Perched on a Parched Hill: Popular Women, Popular Feminism, and the Struggle for Water in Medellín

• Author: Carolina Arango-Vargas
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211013007
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211013007

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 239, Vol. 48 No. 4, July 2021, 69–86

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211013007

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

69

Perched on a Parched Hill

Popular Women, Popular Feminism, and the Struggle for

Water in Medellín

by

Carolina Arango-Vargas

Organized popular women in Medellín, Colombia, have exerted lasting influence on

the city’s women’s movement by centering a gender-class approach to women’s issues and

thus contributing to long-standing forms of popular feminism in Latin America. The work

of the grassroots Red de Mujeres Populares and the nongovernmental organization

Corporación Vamos Mujer in positioning the right to water as a key demand on the city’s

feminist agenda draws upon a legacy of socialist feminisms. These organizations’ praxis

demonstrates that the struggle for water is political and embodies a critique of care work

within the capitalist structure articulated from a gender and class consciousness. Popular

women reclaim their identity as political agents of their own making, underscoring their

active role as women whose lives are defined by political acumen rather than scarcity.

Las mujeres populares organizadas en Medellín, Colombia, han ejercido una influencia

duradera en el movimiento de mujeres de la ciudad al centrar un enfoque de clase y género

en el análisis de las problemáticas de las mujeres, contribuyendo así a la larga tradición

del feminismo popular en Latinoamérica. El trabajo que la organización de base Red de

Mujeres Populares y la organización no gubernamental Corporación Vamos Mujer desar-

rollan en torno a la lucha por establecer, el derecho al agua como una demanda clave en la

agenda feminista de la ciudad, se basa en el legado de los feminismos socialistas. La praxis

de estas organizaciones demuestra que la lucha por el agua es política a la vez que encarna

una crítica al trabajo del cuidado dentro de la estructura capitalista, articulada a partir de

la conciencia de clase y género. Las mujeres populares reclaman su identidad como agentes

políticas de su propia creación, subrayando su papel activo como mujeres cuyas vidas se

definen a partir de la perspicacia política en lugar de la escasez.

Keywords: Women’s movement, Popular feminisms, Care work, Water

Atop the hills that overlook the Valle de Aburrá, perched along steep and

narrow streets, live millions of people in densely populated neighborhoods of

working-class, rural, and economically marginalized communities who settled

Carolina Arango-Vargas is an assistant teaching professor of women’s and gender studies and

anthropology at Drew University. Her research deals with women’s and feminist activism and

political agency among organized urban and rural women in Colombia from a transnational

feminist perspective. This research was funded largely by the Inter-American Foundation

Grassroots Development Fellowship for 2012–2013. The author is grateful to the Corporación

Vamos Mujer and the Red de Mujeres Populares for sharing their time, knowledge, and experi-

ences and especially to Gloria Sánchez, whose generosity made this article possible.

1013007LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211013007LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESArango-Vargas / POPULAR WOMEN AND WATER IN MEDELLÍN

research-article2021

70 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

decades ago in the city of Medellín, Colombia. As in other large Latin American

cities, these settlements—known as comunas1—constitute popular sectors that

have been shaped by the urbanization, forced displacement, and violent con-

flict that characterized the second half of the twentieth century (Maier, 2010;

Moser and McIlwaine, 2004). In the most populous comunas, men and women

have formed a variety of community organizations and, through popular activ-

ism, have fought for change. Even though stories of neighborhood activism

tend to feature a male leadership,2 central to these processes is the political

labor of women—more precisely, of self-identified Mujeres Populares (popular

women) who explicitly name popular feminism as the perspective that informs

their grassroots organizing. By centering the discourses and practices of popu-

lar women in ongoing struggles for access to water as a gendered private and

public issue and endorsing a gender-class approach, this article demonstrates

their importance as contributors to the women’s movement of Medellín and to

popular activism in the landscape of Latin American feminisms.

Organized popular women define themselves as women with an articulated

gender and class consciousness who have fought tooth-and-nail to bring basic

services such as education, health care, urban infrastructure, public services,

and safety to their territorios (villages and neighborhoods) and themselves. The

Latin American concept of territorio reflects a cultural, communal, and social

history that bonds people to a place, shedding light on the relationship between

space, power, and locality. It is born out of the struggles of indigenous, rural,

poor, and Afro-descendant communities like those of the marginalized comu-

nas in Medellín to establish claims to a place (López Sandoval et al., 2017).

The women who at first organized on the basis of a shared background as

women from the popular sectors eventually adopted a feminist stance to con-

ceptualize their lived experiences in these territorios. Explicitly using the term

“popular feminism,” they attend to the gendered consequences of economic

inequality in the domestic sphere, traditionally conceived as the home, while

emphasizing their transformative role in community organizations and the

public sphere of politics.3 Popular women do not conceive of themselves as

recipients of aid from government institutions, development agencies, or non-

governmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they reclaim their identity fully

as political agents of their own making, underscoring their active role as women

whose lives are defined by political acumen rather than scarcity. In doing so,

popular women emphasize their political subjecthood.

This article focuses on the Red de Mujeres Populares (Network of Popular

Women— RMP), a group of women from the popular sectors who began work-

ing in collaboration with a local professional4 feminist organization, the

Corporación Vamos Mujer (CVM), in the early 1990s. I focus on the RMP’s

struggle for access to safe water—one of its key goals since 2000—and analyze

its collective actions with community organizations in marginalized neighbor-

hoods that lack municipal water systems, have only intermittent service, or

depend for access to water on their capacity to pay the bill. In exploring the

political and gendered dimensions of this problem from the point of view of

popular feminists, I demonstrate how the RMP set in motion strategic alliances,

mobilized communities, and organized citywide actions rooted in a feminist

understanding that care work and material needs are linked by the world of