Women’s Historical and Migratory Struggles: The Case of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico

Abstract

Women’s Studies programs critique systems of power and how such systems define identities based on gender, race, and nationality globally. Although we may claim to live in a contemporary period that has superceded past histories of colonization, the histories of struggle over territories and nations of the Americas still influence the identity constructions of people across the hemisphere. Feminist theory examines how such intertwined histories have shaped and continue to reshape women’s patterns of interconnection and alienation across borders, as well as their identities across races, spaces and nations. I examine how the transnational historical contexts of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico fuel the centrality that women from these nations give to identity as they find themselves and their communities migrating to the United States as a result of economic and political interdependencies. This becomes important when considering the implications of immigration in the United States and the complexities individuals experience when constructing their identities in a new nation. While debated more broadly within the field of women’s studies, I argue that a politics of identity gives strength to marginalized women’s groups by using common experiences as a resource for creating political agency.