Brainstorm Week 8 - Sarah Yang

The grassroots feminista movement draws from the past and looks towards the future. A struggle that the movement has is the constant need to correct the colonial and capitalist impact against their practices and goals. While Ecuador’s new Constitution is much better than many other places, in that it recognizes that “nature ‘has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution”, the feminista movement still sees improvements that can be made (Revkin). The grassroots feminista movement is connected to the practice of resilience in la pachamama by combating the legacies of colonial domination and Western capitalism through remembering and practicing indigenous practices and fighting for more rights for their communities and land. According to Catherine Walsh in Afro and Indigenous Life, there is a shift happening “where the principles and base of struggle and transformation are no longer simply about identity, access, recognition, or rights, but about the perspectives of knowledge that have to do with the model and logic of LIFE itself” (51). Much like the concepts of convivencia and Chicanxfuturism, the grassroots feminista movement finds its soul in the community and fighting for a better life. As Walsh states, “the hope for and the making of a new society, able and willing to confront colonial legacies and patterns of power… are not in governments or politically elected officials, nor probably in the State itself, but instead in the communities, movements, and peoples” (66).