Colectiva Feminista en Construcción

Abstract

Abstract Colectiva Feminista en Construcción (La Cole) is a Black feminist political organization that emerged in 2014 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This article discusses the ways La Cole’s public discourse around sexism, racism, and homophobia in the archipelago is articulated through the collective’s presence at marches, demonstrations, and on social media. While core membership is small, La Cole has been able to convene collaborators and supporters to organize against the imposition of neoliberal economic and public policies that negatively impact the most dispossessed populations in Puerto Rico, namely Black, poor, queer, and trans women. La Cole has constructed a transnational intersectional feminist pedagogy as a means of political education both within the organization itself and more broadly in Puerto Rico’s public sphere. The organization’s pedagogical strategies include the rewriting of Christmas songs and plenas, an Afro Puerto Rican musical genre, and their Radical Feminist School, a political education space open to nonmembers. Through these pedagogical interventions La Cole simultaneously calls attention to the ways state and structural gender-based violence and femicides, housing precarity, and austerity measures affect the most marginalized sectors of the archipelago while carving out their identity as a decolonial Black feminist political organization.