Latinas seeking justice in the U.S

After reading and exploring the scholarship of Cresswell (2004), Lorbe (2004), and Wood and Beck (1994), I reflected on an instance when I observed social justice directly. During my feminist ethnographic study, and as a member of Madre Tierra Organization; a collective made up of Latina immigrant women who have survived abuse and continue to apply many of the same social justice principles they conceptualize through their daily experiences; I was able to explore how the community-based cultural practices of these women created forms of social and spatial justice within a public park in Fredericksburg, VA. On June 7th of this year, I took part in a fair held at Old Mill Park in Fredericksburg. This location has become a well-known meeting place for much of the area's growing Latin American community. It is common for people to gather at this location to exchange information, share food, dance, and perform ancestral rituals, especially during holidays and periods of warmer temperatures.

Considering that background, I established the following question: In what ways do the community-based cultural practices of Latina migrant women create forms of social and spatial justice within a public park in Fredericksburg, Virginia?

The Old Mill Park site represents the intentional transformation by individual participants of an abstract geometric space to a lived experience (Wood and Beck, 1994). As a fixed location for the city’s recreation department, the park has served as a venue for the municipality to provide services to residents. However, the embodied presence of Latina immigrant women from Madre Tierra, whose everyday actions and experiences in this location activate it, demonstrates a relationship to place that corresponds to the concept of “place of memory,” as cited by Dolores Hayden in Cresswell (2004). Specifically, as Hayden describes, Puerto Rican immigrants have historically built casitas (homes) and planted community gardens in New York City to create cultural identity as well as a sense of affiliation among themselves. Therefore, when Madre Tierra performs ancestral limpias, dances, and eats together in Old Mill Park, it transforms a largely anonymous public space as a small local holy space where Madre Tierra is able to collectively recover from trauma and reflect on common history.

The work builds on the conceptual model of spatial justice created through Design Studio for Social Intervention (2012). In this way, Madre Tierra occupation of Old Mill Park is an example of all three components of the spatial justice model including; Spatial Claims, Spatial Power and Spatial Links. To start, when the women came together to do ancestral limpias, the Latina women represent a very significant form of spatial claim by the most basic right to have a space where one may exist, grow and develop. In this line of thought, Lorber's (2004) theory of gender as a socially constructed process is important to consider when examining the women’s interactions with public spaces; specifically how the gendered social expectations and power dynamics surrounding whose bodies are deemed legitimate, safe or out of place within specific environments influence their experiences in those environments. The gendered dynamics present in Madre Tierra intersect with their identities as both Latina immigrant women who have experienced violence.

The process of reclaiming a space in which immigrant bodies are under hyper-surveillance, or otherwise precluded from occupying specific sites, Old Mill Park becomes a legitimate and safe place to assert the rights of these women to exist in the space without the threat of deportation or other types of violence. Therefore, these spatial claims establish the spatial power which is related to the capacity of a given environment to create conditions for a group to thrive, to celebrate, to express its cultural identity publicly. For Madre Tierra's members, the spatial claim is connected with healing, sharing, and resisting exclusion. Much like how Indigenous Hawaiian Kumu Hula used 24 hours of ritual drumming and dance at the State Capitol to protect their right to assemble in public spaces, Madre Tierra takes the typical municipal park and makes it a site of possibility. By using their ritual cleansing ceremonies and communal eating activities, Madre Tierra also contests Eurocentric notions of acceptable behavior in public spaces and establishes a shared space for healing that will help address the psychological/social damage often inflicted by physical/spatial displacement/violence.

Additionally, this shared activity achieves the element of spatial links that addresses the ability to utilize public spaces and connect isolated community systems. Many immigrant victims of violence are physically or socially removed from the support networks required in order for them to recover because of the physical and social disconnections (which are invisible) they experience. Utilizing Old Mill Park, Madre Tierra is establishing a space for spatial connection that links the individual healing journey of each member with greater mutual aid and cultural conservation networks. By doing so, Madre Tierra restores social isolation and creates a public ecological system that affords marginalized women access to both relational and physical power. Ultimately, through utilizing elements of spatial rights, spatial power and spatial relationships; Madre Tierra demonstrates how spatial justice can be realized as a real practice of social change through ordinary/daily actions while being conceptualized as an ideal.

Based on the previous, Hopkins' (2021) theoretical lens yields essential background to understand why Madre Tierra's appropriation of territory is more than a local group effort and has become a fundamental act of both social and spatial justice. Hopkins (2021) points out that social justice is represents a broad sociopolitical structure for addressing the inequitable consequences created by social systems, institutions, and administrative actions that result in unequal distribution of resources and burdens in society. Therefore, pursuing spatial justice, as a form of struggle for geography, is to make visible the process of marginalized groups fighting against their physical and social exclusion from geographic spaces where they can live and create meaning. Further, within this larger discussion of struggles for geography, Hopkins identifies a significant omission in the field of social geography. While social geographers have made great strides toward describing the lived experiences of inequality in terms of how people are socially excluded from geographic spaces and how their daily lives are influenced by their social position, they rarely engage with the normative aspects of social justice or explore what social justice actually looks like when it happens. It is in this context that the experience of Madre Tierra is grounded theoretically; by briefly appropriating Old Mill Park on several occasions to conduct ancestral limpias, eat together, etc., these women were challenging the institutionalized mechanisms of surveillance and exclusion and at the same time also physically, emotionally, and collectively embodying how spatial justice is experienced in the everyday spaces of public life.

Bibliography

Design Studio for Social Intervention. Spatial Justice: A Frame for Reclaiming our Rights to Be, Thrive, Express, and ConnectDownload Spatial Justice: A Frame for Reclaiming our Rights to Be, Thrive, Express, and Connect. 2012. Read pp. 1-13.

Hopkins, Peter. 2021. “Social Geography III: Committing to Social JusticeDownload Social Geography III: Committing to Social Justice.” Progress in Human Geography 45(2): 382-393.

Lorber, Judith. 2004. “The Social Construction of GenderDownload The Social Construction of Gender.” Pp. 129-132 in Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee. Boston: McGraw Hill.

Cresswell, Tim. 2004. Place: A Short IntroductionDownload Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.  Pp. 1-12.

Wood, Denis and Robert J. Beck. Home RulesDownload Home Rules. 1994. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Pp. 1-7, 13-23.