This episode celebrates 10+ years of domestic workers organizing and campaigning in Spain, where congress finally approved legislation that grants domestic workers equal rights to other workers. Listen to the stories of Territorio Doméstico and Mujeres Unidas entre Tierras, two powerful collectives that have not just campaigned, but developed an incredible toolbox of mutual support, care, networking, migrant solidarity and celebration.
During ongoing protests in 2014 that escalated in a burning governance building for the first time I took part in interdisciplinary collaborations among different artistic disciplines mostly in public spaces. Thereby I experienced how art can be a tool for expressing resistance and solidarity while recipients are not a middle-class audience who pay tickets, actually this time the gaining ones of the artistic contribution have been the very people who have been addressed in the art piece itself, in this example: the unpaid workers which protested on the streets in front of the parliament in Sarajevo BiH 2014.
During the discussion on May 24, 2022 we were gathering different local and translocal experiences with cross-movement alliances driven by queer-feminist initiatives.First, the activists from Bulgaria, Spain, Switzerland and France were bringing in reports on queer-feminist interventions in social struggles within their local contexts. We were talking about queer-feminist protest against neoliberal reforms of social services, as well as queer-feminist initiatives for social housing and opposition against nationalist, right wing politics. Second, we were getting to know the transnational feminist network “Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational” (EAST). We were learning more about EAST’s queer-feminist approach to connect social struggles of migrants, care workers, women and LGBTQI-communities on a transnational level.
READ MORE Video documentation of the discussion: Feminist cross-movement alliances
This episode features a conversation with Rosemary Rojas, from the Border Agricultural Workers Project and The Border Women’s Project in El Paso, Texas. Since 1994, the project has supported and assisted agricultural workers crossing the US/Mexico border and their families, and is part of La Via Campesina. We speak to Rosemary about workers and feminist struggles in the region, and the efforts to ensure safe working conditions during the pandemic.