What are the ingredients of a feminist casserole?
What do we cook in the squares of our neighborhoods, in our homes, on the roadsides, in the heart of our organizations? Who sits down at our table?
We, feminists, ordinary women from all districts, workers, teachers, women, lesbians, transvestites, transgender, bisexual and non-binary people, peasants, migrants, Afro-Argentine, Afro-descendent and indigenous people, conspire against the neoliberalism of W20 businesswomen. We challenge meritocracy and the idea of development of the G20. We reject the idea of labor market inclusion at the mercy of transnational corporations, capital accumulation and financial power.
We say NO.
We do not tolerate the militarization of our territories, the trials, indoctrinations and joint trainings of Latin American military forces under the leadership of the United States of America and G20 hegemonic powers, the installation of Yankee military bases in our territories, the cooperation with intelligence, the exchange and gathering of cyber data to control our societies and guarantee their profits through structural violence.
We do not accept the criminalization of poverty and protest, and the assassination of territorial defenders and campaigners, used with the purpose of intimidating us and quelling our rebellions.
Neither our peoples nor are we the ones who requested their loans and credits. They were requested by lackey governments. We are not willing to live in debt and exhausted, always relying on credit, victims of usurious rents, renting alien lands, living in obscure rooms and precarious homes, chasing the unattainable dream of becoming prominent entrepreneurs, someday, “through persistence and individual effort”, climbing the corporate ladder, alienating ourselves, stepping over each other, losing our roots and our sisters along the way.
With the long-standing memory of our indigenous and native peoples, our black and Afro-descendent ancestors, with the raging and bonding radicalism of transvestites, we know that salvation is not an individual effort, that we will not surrender to their idea of progress nor to the inclusion in this system by settling for crumbs. We know that our power relies on standing up and speaking out loud, with our desirable body, making the road by walking collectively, gathering force against the heteropatriarchy, against racism and the recolonization of our territories, bodies, and wisdom.
Because now is the time.
We have resisted the genocides of our indigenous peoples, the forced transit of enslaved peoples in our continent, the waves of repression against the organized workers’ class, the persecution and criminalization of immigrants, the femicides and hate crimes against lesbians, transgender people, transvestites, and other dissident identities. We have resisted numerous acts of violence against women and LGTBIQ at their homes, workplaces, learning environments and on the streets. We have resisted civic-military dictatorship, the long-standing neoliberal night of the 90s. Through our resistance, we have learned that we are not alone, that we are powerful together and that only collective action can render us free.
We have gathered, countless times, for a communal casserole in a community orchard, in a soup kitchen, to feed our hungry families, when we could no longer provide for them and there was no hope on the horizon.
We knew that all of us, together, could provide all the ingredients for a casserole and guarantee a meal, that it was possible to get food.
Thus, our gatherings challenged capitalist rationalization, it was a rebellion against the leftover position in the labor force that we had been assigned by the system. We gathered for the communal casseroles on the bridges and during roadblocks of the picketing movements. We did not believe them when they said: “it’s every man for himself.” We sowed the seeds of hope, we recognized ourselves in our sisters, we started to interweave insights, supporting each other in hardship, thinking about our big and small problems together.
There, at the communal casserole gatherings, roadblocks, assemblies, feminist learning spaces, we search for answers to the daily acts of violence we suffer, we gain strength, we plan collective strategies for survival, we listen, and we feed ourselves and our children as we can.
In this place, we, cooks and witches, build autonomy.
We are sick of being told how to live, how to think, how to do things, whom and how we must love, and even how to fight. We want the place in this world we are entitled to. We demand our right to make decisions about our bodies, our lives and our presence in this world. Because our wants neither have a place in their ballot boxes, nor in the bureaucrats’ drawers, nor on the hangers of their closets.
Because we would like to tell the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, the Evangelical Churches and all the dogmas that try to control and subdue us with their hideous patriarchal morals, their capitalist rationale and colonial behavior, that we feel like being free, women, transvestites, and lesbians…
We, warriors, crazy and raging women, organize revolutions, we stand in the way of those who are in power, we vent fury in our struggles and we cook plebeian casseroles, with real work, past and present, with the long-standing memory of our ancestors, the here and now of the world we need.
Because, as our anarchist colleagues already said by the end of the XIX century: “Sick of so much crying and misery, sick of the endless and grim picture of our unfortunate children, sick of asking and begging, of being a toy, an object of the pleasures of our despicable exploiters and vile husbands, we have decided to raise our voices in the social concert and demand, we say, our share of pleasures in the banquet of life!”
We, feminists, mobilize against the G20 policies!