Finding Feminism through Faith: Casa Yela, Popular Feminism, and the Women-Church Movement in Chile

• Author: Hillary Hiner
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211013009
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211013009

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 240, Vol. 48 No. 5, September 2021, 59–74

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211013009

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

59

Finding Feminism through Faith

Casa Yela, Popular Feminism, and the Women-Church

Movement in Chile

by

Hillary Hiner

Among the popular feminist projects of the dictatorship period in Chile was the Yela

group in Talca, made up of pobladoras (women shantytown residents) and two Maryknoll

sisters. Of particular interest is the manner in which this group’s popular feminism and

antiviolence work during the 1980s was shaped by the women-church movement and

feminist theology related to patriarchy, violence against women, and women’s collective

resistance strategies. Over the long term, religious elements were gradually excluded from

Casa Yela’s antiviolence work in favor of more secular feminist interpretations.

Entre los proyectos feministas populares durante la época de la dictadura en Chile se

encuentra la presencia del grupo Yela de Talca, formado por pobladoras (mujeres residentes

de poblaciones) y dos hermanas Maryknoll. De particular interés es la forma en que el

feminismo popular y antiviolencia de este grupo durante la década de 1980 se moldeó a

partir del movimiento mujer-iglesia y la teología feminista relacionada con el patriarcado,

la violencia contra las mujeres y las estrategias de resistencia colectiva de mujeres. A largo

plazo, los elementos religiosos fueron gradualmente excluidos del trabajo antiviolencia de

Casa Yela en favor de interpretaciones feministas más seculares.

Keywords: Popular feminism, Pobladoras, Gender violence, Feminist theology

The year 2018 was a watershed in Chile for a number of reasons. On the one

hand, there were the massive feminist student protests termed the “feminist May”

or the “feminist tsunami” that swept over the majority of Chilean universities. On

the other hand, after Pope Francis received a lackluster reception in Santiago in

January 2018, the media began to link well-publicized child-sex-abuse scandals in

the Catholic Church to the Chilean Church’s rapid decline. What these two 2018

developments share is intertwined histories of gender and sexual violence, insti-

tutional and societal silencing, and increased distancing from the Church. In

recent decades the Chilean feminist movement has highlighted the importance of

Hillary Carroll Hiner is a feminist historian, an associate professor at the Universidad Diego

Portales in Santiago, Chile, and the author of Violencia de género, pobladoras y feminismo popular:

Casa Yela, Talca, 1964–2010 (2019). She thanks the Yela women and, especially, Elena Valenzuela

and Leonarda Gutiérrez for their compromiso and enthusiasm in working with her on this project

and the editors of this issue, Nathalie Lebon and Janet Conway, for their insightful comments and

suggestions. Finally, in this time of uncertainty and difficulty due to COVID-19, she also thanks

her family, especially her mother and sister, for their support and help, especially with regard to

child care for her daughter.

1013009LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211013009Latin American PerspectivesHiner / Finding Feminism Through Faith

research-article2021

60 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

secularism and the effective separation of church and state. Interestingly, the fem-

inist groups that are most likely to reference spirituality are Afro-Chilean and

indigenous women’s groups that employ the popular religiosity of syncretic faiths

or the deities and beliefs that belong to the African diaspora and to particular local

indigenous groups, of which Chile has many.1

The formation in the 1980s of the Yela group in Talca—the group that later

founded one of the first battered-women’s shelters in Chile, Casa Yela—is inter-

esting in this context. Talca is located in the fertile Central Valley about three

and a half hours south of Santiago by car and according to the 1982 Chilean

census had 128,544 habitants (by 2017 this had risen to 220,357). Most Yela

women had become politicized through land occupations and local organizing

in the 1970s. Organizing related to survival during the 1980s also took place

through work with two Maryknoll sisters in faith-based activities such as pre-

paring children for communion, feeding the community (ollas comunes), and

helping the elderly. From there, following new tendencies in feminist theology

and the women-church movement, the sisters and the Yela women began to

work on violence against women in their community from a faith-based per-

spective.

In Latin America there is a long history of linkages between popular educa-

tion and popular religiosity, but in the case of the Yela group it was feminist

theology and not liberation theology that was more influential. As the years

passed, the Yela group became more secularly feminist in orientation, but dur-

ing the 1980s struggles against gender violence involved a potent mix of popu-

lar feminism and popular Catholic religiosity. This intriguing and complex

phenomenon should be studied more closely now that fundamentalist Neo-

Pentecostal evangelical churches and far-right political parties have virtually

monopolized discussions of faith, the spiritual, and Christian values in current

Latin American political discourse.

The Theory and PracTice of PoPular feminism in chile

Maria Stella Toro’s work as both a feminist historian and a member of the

popular feminist groups ReSueltas Feministas Populares and Educación Popular

en Salud is important for our understanding of popular feminist praxis and the-

ory in that it continually crosses the activist/academic divide and reminds us of

the importance of popular feminists in the construction of methodology and

theory relevant to Chilean and Latin American feminist history (Calvin and Toro,

2003; Toro, 1997; 2018a; 2018b): “The sexist, racist, and classist society in which

we live has established hierarchies in our ways of knowing, validating certain

knowledge over others and validating certain subjects over others as fonts of

knowledge. Feminism—particularly, feminist popular education—breaks down

these barriers, since it is based on the premise that we all have knowledge” (Toro,

2018b).2 The Argentine popular feminist Claudia Korol (2016: 16) defines popular

feminism as follows: “Popular feminisms try to understand how to take apart the

violence of colonial and patriarchal capitalism. . . . These are feminisms that do

and defend, that care for and criticize, that are part of but also question socialist

and antipatriarchal revolutions.”3