Promise Institute for Human Rights' Inter-American Human Rights System Series

This panel explores different regional approaches to Latin American feminisms. 

Katherine Marino's historical work on Pan-American feminism traces the role that Latin American and Caribbean feminists had in advancing women's and human rights in the United Nations, as well as how activists navigated between local and global spheres. 

Maylei Blackwell's work explores indigenous women organizers in Mexico as well as feminist movements and sexual rights activists throughout Latin America. Her forthcoming book narrates how Indigenous women's activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in between local, national, continental, and transborder scales.

RSVP Here to attend in-person (UCLA Law, Room 1447)

Limited box lunches available for attendees

Speaker Bios

Katherine M. Marino is Associate Professor of History at UCLA and a Promise Institute Distinguished Research Fellow whose research has focused on transnational feminist and human rights movements in the Americas. Her first book Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (UNC Press, 2019), published in Spanish as Feminismo para América Latina: Un movimiento internacional por los derechos humanos (Mexico: Grano de Sal, 2021) demonstrated the vital role that Latin American and Caribbean feminists and inter-American organizing played in developing international women’s and human rights in the interwar years. Feminism for the Americas won a number of awards, including the Latin American Studies Association’s 2020 Luciano Tomassini Latin American International Relations Book Award, Western Association of Women Historians’ 2020 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award, and International Federation for Research on Women’s History’s Ida Blom-Karen Offen Prize in Transnational Women’s and Gender History. In 2022-23, while on a Mellon New Directions fellowship, Marino will take courses at UCLA law school that focus on international human rights, immigration, labor, gender, and race, and that explore interactions between domestic and international human rights law. This training will help her launch a new project on how globalization has shaped women’s migration, labor, and transnational activism in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Americas.

Maylei Blackwell is Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Based on over twenty years of research accompanying indigenous women’s organizing in Mexico and its diaspora, her forthcoming book, Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Organizing will be published by Duke University Press in 2023. She is the author of the landmark ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (2011) as well as a co-editor of ¡Chicana Movidas! New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (2018).  Her research on social movements in the US and Latin America, transborder activism, and indigenous politics and migration have appeared in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil in journals such as Latino Studies, Meridians, Signs, Aztlán, Journal of Latin American Studies, Desacatos and Revista Estudos Feministas. She is a Professor and Vice Chair of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Gender Studies and is affiliated faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a co-creator and co-director of the digital story platform Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles (mila.ssc.ucla.edu). Maylei is currently working on rematriating historical memory and seeding Indigenous social movements through the Mobile Indigenous Community Archive (MICA). 

Co-sponsored by the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA Latin American Institute, and UCLA Law International & Human Rights Law Association