Politics are for everyone
Alexandra-Marie Figueroa Miranda on political worlds-building in Puerto Rico
Photo credit: Alexandra-Marie Figueroa
I first interviewed Alexandra-Marie Figueroa Miranda for an article for Teen Vogue about young feminist of color across the US; I specifically wanted to highlight the experiences of young feminists living in US colonies such as Hawai’i and Puerto Rico. Alexandra-Marie came recommended by another Puerto Rican feminist activist friend, and I also admired her writing and activism. This piece that she co-wrote with Gloriann Sacha Antonetty and translated for Teen Vogue about their campaigning efforts to get Black Puerto Ricans recognized on their census and the island’s history of racism paints a story and is well worth a read.
Listening to Alexandra-Marie speak about the systemic impacts and cultural ramifications of living in a US colony, I feel that there is a significant overlap with the history of and political movements in Hong Kong. Activists from both Hong Kong and Puerto Rico have gotten together to discuss ways to sustain movements in a colonial context. To get out of a colonized mindset and dream of a world beyond colonization but also beyond nation-state defined ideas of sovereignty requires immense imagination and impossible-seeming work.
Alexandra-Marie is one of those people working on impossible-seeming goals, day by day. She’s also part of an incredible feminist community in Puerto Rico, which has been leading the island’s “insurrection” and fight against corruption and impunity. She’s been completely overworked during this pandemic, and most recently, she was featured in a TIME piece detailing new political movements in Puerto Rico. What TIME misses is that Alexandra-Marie is very specifically a feminist political activist. When you focus on the most marginalized in society, and do community-based political education work, you are doing feminist work, and Alexandra-Marie also doesn’t shy away from that word and its association. In this extended version of our interview for Teen Vogue, we dive deeper into her relationship with her feminist identity, her feminist community in Puerto Rico, and what she’s working on these days.
Ani Hao: How did your background inform your feminist identity?
Alexandra-Marie Figueroa Miranda: I’m not used to speaking about myself and I’m used to speaking more about the work. It’s been a really great exercise. I think it’s a really great proposal; I don’t think people are often thinking about the circumstances that lead women to identify as feminists. When I was younger, saying that you were an activist, that you were a feminist - it was very out there.
I actually don’t think I began identifying as a feminist until later in high school, my junior or senior year of high school. I identified with it but I didn’t understand why exactly. It wasn’t until… university, that I learned the term ‘feminism’. I learned about the theory, and the hidden sex, and all of these things that we standardize now as feminism.
I was born in a single parent household, and my mom was a victim of domestic abuse. It was my aunt, who was my mom’s youngest sister, who showed up to the house one day and packed up all my father’s stuff and threw it out on the streets. The only male authority in my life was my grandfather but he was very respectful of the female dynamic in my life. My mom was a single mother and had two children, but my brother had autism, and so all of our resources went to my brother. I was a very scrappy young girl. I had no idea that I was this scrappy.
I thought it was the normal thing to do - taking on leadership [responsibilities], organizing for public education in high school. It wasn’t until I started clashing with other people, that I realized what gender disparities were in terms of the expectations and norms. I realized what it means to be, specifically, a White Latina in college.
Did I become an official feminist the first time I suffered a sexual assault? Did I become an official feminist the first time I organized a protest against sexist? Did I become a feminist last year, when I joined a fully fledged organization that’s working on gender justice? It has depended on the stage of my life where I’ve evaluated myself. I think that I’ve always been [a feminist], it’s just been a matter of what point in my life journey have I been able to fledge out my definition.
My first experience of organizing for public education was in my sophomore year. In Puerto Rico, there’s [only] one public high school, and so the best students have to take a test to get in.
He [the president] instituted a law that laid off all of these employees overnight, that increased our unemployment rates by 14% overnight. Actually, my aunt got laid off in that number. Because our school was part of the university system, if the university system was somewhat [affected by this cut], then we knew that our high school was going to be cut. Either they were going to cut us or they were going to start a payment system, which was going to mean that a lot of us weren’t going to be able to go. We started organizing, and organizing at university level as well. That was October - later in February/March, a full blown student strike blew up across all 11 campuses of the university system, demanding that the university fee that they were trying to implement shouldn’t be implemented. That was my introduction to activism and it was this really real fear of, ‘We are going to lose something that we have right now’. We might survive this but what’s going to happen with all of these other people?
Up until that point, I was on track to become a veterinarian. I didn’t want to work with people, I wanted to help animals, I thought animals were great and selfless, and I didn’t want to work with people. I was actually volunteering to become a vet. And then this thing blew up. I was so concerned about organizing. We barricaded and began to occupy the university.
During the occupation. Photo credit: Alexandra-Marie Figueroa.
I was really inspired by my high school Latin American literature professor, María Gisela Rosado Almedina, who was also a union organizer. She has defended freedom for education her entire life. We were [tear]gassed while protesting on the streets, and she and other professors repeatedly used their bodies to fend off the gas canisters from students' bodies. She was protecting us from the police. That was the groundbreaking moment for me, in which everything shifted. She looked at me and told me, “You’re going to be working on the ground, working with people.”
In university, I specialized in Cultural Anthropology with an emphasis in Latin American studies and I began studying the worst aspects of the human condition. I did a whole field of study on Latin American dictatorships in the ‘70s that were powered by US interventions. I had the opportunity to move to Chile and organize with organizers in Chile, reading books about torture, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and more. But I needed to know that human beings are also capable of being good. We are capable of so much good. It is unfortunate that people who are capable of such evil are in power. I started looking home, and realized that Puerto Rico has been a colony for 200 years. All we know is colonization - from Spain, from the US. We still have been able to do so much with what little liberty we’ve been afforded, and it’s all because of ordinary people who have been organizing for change - especially women. Learning from that has been - that’s why I don’t know when I’ve become an official feminist, I feel like my heart just grows more…. especially [thinking about and working on] civil rights, participation, education, and autonomy. The study of human movement and interaction in the most beautiful of ways.
How would you describe your feminist community today?
The feminist community in PR is not homogenous. The women that built the feminist movements in PR today are still very much alive. We’ve been so held back by our political context, so I’ve gotten to learn from women that made history, like Ana Irma Rivera Lassén — she changed the way women advocated in the courtroom, and was always so open about her sexual identity. I’ve gotten to organize next to her. She’s also a Black woman. I’m working with the new wave of feminism too, like Zoan Dávila Roldán and Shariana Ferrer-Nuñez from La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, and Isabel Valentín, a 17-year-old climate activist. Women who are so much more radical in their approach, as a sign of our times, with a more intersectional, racial approach to it. I’m learning what it’s like to be an ally, to take a back seat. As a White Latina in Puerto Rico, what it means to be a feminist also means to step back and learn. There are also the Gen Z feminists: I’ve had the privilege to serve as a mentor for some of them, and they are so full of energy, and they see the world in such a different light. I think they are less hopeful for the future somehow, but that makes them so much clearer and focused. They’re like, “I think the world is going to end in 10 years, so let’s do this now!” And I’m like, “Okay! Just let me know where to set up.”
The common thread really is the solidarity and the shared experience. Every time that something happens - every time there’s a femicide or an sexual assault, we’ve been organizing because the gender violence problem in Puerto Rico is already terrifying. We are trying to organize a state of emergency for gender violence. We need to socially work to eradicate these violences. Every time another person is hurt, the movement feels it very directly. We take it very personally. Some of us are also survivors, we feel it two-fold, we have a community here.
We have a network of women and feminine bodies - we have a lot of non cis-gendered individuals that are also. We’ve developed certain relationships that go beyond the work that we do - any other family doesn’t go without its conflicts. We support each other. Here it’s small, and we all know each other, and we do a good job in checking in on each other and checking each other’s needs.
I’ve given a lot of time to my day job. I’m the director of communications. Most of our participants don’t have resources to access digital tools and if they do, they don’t necessarily know how to use them. We work with victims of sexual assault, children, leaders - we believe in restorative justice. Any kind of conflict in our communities, we go into these communities to resolve conflicts so that the police don’t get involved.
It’s been really difficult working virtually. My job has become a lot more disassociated. I’m working right now on just making sure that our work can continue because of this pandemic. Donor relations, brand awareness. I need people to recognize what Taller Salud does. I don’t regret it for a second because we haven’t had to lay anyone off, and we’re actually hiring right now because we need more people on the ground. I’ve been donating my time as a freelancer for different projects on mental health and education initiatives. I’ve also been leading efforts for different collectives, like La Clara, which is a civil education project that works primarily through social media for young people on how their civil rights are being affected.
Not just about voting, but what does it mean to vote? We’ve been educating about political candidates, trajectories, and what are these different laws. We’ve been so surprised. It hits home that young people are so ready to take action and so tired of everything that’s been happening to threaten a life of dignity.
In spite of us being locked down, the feminist movements around the world have connected. You could see this for the last 2-3 years, Ireland and Argentina’s feminist movements for abortion rights have gone global. We have become more connected than ever before, sharing resources, sharing aid, sharing spaces of ventilation and support. One of the most beautiful days I’ve had in quarantine, a feminist organization in Colombia reached out to all their contacts to feminist organizations throughout Latin America, 100 women in this call from all social backgrounds, racial identities, we took turns for 3 hours talking about how we are dealing with things, what our country is doing. There’s something so powerful in connecting.
Alexandra-Marie Figueroa Miranda is on Twitter at @elcielodeabril. Here you can make a donation to Taller Salud, a community-based organization working on sexual and reproductive health and rights in Puerto Rico.
Ani Hao is a young feminist writer, journalist and media consultant. She reports on young feminist activism and youth-led social movements globally.
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