Rebel Girls

Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas

Jessica K. Taft

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814783375
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

From anti-war walkouts to anarchist youth newspapers, rallies against educational privatization, and workshops on fair trade, teenage girls are active participants and leaders in a variety of social movements. Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas illuminates the experiences and perspectives of these uniquely positioned agents of social change. Jessica K. Taft introduces readers to a diverse and vibrant transnational community of teenage girl activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, and Vancouver. Expansive in scope and full of rich details, Taft brings to life the voices of these inspiring activists who are engaged in innovative and effective organizing for global and local social justice, highlighting their important contributions to contemporary social movements and social theory.

Rebel Girls explores how teenage girls construct activist identities, rejecting and redefining girlhood and claiming political authority for youth in the process. Taft examines the girl activists' social movement strategies and collective political practices, detailing their shared commitments to process-based political education, participatory democracy, and hopeful enthusiasm. Ultimately, Rebel Girls has substantial implications for social movements and youth organizations, arguing that adult social movements could learn a great deal from girl activists and making clear the importance of increased collaboration between young people and adults.

1
Introduction
Growing Up and Rising Up

Nenetzin stands in the center of the plaza, her arms painted white, wearing a skeleton mask and a bridal veil. Along with a dozen other young activists all dressed as skeletons, she sings a song about remembering those who have died due to poverty, domestic violence, state repression, and other social and political injustices. It is “El Dia de los Muertos,” the Day of the Dead, and Nenetzin’s Mexican youth activist collective is interweaving tradition with political theater to educate others and build oppositional consciousness. At the end of the singing and dancing, another young skeleton steps forward to inform the audience that this performance was part of the construction of La Otra Campaña, a Zapatista-initiated campaign for building an alternative progressive politics in Mexico.

* * * *

Emma reports on labor issues for an independent, public access television show in Vancouver. She has presented stories on a speech given by anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, a day of mourning for workers who have died on the job, and other “progressive, or working things that are going on around the city.” In addition to being a media activist, Emma also played a key role in the organization of a student rally in support of striking teachers. Emma and some of her pro-labor friends convinced a citywide student organization to take a stand on the issue and coordinated an exuberant display of student solidarity. Taking over a major intersection, the teens played music, danced, had fun, and demonstrated to the city that they wanted the district administration to return to contract negotiations with the teachers’ union.

* * * *

Manuela and I sit at her kitchen table, making pins out of foam, ribbon, and printed logos for tomorrow’s Communist Youth of Venezuela (Juventud Comunista de Venezuela or JCV) concert and cultural event. We talk about Presidents Chavez and Bush, and discuss the future of social movements in Venezuela and the United States. As members of the JCV, Manuela and her comrades see themselves as having an important role in Venezuela’s revolutionary Bolivarian process. They spend most of their time and energy doing political education work with the many young people who are excited about Chavez and the possibilities of his government, but, according to Manuela, do not yet understand all of the economic and social problems and their potential solutions. Chavez speaks openly about socialism, and the JCV is trying to work with youth to mobilize for substantial, “real” socialism, not just a few minor reforms. To do this, they hold study groups, discussing global political economy and reading Marx, Lenin, and Che. And they organize community events, like the upcoming concert, trying to bring youth together to talk about the problems they see around them and to develop their collective knowledge.

* * * *

Pitu, a tiny seventeen-year-old with a pixie haircut and wearing a fluffy pink sweater, takes my hand and leads me around one of Buenos Aires’ most well-known comedores, a new set of social institutions that can be loosely translated as soup kitchens. A cooperative, self-governing, and democratic enterprise that includes a pasta workshop, soup kitchen, photo shop, textile factory, screen-printing operation, and bakery, this comedor provides prepared and raw foods, employment opportunities, and political and social community for its members. Pitu is the youngest member of the center’s youth group, a subsection of the organization where youth participants gather together to talk and learn from each other, and to work on their own projects or assist in the various facets of the organization’s operation.

* * * *

Lisette’s dedication to fighting against environmental racism and for community health and safety finally paid off in the summer of 2001 when a San Francisco Bay Area toxic waste disposal facility, which her youth organization had been trying to shut down for more than eight years, was forced to close. Motivated by her anger at the health problems her community has experienced because of the facility’s lack of concern for the well-being of neighborhoods of poor people of color, Lisette spent countless hours planning and implementing educational events, rallies, and press conferences. She and her peers also documented the company’s violations, went to planning meetings, confronted the regulating agency, and lobbied politicians. As an activist, Lisette has been focused primarily on this one campaign for several years because, she said, “I know everything is connected and messed up, but let me try to just focus on this one thing because, if not, then I just feel like it’s too much.” Now, with the facility closed, she and her group are moving on to new projects, and Lisette is hopeful that she’ll see some major “systemic changes” in her lifetime.

* * * *

These brief stories about five teenage girl activists provide just a glimpse of their vibrant political identities and practices. From the young Zapatistas with the braids and bandanas who climbed the fence at the WTO protests in Cancun to throw flowers at the police to the U.S. high school students designing curriculums to educate their peers about child labor and sweatshops, teenage girls in the Americas are participating in a variety of struggles for social justice. Radical cheerleaders at a high school in Los Angeles, wearing red shirts with black stars, chant against the U.S. war in Iraq and in support of striking workers while doing splits and pyramids.¹ Forty-four juveniles were arrested at the 2004 American Indian Movement march against the celebration of the Columbus Day Parade in Denver, Colorado.² Girls and queer youth are increasingly visible in the boisterous pink blocs that have mobilized at numerous large-scale protests since the initial pink and silver column at the IMF/World Bank protests in Prague in 2000. The MST land occupations in Brazil include whole families, not just adults.³ The YouthPower! program of Desis Rising Up and Moving in New York, Khmer Girls in Action, in Long Beach, California, and other community-based youth groups organize for immigrant rights and against the detention and deportation of community members. Philadelphia students have resisted the privatization of their schools. Teenage women working in export processing zones are forming workers’ organizations. Young sex workers are organizing for their rights to health and safety. Anti-capitalist urban youth are reclaiming buildings, setting up squats, and creating autonomous spaces. Across the United States, youth are fighting for increased spending on education and against the development of more juvenile justice facilities and youth jails.⁴ Teenagers are actively participating in indymedia centers and youth media projects, producing a variety of alternative media and challenging the corporate concentration of television, radio, and print news. And, on March 6, 2003, hundreds of thousands of students walked out of classes around the world to protest the impending U.S. bombing of Iraq.⁵

Within academic and activist circles in the United States, we sometimes get a fleeting impression of the teenage girls who participate in these and other struggles. Before beginning to seek them out for this book, I would see them in a photo of the workers’ meeting outside the export-processing zone, in an independently produced video about a protest at a trade summit, in a brief mention by an older activist of some “cool youth” they know, across the circle at a meeting, or chanting and dancing in the streets. But finding documentation of their stories, their organizations, and their words is not easy; they are rarely considered and written about as significant political actors. They appear, but they do not speak. This book aims to address this silence and to illuminate the experiences and perspectives of these uniquely positioned agents of social change through the analysis of indepth interviews and participant observation with progressive and Left-leaning girl activists in five different cities in the Americas.⁶

Girls’ activism is an extremely underexplored scholarly topic, largely invisible in the academic literatures on girlhood and on social movements. Research in the growing field of girls’ studies has focused primarily on girls’ self-esteem and psychology, sexuality and sexual behavior, friendships, school and peer relationships, media consumption, production and cultural practices, and issues of growing up and constructing identities in various contexts.⁷ These works often describe girls’ acts of resistance to dominant gender norms, or address girls’ consumption of commodified versions of feminism, but very few have made girls’ politics or political identities the central focus of study.⁸ Additionally, the volumes on feminist generations and the relationship between young women and feminism have largely ignored the specific experiences of teenage girls, focusing more on college-aged women.⁹ Indeed, the invoking of “girl” in these writings generally occurs in comments upon how young women do or do not embrace this identity and how this either empowers or diminishes them.¹⁰ Thus, actual teenage girls are virtually erased from the discussion as talk about “girls” in this context refers primarily to a debate about young women and their “girly” feminism (or post-feminism). This means that the stories of girls like those in this study, girls who are involved in a multitude of political struggles, are left out of these debates due to the elision of the terms “girl” and “young woman.”

A similar situation exists in the literature on youth movements. Studies of the student and youth activism of the 1960s and beyond have not often addressed the specific experiences of high school and middle school students, focusing primarily on college and university-based movements.¹¹ In studies of white student movements, youth has been collapsed into one category, with college students representing all young people, a situation that contains both age and class biases. Studies of the Chicano movement and the African American civil rights movement more frequently acknowledge the presence of younger activists, but the consciousness and experiences of these younger activists has not often been the focus of study and analysis.¹² Social movement scholars, despite having noted the impact of race, class, gender, and generation on the activist experience,¹³ have generally not studied teenagers. The dynamics of age and ageism, the impact of being below the age of legal majority, the role of teens in social movements, and the characteristics of young people’s activism are all not yet a substantial part of the literature in this field.¹⁴ Girl activists’ ideas, stories, and theoretical contributions thus remain largely hidden from view. They continue to appear in both the public and academic domain only as occasional images—as visual objects rather than as intelligent and intelligible political subjects.

In contrast to girls’ absence from the literature on social movements in the Americas, they are figures of central importance to contemporary processes and discourses of globalization and global citizenship. Teenage girls and young women in the Global South are a major source of labor for the global economy. As structural adjustment programs and the shift to exportoriented economies erode subsistence economies and thus displace small farmers and producers, families are forced into greater participation in market economies, either formal or informal, and children and youth play an important role in this income generation.¹⁵ Young women and girls frequently leave the rural areas for work in the cities or export processing zones (EPZs) so that they can send money to support their families.¹⁶ Hired for their supposedly “nimble fingers” and assumed passivity, they make up a significant portion of the labor force in most of these zones, in maquiladoras, and in agro-business greenhouses.¹⁷ According to the AFL-CIO, 90 percent of the 27 million workers in EPZs are women, most of them between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.¹⁸ An International Labor Organization document reports that nearly 2 million girls in Latin America work as domestic laborers.¹⁹ Teenage girls also labor for the global tourist industry in a variety of locations. They sell trinkets and souvenirs in the informal economy,²⁰ are sex workers,²¹ and work as maids and servers in hotels and restaurants.

Meanwhile, in the Global North, business magazines identify the importance of teenage and “tween” girl consumption.²² Teenage girls represent the most highly sought after market segment in the United States,²³ and a major marketing research company reports that “the current generation of teenage girls has tremendous buying power.”²⁴ Teenage and young women’s clothing has more fashion seasons than any other category of clothing, with stores aimed at this market changing their inventory for as many as eighteen fashion seasons. Girls’ studies scholar Anita Harris has persuasively argued that “it is primarily as consumer citizens that youth are offered a place in contemporary social life, and it is girls above all who are held up as the exemplars of this new citizenship.”²⁵ Consumption and participation in the global marketplace are central features of contemporary images of idealized girlhood.²⁶ The image of the girl is frequently deployed as a model for the “appropriate ways to embrace and manage the political, economic, and social conditions of contemporary societies,” and an indicator of the supposed potential benefits of global capitalism.²⁷

In addition to being central to the economic processes of globalization, girls—and youth in general—are also being targeted by a wide variety of social programs designed to encourage particular forms of global citizenship. Receiving significant money from governments and numerous private foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Kellogg Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the William T. Grant Foundation, youth civic engagement programs are a widespread and growing part of civil society and the field of nonprofit organizations. The heavy investment in such programs indicates the political, and not just the economic, importance of teenagers, both male and female. Although most civic engagement programs are not gender specific, there are some significant indicators of widespread interest in girls’ empowerment and civic identities, a theme developed in the following chapter. Empowered girls are not just an ideal for other girls to model themselves after but are also models for contemporary citizenship more broadly. Girlhood is not an irrelevant social category, but one that is important to global capital and global citizenship, and, therefore, to our understandings of political resistance and social movements in the Americas. According to the transnational theorist Chandra Mohanty, “it is especially on the bodies and lives of women and girls from the Third World/South—the Two-Thirds World—that global capitalism writes its script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anti-capitalist resistance.”²⁸ The centrality of girlhood to the global economy and to global civil society provides a theoretically rich reason for looking at the political identities and practices of teenage girl activists.

Identities, Cultures, and Strategies

Progressive teenage girl activists in the Americas, despite their numerous differences of national and local context, of ideology, and of biography, have far more in common with one another than we might expect. They make surprisingly similar identity claims, asserting many shared understandings of what it means to be a girl, to be a youth, and to be an activist. They also make quite similar strategic choices in their movement groups, continually committing their organizational and individual time and energy to ongoing political education, to building egalitarian activist communities, and to the construction of “positive” and hopeful feelings, messages, and projects. These three strategic clusters—the politics of learning, of participation, and of hope—emerged in all of my research sites.

Intrigued by the surprising pattern of strategic tendencies within girls’ activism, I follow the suggestion of prominent social movement scholar James Jasper that movement researchers study how and why movements make the strategic choices they do.²⁹ Jasper suggests that strategic choices are not merely rational decisions made to further interests, but are deeply embedded in cultural and institutional contexts. Symbolic meanings permeate strategic action, and Jasper therefore calls on cultural sociologists to “specify concretely where they saw meanings and what effects those meanings had.”³⁰ Preceding Jasper’s cultural approach to strategic action in movements by nearly twenty years, Ann Swidler has also suggested a theoretical model for understanding the messy relationship between culture and strategic action. Swidler treats culture as a “tool kit of symbols, stories, rituals, and worldviews, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems.”³¹ And, like Jasper, Swidler views strategy not as a necessarily conscious plan, but as “a general way of organizing action.” Swidler also notes that in the ...