Daenerys, the White Feminist
In the Fall of 2015, I took a course entitled Latin America in 21 st Century taught by Dr. Victoria Cummins. This class essentially worked as a survey course of Latin America though it did (as its name suggests) focus particularly on more modern issues including political, racial, and gendered issues. We read an autobiography Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines for the course by Domitila Barrios de Chungara, the wife of a Bolivian tin miner. The focus of the story was on her experiences as a working class, miner’s wife in Bolivia who organized women in the mining community around her while dealing with capitalist exploitation of the mines. Of all the stories which we read, one which stuck out to me was when she discussed the International Women’s Year Conference in 1975. Here, she was confronted with just how different the issues she dealt with were from what others were dealing with and she felt she very clearly did not belong. What was an instance in...