We have been told that the feminist movement in Colombia was born out of the fight for women’s suffrage. We have also been told that feminism in our country evolved based on the “waves” that emerged in the global north. But what would happen if we questioned these stories, imported from other places and other experiences? What if we thought of feminism as the struggles by women in our territory in response to the multiple oppressions against women, small farmers, indigenous people, black people, and workers since the colonial era?
And what if we did this by listening to what social movements and some currents of grassroots feminism in Colombia have been telling us for decades: by recognizing Juana Julia Guzman, an Afro-indigenous woman active in the Caribbean coast region of Colombia in the 1920s, as a pioneer of our feminist struggles. A pioneer who was not a laundress or a domestic worker, yet fought for the rights of laundresses and domestic workers; who was not subject to the matrícula—a kind of debt slavery—yet fought to abolish it; and who was not a farmer, yet fought for small farmers’ right to land.
