Immigrant Labor, Immigrant Rights
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Abstract
TEN YEARS AGO, IN THE BASEment of a yellow church in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Jeff Rubin, his wife, and three young daughters participated in a workshop held by the Movement of Rural Women Workers (MMTR). Jeff remembers the three-day workshop as being pivotal in framing his relationship with and establishing his level of access to the MMTR, which he attributes to the presence of his family. In a room in which nearly all of the women present were there because they had built the courage to defy a husband, father, or brother who did not support their choice to attend, Jeff—a father and husband—brought his wife and daughters. He performs his “husbandness and fatherhood,” seeking to demonstrate his comfort in taking on non-traditional roles, such as caring for his infant daughter and washing his family’s dishes. Mesmerized by the workshop and the women she meets, Jeff’s 12-year-old daughter Emma embarks on the first step of a decade-long collaboration with her father that hinges on cooperation and mutual respect, seeking to share the story of women who, when not much older than herself at the time, ran away from their homes to escape fathers who did not respect them as women. These are the stakes that frame Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father Daughter Collaboration, which, as the title suggests, is much more than a history of a social movement. The book reveals many tensions— between the promise of democracy and its fraught fulfillment, institutional reform and grassroots organizing, political change and cultural change, singular identity and broader movement platforms, and the researcher and the subject—and also resolutions, as the characters in this drama struggle through these frictions seeking some sort of acceptable balance. The result is a text that is at once ethnography, memoir, and oral history, reaching beyond the aim of research and analysis and into human connection, common experience, and understanding. Sustaining Activism, which seeks to define a social movement not by its goals, successes, and failures, but by the people who have poured their lives into it, profiles various women involved in the MMTR since its early foundations. It looks to the lives and experiences of these women to reveal the complexities and tensions characteristic of democratic social movements.