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News > Analysis

'Not Nannies or Cooks': Afro-Ecuadorean Women Fight Back

  • Catherine Chala, founding member of the National Coordinator for Black women in Ecuador (Conamune).

    Catherine Chala, founding member of the National Coordinator for Black women in Ecuador (Conamune). | Photo: Facebook / Catherine Chala

Published 6 March 2018
Opinion

Catherine Chala, of the National Coordinator for Black Women in Ecuador, tells teleSUR about racism, sexism and how Black women are fighting back.  

In the Andean nation of Ecuador, Afro-Ecuadorean women are leading the charge to change a society they say discriminates against Black women.

Catherine Chala, founding member of the National Coordinator for Black Women in Ecuador (Conamune), began her activism as a university student tired of seeing Black women banned from jobs and trapped in oversexualized roles.

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"We didn't want to have to work as cooks, washers, nannies, caregivers after graduating as secretaries, teachers or nurses because of discrimination," Chala told teleSUR.

When she was a university student, women who studied to become nurses or accountants could not work in private clinics or banks due to a "good presence" requirement that was effectively used to ban Black women from certain jobs.

She grew up in an environment where most Black women were domestic workers paid below the minimum wage and worked without a contract. This led her to dedicate her life's work to the economic and cultural empowerment of Black women: "Black Ecuadorean women know they can overcome the situation of poverty they are in, that being Black doesn't mean they are inherently poor and dumb and have to endure ill treatment."

Working to improve women's sense of self-worth – recognized as a key factor in their ability to overcome situations of discrimination and violence – took on many forms.  

In the early days of Conamune, Chala used to hit the streets of Quito throwing paint balloons at offensive ads, like a rum ad featuring a naked Black woman "with an exaggerated bottom" along with the caption "Black tail, liquid pleasure."

Today, she works in the Ministry for Social and Economic Inclusion where she focuses on enacting public policies to ensure Afro-Ecuadorean culture is valued, not only by Black people but also by the Mestizo population. She also works to combat school drop-outs and lack of economic and productive opportunities in the community.

For Chala, public policy is key. Discrimination on the basis of sex and race is structural, she argues, and must be addressed as such by society as well as the state.    

Before entering public service, she worked with a church-based NGO to revitalize Black spirituality among youth. "Of course, for the church it was a way of vindicating themselves because in the 1700s they were the main importers of 'pieces from India,' as they called the Africans brought to the Americas," she said.

Her ancestors were among the Africans brought to the country by religious groups. Her first last name, Chala, has African origins, while her second last name, Angulo, is Spanish.

"Unlike plantation owners, religious congregations didn't give their last names to enslaved Africans... so in the last names of the Black people of Ecuador, the names of African tribes and places coexist with Spanish names."

Tracing origins is part of her community's efforts to recover their personal histories and enrich their own identities.

The Conamune was created in 1999 to improve opportunities for Black women through the promotion of productive projects, university access, professionalization and access to jobs.

Among their first achievements was the establishment of seven "casas de la mujer Negra" (Black Woman’s Houses). After that, the organization began linking their struggles to those of the national women’s movement, specifically on the issue of domestic violence, encouraging many of her comrades to enter political life.

In 2003, for the first time in Ecuadorean history, a Black woman ran for the National Assembly and in 2008 Conamune activist Alexandra Ocleswas was elected to Ecuador's National Constituent Assembly, which rewrote the constitution.

Many of the political and economic demands put forward by Afro-Ecuadoreans were reflected in the 2008 constitution, including their recognition as a people with a shared history and culture.

In the constituent process "we entered as Blacks and left as Afro-Ecuadoreans," Chala said, which "recognizes our African heritage and the contributions we've made to Ecuador, both before and after the republic was established."    

The recognition of Afro-Ecuadoreans as a people was accompanied by the "government and state institutions' commitment to engage in a frontal battle against racism and discrimination." 

Their political participation in the constituent process also resulted in Black women taking a leading role at local and national level. "There was a moment when the maximum leaders of the Afro movement were women… and all of this happened as the result of six or seven women getting together in 1997 and saying we must do something, things must change our situation; the situation of our daughters, our friends, our brothers."

For Chala, the constituent process was the first time Afro-Ecuadoreans played a leading role in public matters and in their struggles at an institutional level. "It was not the whites who spoke for us; it was ourselves taking a leading role, writing our texts, our histories," she said.

Since 1999 the Conamune has secured scholarships for Afro-Ecuadoreans in Ecuador's private universities, economic projects with international cooperation funds, and affirmative action clauses to guarantee access to higher education and high-paying jobs.  

But these institutional victories demobilized the Afro-Ecuadorean movement, despite remaining obstacles.

The Conamune has not been legalized. "As women, we decided to organize ourselves horizontally, not in accordance with Ecuadoran legislation which requires a pyramidal structure that is not useful to us because it doesn't allow for real participation."  

Chala also identified new challenges in organizing, like attracting new generations of Black women with different concerns. "We can't continue to say 'Oh, we have to meet to talk about self-esteem because they are in another era, a digital era where they have access to information."

However, she is optimistic and hopes to extend the reach of Conamune, which she estimates some 5,000 women count on. "We must be critical to understand how to widen our scope, how to reach that 90 percent of women who are not involved in organizing."

This is key to confronting discrimination within their homes, their communities, and in Ecuadorean society, to ensure they are not abused by employers, strangers or their own partners.      

"Men don't know how to deal with powerful women, with empowered partners… Strong women, sooner or later, decide to be by themselves because they can't find men who are partners, who encourage them," Chala said: a particularly pressing problem, given that Afro-Ecuadorean women have higher levels of education than Afro-Ecuadorean men and thus higher incomes.

But gender-based violence is just one of the problems Black women face, Chala warns.

In the northern zone of Esmeraldas, a coastal province on the border with Colombia, Afro-Ecuadoreans are affected by industries taking over their land. "First it was loggers, then palm plantations and now money laundering. People come offering a million dollars for Black campesinos to sell their land, and when they refuse, their family is threatened."  

For Black women organized around Conamune, gender is an analytical tool which allows an integral vision of issues: "Gender and race are magnifying glasses, and in every territory Black women see things differently."

Violence against women and racism are problems identified by Black women across the country. To these, Chala adds a lack of identity: "There are assimilation issues, you find women who don't want to identify as Black or Afro-Ecuadorean... I remember one woman argued she had nothing to do with being Black: 'They call me lawyer because I studied law,’ she said."

For Chala, Afro-Ecuadoreans today face more "subtle forms of racism that are difficult to combat in a frontal way."

Perhaps this is the most pressing challenge the community faces now, but she is certain that more organizing is the key to challenging racial and gender-based discrimination. 

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