The Untold Story of the Latin Women’s Collective

At Casabe Houses in the New York City neighborhood of El Barrio, the opening lines of the poem “Dedicated to my First World Healing Circle Sisters,” by Sandra Nia Rodríguez, resonated across the room. The mistress of ceremony –Maria Teresa “Mariposa” Fernández– delivered the words with unshakeable confidence, beckoning to the crowd of women, “I miss the ones who patiently waited for the universe to act, and having no answer, took justice in their hands.” She kept a steady rhythm. “I miss the city sisters, the organizer sisters.”

As she concluded the poem, Mariposa shouted, “¡Que viva la mujer!” and the room roared in response, “¡Que viva!” Applause, celebration, and smiles broke out as the members of the Latin Women’s Collective (LWC) reunited for the first time since their founding 48 years ago.

With 60 members and participants at its height, the LWC emerged in an era of anti-colonial struggles and social change across continents.

In the United States, Civil Rights, anti-war and militant movements in the 1960s and 1970s pressured for representation, equality and transformation. The women who formed the LWC in 1975 came out of leftist organizing in New York City, where they were members of political groups such as El Comité, the Young Lords Party, Casa de Las Americas, and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party.

The Collective brought together working-class women who longed for a sisterhood to talk about struggles —both personal and within groups— that they faced. Though many of them were activists, they felt they didn’t have the voice or authority to become leaders. The LWC became a vehicle for developing their own leadership and organizational abilities.

“The beginning [of the LWC] had to do with the work that a few of us had been doing around Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and also the work around sterilization,” said co-founder Lillian Jiménez. While attending conferences in support of Vietnamese women in the early '70s, the early founders began to meet other Latinas interested in organizing around these issues.

Jiménez, Esperanza Martell, and Blanca Vázquez, and others officially launched the collective in 1976 at a large conference where they put out their plans and objectives. “The major thing is that we were anti-imperialist,” shared Martell, “grounded with a real race, class, and gender lens with a focus on Latin American women.”

“What I learned in the Collective was to speak and to stop hiding. That’s a very powerful thing”

Shaped by a range of experiences, from surviving the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to the U.S.-funded sterilization program that targeted Puerto Rican women, LWC members and participants nurtured their capacities through rigorous study, reading, and discussions.

The LWC slogan, “La liberación de la mujer a través de la lucha obrera,” or “Women’s liberation through the struggle of the working class,” affirmed that the freedom of women would only be possible through working class liberation. In comparison to the more visible feminist movements at the time, the LWC saw class and race as integral to the rights of women.

When the LWC first began, its members were guided by a shared identity as revolutionary women, meaning they were about transforming themselves and systems of oppression. The group brought together puertorriqueñas, chicanas, dominicanas, colombianas and more. Together, they saw how working-class women, particularly Latinas, were rarely acknowledged for their work.

Gathering in a circle, members of the LWC sat down at their reunion this past March 12th to discuss their experiences and the impact of the Collective on their lives. The women opened up about the traumas that affected their communities. When Jiménez said her mother had been sterilized, others affirmed that this had also been the case in their families.

These painful experiences often transitioned into action. For example, Vázquez served as an associate producer for the documentary “La Operación,” which exposes how the sterilization campaign eliminated the reproductive rights of one-third of Puerto Rican women.

Vázquez, who was a child during the mass migration of Puerto Ricans in the 1950s, recalled how the LWC gave her the power to speak up. Many children of that generation were subjected to schools that did not offer bilingual education and that were hostile to the “surge” of Puerto Rican kids.

“I was a smart kid who never spoke in class. I felt that because the racism was blatant –it was about ignoring us– I was silent throughout high school,” Vázquez shared. “What I learned in the Collective was to speak and to stop hiding. That’s a very powerful thing. I went from not being able to speak to becoming a teacher.”

Two dominicanas present also shared their struggles of living through a dictatorship followed by U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. Their journey to New York and facing challenges as Latinas led them to join the LWC. “I found women who were supportive of the Cuban revolution and were against the war in Vietnam. I felt identified with [them] – and that there was a working class struggle in this country,” Estela Vázquez explained.

The safe space the LWC created allowed for class critique to be about a compassionate transformation, instead of a shaming session. By emphasizing the practice of criticism versus self-criticism and political education as tools for growth, the Collective focused on the upliftment of Latinas. “The person criticized should not come out of the meeting feeling downcast, despised and totally discouraged,” states a 1976 LWC memo, “but should emerge stronger and clear-minded, with warmth and confidence that the criticism did her good and helped correct her mistakes.”

The LWC facilitated discussions that allowed women to see how systems of oppression worked. “They began to open my eyes about how colonialism affected my family,” Edelmira Ventura said at the gathering. Studying books like Philip S. Foner’s History of the Labor Movement in the United States, or the groundbreaking women’s health classic Our Body, Ourselves, the LWC also empowered women with the knowledge to interpret readings critically and advocate for themselves.

Though they went their separate ways in 1978 over political disagreements and tactics, at the reunion LWC participants were moved by and grateful for its impact on their lives. “We might have been in contact in different configurations,” Blanca Vázquez said, “but all of us in one room, to be able to say what this experience meant to us, it was really something very special.”

To capture the lasting impact of the collective, there are plans to release a book and gather oral histories of members to “send us into the future,” as Martell said. Their compilation of meeting minutes, readings, and documents awaits to be digitized by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. “Someone needs to write this history of these powerful women,” Martell added. “Young people need to hear that history and we’re doing these oral interviews to hold on to these stories.”

As mentors, LWC'ers have influenced younger generations of women. Those present at the reunion understood the important lessons they could tap, with one suggesting the development of a curriculum based on the Collective.

In the LWC archives is a poem by Karen Slotnick for International Working Women’s Day (IWWD) in 1977. The poem captures the moments in which a woman describes the historic 1857 protests in New York that marked a new chapter for women’s rights. “Everyone was marching outside the factory walls. Everyone had been waiting for everyone else and everyone had come.”

As LWC members continue to compile their history for Latina leaders to come, Slotnik’s poem swells with lasting meaning. “She raised her eyes,” the text reads, “and what she saw was the sun and the sun was rising.”

Correction: The original published version of this story stated that Lillian Jiménez was an associate producer of the documentary La Operación. This was corrected to state that Blanca Vázquez was an associate producer.