Community of Struggle: Gender, Violence, and Resistance on the U.S./Mexico Border

Abstract

Using 10 women's narratives, participant observation, archival research, and a focus group, this article analyzes women's social activism in a settler community in northern Mexico near the border. I argue that women's activism and emerging political consciousness provides a lens through which women critique structural violence and intimate partner violence and that ultimately provides new women-centered subjectivities. This article contributes to gender and social movements literature by examining the generation of a political consciousness engendered from women's grounded experience of living on the U.S./Mexico border. Furthermore, despite the unique sociopolitical conditions of the border, this article demonstrates that border residents have the agency to challenge, and more importantly, change their situation.