[Hegemonic feminist currents focus on patriarchal oppression, but racialized forms of oppression seldom enter their discourse. Merlyn Pirela is a Venezuelan Afrofeminist activist and organizer, and a member of the Afro-Venezuelan Women’s Cumbe. In Part I of this two-part interview, Pirela explores the historical forms of oppression and domination, and the Afro-Venezuelan struggle for emancipation. Part II addresses both the advances and the pending tasks of the movement in the context of the Bolivarian Process.]

Part I

Cira Pascual Marquina: To help readers understand context, could you explain the history of slavery in Venezuela?

Merlyn Pirela: Like most countries in our continent, Venezuela had a long history of slavery. People from Africa were brought to this land by force, and their oppression and exploitation lasted three centuries. In other words, if we look at the country’s history since colonization, we have been enslaved longer than “free.” Legal emancipation only happened in 1854, and it came about because of a calculation that the dominant class made: slavery was no longer economically viable. This means that for centuries, Africans and people of African descent were enslaved laborers. On their shoulders, creole culture “blossomed.”

Legal emancipation came with indemnification to the enslavers and no reparations to the formerly enslaved. But of course, oppression and domination didn’t stop there, it just took a more conventional, mercantile and capitalist shape.

The three centuries of slavery were not just about the direct exploitation of Black people. At its origin was the violent process of enslavement of millions of Africans and the ensuing devastation of life in large swaths of the African continent. After the violent uprooting came the middle passage where the people were packed tightly into ships, chained, and confined to extremely cramped spaces. Saying that it was horrific is an understatement. The journey was horrible, lasting months, and many died due to disease, malnutrition, and brutal treatment.

Then came the market, where the enslaved people were measured and branded with the “carimba.” Brutally separated from their home, their culture, and their families, these peoples were then bought and taken to the haciendas for forced labor. The “lucky” ones, generally women, worked in the house and were often sexually exploited. The less “lucky” ones, often the most physically fit, were matched and turned into “factories” for producing future generations of enslaved people.

After having their children taken away, some of them would be assigned to be the wet nurses and caretakers of the mantuanos [oligarchical class].

How did society legitimate all this? Black people were said to have no soul and no discernment. The aim was to erase their histories, civilizations, knowledge, and cosmovisions. In short, for the colonizers and their descendants, enslaved people were not humans.

CPM: Resistance was not occasional but a constant. Can you highlight some forms of struggle past and present?

MP: We talk about Afrofeminism because our struggle has other roots and our histories are not the same as those of the mainstream feminists. The oppression that women such as Simone de Beauvoir experienced is worlds apart from the oppression that Black women endured in the past and in the present.

The first form of Maroon resistance was abortion. Why? Nobody wants to bring a baby into a society that will enslave them. No mother wants to see her four-year-old taken away from her and put to work!

It so happens that mainstream culture still romanticizes the lives of figures such as Hipólita and Matea, Simón Bolívar’s wet nurses. How were they able to breastfeed him? Their kids were taken away from them! Afrofeminism confronts the discourse that erases the long history of racist, patriarchal oppression.

Enslaved people, both men and women, together with Indigenous peoples, didn’t passively submit. The practice of escaping the hacienda, going up to the mountains, and building libertarian communities wasn’t a rare event. There were hundreds of Maroon communities in what we now know as Venezuela. Some lasted months, some lasted years.

One of the longest-lasting cumbes [Maroon communities] in Barlovento [Miranda state] was Mango de Ocoita. There, in the 1770s, Guillermo Rivas and many others built an egalitarian community that lasted three years, much longer than the Paris Commune, and preceded it by about one hundred years!

But long before, in 1552, King Miguel de Buría and Queen Guiomar led an insurrection and liberated many enslaved people. They settled in Sorte Mountain, between Yaracuy and Lara states, and built a cumbe. That mountain is now a sacred territory where spiritism is practiced.

CPM: How did cumbes organize?

MP: Cumbes had political, economic, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. Cumbes were free territories with their own collectivized economy based on agriculture and animal husbandry. Of course, they were always in a situation of siege, and the violence deployed against them was brutal.

Cumbes were organized for life and for making families in conditions of freedom and love. Of course, the history of these Maroon communities has been erased from the textbooks. The free societies that emerged in the cumbes had a lot to do with African cultures, from food to agricultural practices. However, as we speak today, one of the most important things to highlight is that cumbes were communitarian organizations fundamentally based on the common good.

CPM: You have talked about feminist Marooning practices, particularly abortion. There were also legal battles against the enslavers. Can you talk about this?

MP: There was a creative practice amongst enslaved women: to use the law against the enslaver. They would go to court and accuse them of sexual abuse, rape, or of not granting them liberty after having had sexual relations in exchange for liberty. Needless to say, their chances of winning were close to none, but while the trial lasted, the enslaved women would be put in a convent, which was a much-welcome break away from rape and forced labor.

There were many ways of violent domination and oppression, but there were just as many ways of rebelling against the system, from maintaining spiritual traditions to making maps in hair [with braids that showed the routes] from the plantation to the cumbe, to insurrections that would destroy the plantation regime.

CPM: Some say that Venezuela is not a racist country, that we are all “café con leche,” but racism is alive and kicking.

MP: The mestizaje ideology is very much part of the dominant culture here. The discourse goes like this: everyone is mixed-race, so we can’t be racist. In reality, things couldn’t be more different. There is a deeply ingrained structural racism in Venezuela.

Let’s start with the households in the East of Caracas [where the upper middle class and the bourgeoisie live]. Every household has an Afro-Venezuelan domestic worker: she’s generally a live-in worker, cares for the house, for the kids, cooks for everyone… and she’s Black and practically invisible to society.

Then there is racism on TV. When do you see a Black person on the screen? We are brought on to talk about Afro-Venezuelan cultural traditions from an “ethnic” perspective, to talk about our music, our festivities, but you won’t see Black people invited to talk about politics in general, or more specifically about the situation of Afro-Venezuelan communities.

Additionally, Venezuela has very narrow beauty standards, and Black women don’t fit there: our hair, our hips, etc. This fuels day-to-day discrimination at work.

Then there is the educational dimension: it’s very rare to see an Afro-Venezuelan in medical or engineering school. This means that when Black people go to university, they end up in areas linked to care work, such as nursing or education.

Additionally, predominantly Black territories in the country have limited access to higher education in general. If you go to Barlovento, you will be hard-pressed to find a university there, and since those communities are economically depressed, moving to Caracas to study is practically impossible.

Our society reproduces colonial forms of oppression in which descendants of enslaved people are assigned the task of producing and caring for non-Blacks.

Then there is institutional racism. It is much harder to get legal support or open a legal process or get a restrictive order in predominantly Black communities because there are very few Public Ministry offices [prosecutor’s offices]. This means that women in particular are more vulnerable when it comes to issues such as gender-based violence.

Racism extends to all state institutions. When laws are promoted, the Afro-Venezuelan perspective is generally not there. For instance, at the Ministry of Women, we are called on to talk about Afro-Venezuelan traditions, but that’s not considered politics with a capital “P,” it’s considered a cultural issue, and therefore of secondary importance.

Part II

CPM: There’s a widespread belief that claims Black communities in Venezuela are matriarchal. Is there some truth to that?

MP: We live in a society that is organized by colonial, capitalist principles, so the matriarchal forms that may have characterized the peoples that were forcefully brought here are practically nonexistent. Instead, what you can often find are matricentric families in a society that is patriarchal.

Afro-Venezuelan communities are not free from gender-based violence. Also, it is socially acceptable for a man to have eight partners (and families), while the opposite is not acceptable. Additionally, it is no secret that poverty increases gender-based violence, and since many Afro-Venezuelan communities are economically depressed, machista violence can become a real problem.

Moreover, the state embodies patriarchal and racist logics; for instance, it is always harder for a Black woman to introduce a claim than it is for a white man. Add to that the fact that the Public Ministry has few offices in Black communities, and you get the picture.

For the state, an Afro-Venezuelan community in Barlovento or the coastal towns in La Guaira are thought of as spaces to promote tourism: locations where city-dwellers can enjoy a vacation, towns where tourists can go to enjoy the San Juan drums, dance, laugh, and drink.

CPM: You have mentioned that the Afrofeminist perspective is different from that of western feminism. Can you expand on this?

MP: While many feminists struggle against class and gender oppression, we have to add another dimension to the struggle: race. Then, if you are a person with a disability, you have to add another dimension, and the same if you are an LGBTQ+ person. Layers of oppression build up on top of each other. As Afrofeminists, we are acutely aware of this situation, which has consequences for the way we organize and struggle.

In our continent, there is a robust Black feminist current. Here, in the early 90s, the Black Women’s Union was a powerful movement that emerged with figures such as Argelia Laya, Josefina Brito y Camacho, and Reyna Ratia. This movement was contestatarian and went beyond the narrow precepts of mainstream feminism. But there were similar movements in Colombia, Panamá, and Costa Rica. Further North, Black Panther women also had a combative perspective, and none other than Angela Davis came out of that movement.

In general, Black feminism is on the Left of the political spectrum, although there are some sub-currents that don’t identify as Left because colonialism is still among us and exercises pressure through academic and financial mechanisms.

As a Black woman, I’m part of the Afrofeminist movement, and I’m a Leftist.

CPM: Can you talk to us about the Black Women’s Union in Venezuela?

MP: The Union was founded by Irene Ugueto, a social worker from La Guaira, and other Black women in 1990. Three years before Irene had taken the stand at the women’s congress in Cuba. There, she talked about the condition of Black women, which hadn’t been visible in prior conferences and, in general, in the feminist discourse.

The Union was a combative Black women’s organization that, hand in hand with Irene Ugueto and Argelia Laya, planted the seeds for a new Afrofeminist approach. This approach brings an awareness of the multiple forms of oppression into the discourse and into the struggle.

CPM: In Venezuela, the current iteration of the Black Women’s Union is the Afro-Venezuelan Women’s Cumbe. How was it born and what are its aims?

MP: The Cumbe is the daughter of the Black Women’s Union. The former organization was born in 2005, in the heyday of the Bolivarian Process, hand in hand with Black communities that were making the wounds of colonialism and slavery visible.

The Process was a breath of fresh air for the struggle: it was easier to organize and to be heard, beauty standards began to change, social programs were put in place to address structural poverty in Black communities, and a widespread process of self-recognition and empowerment emerged. We also began to read history against the grain; our key references were Argelia Laya, Guiomar, and the long line of Black women who struggled for their rights and our own.

The Afro-Venezuelan Women’s Cumbe was born to promote an Afrofeminist perspective, and it remains important force to this day, although the crisis and the pandemic were a blow to the organization. We are now focusing on mutual care and the revival of some of our traditions, including culinary ones. That, of course, doesn’t mean that we gave up the big fight, but we realized that mutual care is a must for the continuity of the movement.

CPM: You were talking about the fruitful context of the Bolivarian Process. Can you highlight some milestones when it comes to the Afro-Venezuelan and Black feminist struggles?

MP: In legal terms, the most important advance was the 2011 Law Against Racial Discrimination. However, the battlefield is still open: in the most recent reform of the Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence, we had proposed that racial discrimination be defined as a form of violence against Black women, but the text was changed at the very last minute. There, “racial discrimination” became “multiform violence,” which is far more ambiguous.

As for other advances, as we speak, the issue of reparations is on the table, and the Ministry of Science and Technology has a team working on the issue of Black identity reaffirmation, which is accompanied by audiovisual productions. This is important because it makes our culture and our bodies more visible.

CPM: What are the pending tasks for the movement?

MP: One of the pending tasks is re-internationalizing the Black women’s struggle, which has retreated to the local arena in the continent. In this regard, Francia Márquez’s presence as Colombia’s VP is very important: she could become a catalyst and magnet to internationalize the Black women’s struggle.

This re-internationalization has to happen from the Left: our struggle is to do away with all forms of oppression and domination. We are not looking for solutions to specific problems, we must do away with the existing system of oppression. We must do away with capitalism and we must end the colonial legacy.

This means that we cannot gear our work to please international agencies and their large wallets. We will not be able to do the revolution that must be done if we are dependent, so a degree of autonomy is a must. We also have to work on anti-racist education across the board. This means going to the territories because Zoom classes are as good as nothing for many in the Black communities, which are territories neglected by telephone and internet companies.

Access to sexual and reproductive education and healthcare is also an urgent matter for most Black women. In addition to the criminalization of abortion – which is classist, racist, and must end – there isn’t a national policy to ensure widespread access to contraceptives. On top of that, many Black communities are far away from a medical center, so women aren’t able to get a cytology, a mammogram, or pre- and postnatal care.

Overall, Black women have a much harder time accessing public healthcare, and their economic situation keeps them away from private clinics. Of course, Afro-Venezuelan communities are carriers of ancestral medicine practices that save many lives, but that is not enough.

Additionally, the setbacks that we have witnessed over the past few years are of great concern to us. We see a reemergence of racist practices in institutions and on the street. This worries us a great deal. It is true that in times of crisis, the poor and oppressed always get the short end of the stick, but that explanation is not good enough for us.

CPM: Finally, what proposals and projects does the movement have for the future?

MP: As Afro-Venezuelans, one of our strengths is the community and its ancestral practices. Maroon forms of resistance are still with us: our way of caring for the kids is far more collectivized and our communities are far more socially integrated. This makes us more resilient and it gives us the strength to fight against the current system of oppression and domination.

The fact that we are working on collective self-care at the Afro-Venezuelan Women’s Cumbe is also positive: it makes us stronger for the struggle. These spaces of self-care comprise groups of some twenty women who share ancestral knowledge, Afro-Venezuelan culinary practices, and, most importantly, we protect and support each other.

If we don’t practice mutual care, we won’t be able to overturn the racist, class-base system that is now in place!

(Cira Pascual Marquina is Political Science Professor at the Universidad de Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas and is staff writer for Venezuelanalysis.com. Courtesy: Venezuela Analysis, an independent website produced by individuals who are dedicated to disseminating news and analysis about the current political situation in Venezuela.)