a third national march, there was already a strong Latina/o queer presence throughout the United States, represented by organizations such as the D.C. Metropolitan Area Coalition of Latino Lesbians and Gays in Washington, D.C.; Ellas en Acción, Asociación Gay Unida Impactando Latinos/Latinas A Superarse, and Proyecto Contra SIDA Por Vida in San Francisco; Las Buenas Amigas (itself derived from Salsa Soul Sisters, a women of color group) in New York, as well as other groups being formalized there, like Latino Gay Men of New York and Latinas and Latinos de Ambiente New York; and the Austin Latina/o Lesbian and Gay Organization, Gay and Lesbian Coalition de Dallas, and the Gay Chicano Caucus (eventually becoming Gay and Lesbian Hispanics Unidos of Houston) in Texas. Other organizations existed in Puerto Rico, groups such as Colectivo de Concientización Gay (later Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas), Coalición Orgullo Arcoiris, and Coalición Puertorriqueña de Lesbianas y Homosexuales. By 1993 the first nationwide organization, the National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGÓ), founded in 1988, had begun to offer services, in large part due to health funding provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A large presence of Brown queers who had been visible since the 1970s in their own cities, regions, and states were now, between the second and third “gay and lesbian” marches, becoming more established and visible at the national level. Brown was being written into queer in a slow but steady manner. Yet both Brown and queer still functioned as shameless markers that signaled outsiderness to heteronormativity and whiteness, as I will discuss later on.

As a member of ACT UP Puerto Rico, I was also at the march to address issues of access to treatment for those infected with HIV and, equally important for me and my fellow ACT UP members, to address HIV-related discrimination and to advocate for more prevention and education funds. Walking on the National Mall, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt was displayed, we could see the countless names—and recognize friends and lovers and family members—of those lost to AIDS because of homophobia, inadequate treatment, and ignorance. While queer Latinas/os, as a movement, weren’t in decline, we were nevertheless affected by HIV/AIDS—and little to nothing was being done then. Just as Brown was becoming visible and organized, the impact of AIDS in our lives was both prompting the establishment of organizations and movements while also taking many of our Latina/o brothers and sisters from us.