Latinx Caucus

We Know The Best Route For Change Is To Empower Our Communities...

#Solidarity #Intersectionality #Unity

...And Uplift Communities By Providing Resources

• Activist Wellbeing
• DACA Assistance
• DACA renewal form (*renewals only)
• Financial Aid for Students
• Food Assistance
• Help with Bills
• Immigration Legal Resource Center
• National TPS Alliance
• Pro Bono Lawyers
• Social Security Questions
• Tenant's Rights
• Unemployment Help
• United Farm Workers

#MutualAid #Community #NeighborHelpingNeighbor

Most Importantly, We Must Honor Latin American Women Revolutionaries!

The Mirabal Sisters (Dominican Republic)

The Mirabal sisters (Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa) courageously opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. They never gave up the fight until the day they were assassinated by orders of Trujillo. Trujillo thought getting rid of the sisters would benefit him, but things didn't go as he planned. Their assassination angered Dominicans and it is believed it contributed to the assassination of Trujillo one year later.

In the middle of the 20th century, Dominican Republic was a dystopian nightmare controlled by the sadistic dictator Rafael Trujillo, who had gained control of the island from 1930 to 1960. Trujillo managed to eliminate his rivals and seize control through a rigged presidential election which he won using intimidation tactics and violence. The “Era of Trujillo” began in 1930 with a coup which exiled the previous president of the Dominican Republic, Horacio Vásquez, who won the presidency in an election supervised and influenced by the United States. At the time Trujillo was a military general and assisted in the coup by preventing the Dominican military from defending their president.

During his tyrannical reign, Trujillo committed a number of atrocities in the thirty years he was in control:

1. He placed the Dominican Republic under martial law.
2. He controlled the mail, press, air travel and passports.
3. He arranged kickbacks and monopolies in a series of industries in the Dominican that increased economic prosperity and disproportionately gave it to his family and supporters.
4. He had a secret police force and spies that assisted in the censorship of the press as well as the torture and murder of hundreds of people that were made to look like suicides.

Trujillo’s most notorious crime occurred in 1937 when he had his police force brutally kill over 20,000 Haitians who lived in Hispaniola, a 224-mile border which separated the island between Haiti and the Dominican. The police force used machetes to murder the Haitians to make it seem like the military was not involved. This became known as the Parsley Massacre because the pronunciation of the Spanish word for parsley (perejil) was used to divide dark skin Dominicans from Haitians. During the massacre, the police would test the people living in Hispaniola and if a person was unable to roll the letter “R” when pronouncing perejil, they were assumed to be Haitian thus killed. These were just a few examples of the barbaric crimes that occurred during Trujillo’s occupation.

Trujillo had his own unit of “beauty scouts” that traveled all around the Dominican in search of attractive young girls. Trujillo’s sexual appetite for these young girls was so frightening that families would hide their female members out of fear they would be taken. It is speculated that Trujillo made sexual advances at one of the sisters, Minierva, and she turned the Dictator down. Her father repeatedly sent letters of apology to Trujillo for the incident but they fell on deaf ears. Instead, Trujillo imprisoned their father. After a period of being subjected to horrific treatment, their father was eventually released but died shortly thereafter. At another point, Trujillo put Minerva and her mother under house arrest in a hotel until Minerva agreed to meet with him. He then tried to coerce Minerva into having sex with him to secure her and her mother’s release which she refused. Minerva and her mother eventually escaped the hotel. Trujillo’s retaliation against the Mirabal family was endless and eventually affected the family’s income because no one wanted to buy from a family that had upset the dictator. The last straw came for Minerva after she graduated from law school and was prevented from obtaining a license to practice law even though she graduated at the top of her class.

Patria and Maria Teresa quickly became incentivized as well, following the 1959 exiled Cuban revolutionaries’ failed attempt to overthrow Trujillo. This incident influenced the name of the Mirabal sister’s revolutionary movement which would become known as “The 14th of June Movement,” established in 1960. Although the Mirabal sisters were specifically affected by Trujillo, their main reason for opposing him was a unified desire for the Dominican Republic to become a peaceful democracy.

Within their movement, the sisters became known as Las Mariposas (the butterflies.) The sisters handed out pamphlets that contained the names of people killed by Trujillo, obtained materials for constructing guns, there are even stories of the sisters, their husbands and children making bombs out of firecrackers around Minerva’s kitchen table. The sister’s movement met its premature end after they formulated a plan to assassinate Trujillo with a bomb at a cattle fair. The day before the assassination was supposed to occur, the plan was exposed. Most members of the movement were arrested. Under international pressure, Trujillo eventually released the women. After their release Trujillo’s economic success dropped significantly. Although there was no evidence, Trujillo blamed the Mirabal sisters for his failures and put out a kill order on them. Like many of his ordered assassinations, the planned murder of the sisters was a disorganized one. Trujillo transferred the sister’s imprisoned husbands to a jail that could only be accessed if the sisters traveled across a mountain range. The Mirabal sisters knew this was a trap, friends and family begged them not to go. But they went anyway.

On November 25, 1960 while on their way back from visiting their husbands, the sisters’ car was stopped by Trujillo’s henchmen. The assassins first killed the sister’s driver, Rufino de la Cruz, and then kidnapped the sisters at gunpoint. They were then strangled and beaten to death with clubs. The henchmen placed the sister’s bodies back in their car, pushed it off a cliff to make their deaths look like an accident. The Mirabal sister’s assassination served as a final catalyst for overthrowing Trujillo who was assassinated six months after their deaths. There were many instances that led to Trujillo’s demise but no other incident during Trujillo’s reign solidified his downfall more than the murders of the Mirabal sisters. Dedé Mirabal, the last surviving sister who had not been involved in her sister’s movement lived to see Trujillo’s regime fall. 

Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an Argentine human rights association formed in response to the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla, with the goal of finding the desaparecidos, initially, and then determine the culprits of crimes against humanity to promote their trial and sentencing.

The Mothers began demonstrating in the Plaza de Mayo, the public square located in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace, in the city of Buenos Aires, on April 30, 1977, to petition for the alive reappearance of their disappeared children. Originally, they would remain there seated, but by declaring state of emergency, police expelled them from the public square.

In September 1977, in order to provide themselves with an opportunity to share their stories with other Argentinians, the mothers decided to join the annual pilgrimage to Our Lady of Luján, located 30 miles outside Buenos Aires. In order to stand out among the crowds, the mothers decided to wear their children's nappies as headscarves. Following the pilgrimage, the mothers decided to continue wearing these headscarves during their meetings and weekly demonstrations at the Plaza. On them, they embroidered the names of their children and wrote “Aparición con Vida” (Alive reappearance). 

Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala)

Nobel Peace Prize (1992) recipient, Rigoberta Menchú was born in Chimel, in the Ixil triangle, a mountainous jungle área in northern Guatemala in 1959. Her family were peasants: her father active in the struggle for land and workers rights, and her mother a midwife involved in the social struggle. She followed in their footsteps, campaiging with the Committee for Peasant Union (CUC) and Catholic liberation theology priests. Politically, she supported the resistance line of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (UNRG). After both her parents and two brothers met horrific deaths at the hands of the Guatemalan army and her village was destroyed, she went into hiding, then fled to exile in Mexico in 1981.

In her decade in exile in the 1980s, she campaigned tirelesssly against human rights violations in Guatemala, and organized at the UN on indigenous isssues, visiting indigenous peoples in SE Asia, US/Canada and Latin America.  

After the Civil War ended in 1996, Rigoberta returned to Guatemala and created the Rigoberta Menchú Foundation. It campaigned to get former President Rios Montt tried for war crimes in Spanish courts: prosecutions in Guatemala being virtually impossible then. Spain called for his extradition in 2006 but, after losing his parliamentary immunity, Rios Montt was eventually convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity in a Guatemalan court in 2012, receiving two life sentences.

In the past two decades the Menchú Foundation has also campaigned to exhume mass graves, legislate for new crimes, fight for the return of ancestral Mayan lands, and has documented 36,000 Mayan women.

In 2007 Menchú formed a political party called Winaq (People), the first indigenous party in Central America, and ran for president. She did not win (nor did she in 2011) but set a precedent as the first Mayan and first woman to do so.

Juana Azurduy de Padilla (Bolivia) 

Born in 1780, Juana Azurduy de Padilla was a guerrilla leader from Chuquisaca, Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (now Sucre, the capital of Bolivia). She fought for independence from Spanish rule and the rights of the indigenous people of Upper Peru. Of mixed heritage, she spoke Quechua and Aymara as well as Spanish.

In 1809, Azurduy and her husband joined the Chuquisaca Revolution which ousted the Spanish governor of the Reál Audencia of Charcas and established a governing Junta de Buenos Aires. In the years that followed, she continued to fight Spanish royalist tropos, helping General Manuel Belgrano, Commander of the Independence Movement’s northern armso.

A tremendous recruiting force among the indigenous population, she led the ‘Loyal Battalions’, named for their fierce loyalty to their commander. She even inspired a batallion of women who became known as ‘Amazonas’. At the height of her power, she led an army of 6,000 soldiers.

Juana was granted a Colonel’s military pension in 1825 by Simón Bolívar, first president of newly independent Gran Colombia (which then included Bolivia). Unfortunately, it was revoked in 1857 in the so-called bureaucratic organization of the government of José María Linares and in 1862 she died penniless, at the age of 82. She was buried in a common grave.

A hundred years later her remains were exhumed and moved to a mausoleum built in her honour in the city of Sucre. When Evo Morales was elected President, he declared her birthday - July 12 - the Day of Argentine-Bolivian Friendship. A province of Bolivia is now named after her, as is the airport at Sucre.

Berta Cáceres (Honduras)

Berta Cáceres was a renowned environmental activist and advocate for the protection of indigenous peoples’ land in Honduras. While she has also fought for the rights of women and the LBGTQ community, she is best known for the successful, decade-long campaign she organized against the Agua Zarca Dam. In addition to grave environmental repercussions, construction of the dam violated international laws protecting indigenous people as it would have denied the Lenca people’s access to water and self-sustainability. Cáceres’ efforts were commemorated with a Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015. But after years of increasing death threats, she was killed in what the people of Honduras are calling an assassination by the government.  COPINH, the organization she founded in 1993 to preserve the Lenca land and culture, continues to fight and operate within the country, although with caution. Her death has been widely criticized and protested around the world.

Tamara Bunke aka Tania La Guerrillera (Cuba)

Haydée Tamara Bunke was born in Argentina in 1933 into a German Jewish family fleeing Nazism. She returned to East Germany when she was 14. Brought up a Communist, she later played an active role in Cuba after the Cuban Revolution.

In 1960, at the age of 23, Tamara met Che Guevara when interpreting for him on a Cuban trade visit to Leipzig. She told him she longed to return to Latin America. She moved to Cuba in 1961 where she first did solidarity work for the literacy campaign; and building homes and schools in the countryside. She then got paid work as a translator in the Ministry of Education and the Federation of Cuban Women, before finally joining Che’s programme of revolution for Latin American, training in espionaje and covert actions. She was given the nom de guerre Tania.

Years before Che left Cuba for his Bolivia campaign in 1967, he embedded Tania as a spy in the Bolivian political elite and military circles. Posing as a right-wing Argentine ethnologist, she became popular in La Paz high society. In 1965, she married a young Bolivian engineer. Using equipment hidden in a compartment behind the wall in her flat, she sent coded messages to Fidel Castro in La Havana and to the guerrilla base Che set up in the Chaco región of southern Bolivia. Che also sent her on missions to other Latin American countries to get support.

In 1968, Tania left La Paz to join Che in the armed struggle at his camp in Nancahuazú. By then, Che had lost radio contact with the outside world and the Bolivian army had discovered the guerillas whereabouts.. They withdraw to higher mountains in two columns which subsequently lost contact with each other. Tania was with the lead column. It was ambushed while crossing the Rio Grande river at Vado del Yeso. The river was swollen with heavy rains and Tania was apparently waist-deep in water when she was shot through the arm and lung. Eight of her fellow insurgents were killed in the ambush. Che was eventually captured and killed at La Higuera on October 8, 1968.

In 1998, Tania’s remains were traced to an unmarked grave on the periphery of a Bolivian army base in Vallegrande. The Cubans later built a memorial there to her and the other guerrillas who died in Bolivia. But her remains were transferred to Cuba and interred in the Che Guevara Mausoleum in Santa Clara, alongside those of Che himself. A contraversial figure, Tania conforms to the ideal of an international revolutionary: born in Argentina to German parents, an icon of the Cuban Revolution, who died fighting in Bolivia to liberate all of Latin America. 

Domitila Barrios de Chúngara (Bolivia)

Domitila Barrios de Chúngara was a Bolivian labor rights activist and pioneer of intersectional feminism. An impoverished mother of seven and the wife of a tin miner, Barrios de Chúngara founded the Housewives’ Committee of Siglo XX alongside 70 other wives of miners as they advocated for increased wages and medical care through marches, hunger strikes, and political assembly. After unifying 600 unemployed women eager to financially support their families, Barrios de Chúngara convinced the managers of local mining companies to hire all of them, boosting their quality of life and the local economy. While participating in the International Women’s Year Tribunal in 1975, Barrios de Chúngara found that the majority of concerns discussed were not reflective of her experiences or struggles, so she spoke of the intersection of race, class, and sexism that she and her people faced. She went on to co-author Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines, a chronicle of her life and work.

Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Argentina)

In 1977, Chichi Mariani, one of the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’,suggested that an equally unique organization called the ‘Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ be created.

Some of their daughters had been abducted with small children, or had been pregnant, or were impregnated by their torturers. The children or the babies born in captivity were known to have been adopted by military families or others who could be relied upon to bring them up in the ‘right’ way. A genetic data base called The Grandparents Index with the details of over 500 disappeared grandchildren was created in 1978, and eventually, with the advances in DNA science, included a bank where samples could be stored. It was the first of it’s kind in the world. After painstaking investigation, grandchildren began to be found. 

By 1998 the identities of about 71 missing children had been documented. Of those, 56 children have been located, and seven others had died. The Grandmothers' work led to the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and the establishment of the National Bank of Genetic Data. Aided by recent breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families. In 13 other cases, adoptive and biological families agreed on jointly raising the children after they had been identified. The remaining cases are bogged down in court custody battles between families. As of June 2019, their efforts have resulted in finding 130 grandchildren. 

Argelia Laya (Venezula)

Regarded as one of the most important female leaders in Venezuela, Argelia Mercedes Laya López was an Afro-Latina political activist who fought to eradicate gender, ethnic, and able-bodied discrimination in her country.  Born in a cocoa hacienda in Rio Chico, Laya’s mother instilled activism from a young age and encouraged her to protect her rights as a woman and person of African descent. Laya advocated for educational equality, inclusivity for girls who became pregnant while in school, and the right to a safe pregnancy. Despite peaceful protest and non-violent ethos, Laya faced repeated physical assaults for her efforts.  During the 1960’s, Laya became a member of the communist guerrilla movement FALN where she traversed mountainsides under the name of Comandanta Jacinta. Before her death, she served as the president of MAS, Venezuela’s social-democratic political party. 

Dolores Cacuango (Ecuador)

Dolores Cacuango was a native rights leader and revolutionary in Ecuador at the turn of the 19th century. While in servitude to a hacienda owner at the age of 15, the stark contrast between quality of life between the rich and poor sparked Cacuango’s calling to action. Her advocacy focused on education, the protection of native lands, and government reform in recognition of indigenous people. In 1944, she led an assault against a military base and founded the Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in collaboration with representatives from a variety of tribes. Despite her own lack of formal education, she spent 18 years directing one of the first schools for indigenous children with instruction in Spanish and Quechua before it was closed down by the military junta in 1963. Reportedly the result of her radical action and communist beliefs, Cacuango’s legacy has been expunged from many texts yet is remembered by many as the pioneer of indigenous activism in Ecuador.

#ElQueNoArriesgaNoGana

The formation of the Latinx Caucus was approved by the NC on September 20, 2015.