Finding Feminism through Faith: Casa Yela,Popular Feminism,and the Women-Church Movement in Chile

The Theory and Practice of Popular Feminism in Chile

Maria Stella Toro’s work as both a feminist historian and a member of the popular feminist groups ReSueltas Feministas Populares and Educación Popular en Salud is important for our understanding of popular feminist praxis and theory in that it continually crosses the activist/academic divide and reminds us of the importance of popular feminists in the construction of methodology and theory relevant to Chilean and Latin American feminist history (Calvin and Toro, 2003; Toro, 1997; 2018a; 2018b): “The sexist, racist, and classist society in which we live has established hierarchies in our ways of knowing, validating certain knowledge over others and validating certain subjects over others as fonts of knowledge. Feminism—particularly, feminist popular education—breaks down these barriers, since it is based on the premise that we all have knowledge” (Toro, 2018b). ² The Argentine popular feminist Claudia Korol (2016: 16) defines popular feminism as follows: “Popular feminisms try to understand how to take apart the violence of colonial and patriarchal capitalism. . . . These are feminisms that do and defend, that care for and criticize, that are part of but also question socialist and antipatriarchal revolutions.” ³

Here we can see some grounding in specific Latin American issues with regard to feminisms and the left. Popular feminisms question patriarchy, capitalism, and coloniality but also the larger socialist and feminist movements that they are frequently part of. They are the dedo en la llaga (finger in the wound) of feminist movements (criticizing them for being too white, bourgeois, and colonial) and of socialist and other “popular power” social movements (criticizing them for being machista, heteronormative, and androcentric). They have recently been enriched by intersectional, decolonial, antiracist, and communitarian feminisms highlighting the relations between class, gender, coloniality, heteronormativity, and racism (Espinosa, Gómez, and Ochoa, 2014; Lugones, 2011). In all of this work, it is important to highlight the presence of women who not only write about but also come from and continue to be part of the popular sectors, because in doing so we help to break down the barriers to validating knowledge production outside of academia or from marginalized spaces within it (for example, by untenured, part-time scholars). Latin American academia is classed, racialized, and gendered; including and analyzing the contributions of racially and ethnically diverse popular feminists to Latin American feminist theory, practice, and affect must be a priority for feminist research.

Unfortunately, race and ethnicity have been largely absent from discussions of Chilean feminisms, including popular feminisms, until very recently (Hiner, 2019b; Vera, 2014). That it is still quite common for Chileans to conceptualize themselves as homogeneously white or mestizo is largely due to the exaltation of a Euro-white ruling oligarchy made more robust by migration schemes to incentivize white European immigration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in order to dispossess Mapuche communities in the South (Mallon, 2005). However, it also has to do with the cultural centrality for both elites and the masses of the Central Valley masculine mestizo huaso (hillbilly) in the construction of the Chilean nation-state (Montecino, 1991). The city of Talca is one of the Central Valley’s largest capital cities, in the heart of huaso culture, connected to traditional agriculture and its deeply classed and gendered symbols related to hacendados and peasants (Hiner, 2019a; 2019b; Tinsman, 2002). Casa Yela women are related, in that sense, both to the popular feminisms of pobladoras (women shantytown residents) and, albeit more remotely, to those of campesinas, since many of them are first- or second-generation migrants to Talca from the surrounding rural areas. In Chile both of these categories are explicitly classed as part of the “popular sectors” and implicitly categorized racially as mestizo or not-exactly-white, although in this last case the centering of huaso culture as an authentically national Chilean culture elides First Nations and Afro-descendant cultural influences.

Feminist academic work on pobladoras and popular feminism in Chile has largely been written by feminist activist academics, the majority not popular-sector women themselves. The early publications of the 1980s and 1990s (Kirkwood, 1986; Valdés and Weinstein, 1993; Valenzuela, 1987) situated popular-sector women as an important oppositional force to the Pinochet dictatorship. Additionally, following a tendency in Latin American scholarship at that time, they positioned popular-sector women’s activism as a new form of politics, one that was more “horizontal,” participative, and equal (Jelin, 1990; Molyneux, 2003; Valenzuela, 1998). By the late 1990s, the literature on popular feminisms in Chile had begun to take a much more critical turn. Chilean radical autonomous lesbian feminists such as Margarita Pisano and Victoria Aldunate were also popular feminists— Aldunate from the popular sectors, Pisano not—but very active in popular education projects with popular-sector women. Pisano passed away in 2015, but Aldunate is still extremely active in workshops, lectures, and other activities with popular-sector women, although her popular feminism has taken a decolonial and antiracist turn. In any case, both women were extremely vocal in their rejection of “institutionalized” feminists—for example, those who were active in political parties or the National Women’s Service, involved in the autonomous-versus-institutionalized conflict that erupted at the 1996 Encounter of Latin American and Caribbean Feminists in Cartagena (Aldunate, 2012; Mogrovejo, 2010; Pisano, 2004). A large part of this rejection had to do with the marginalization of popular feminist groups, many ignored by the Chilean state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as being insufficiently “professional” and “educated”—both loaded, classist terms. Since, during the 1990s, Chile was also a very conservative and heteropatriarchal state (Hiner and Azócar, 2015), it should perhaps not surprise us that lesbian feminists were in the vanguard of criticizing the neoliberal, heteronormative, patriarchal state. However, following the pioneering work of Sonia Alvarez (1997) on the “NGOization” of Latin American feminist groups, academics who have worked on women and gender in Chile during the 1990s and 2000s—for example. Susan Franceschet (2003), Patricia Richards (2004), and Verónica Schild (1998)—have also situated tensions between women’s groups and the Chilean state in relation to the rampant neoliberalism and consensus politics of the Concertación governments.

In parallel to this specifically feminist activist academic production, other types of social science and historical analyses have also been key in studies of poblador/a activism, influenced particularly by Latin American Marxist dependency theory and “new social movement” theory (Oxhorn, 1995; Schneider, 1995). In the case of Chilean historiography, it is most common to find pobladoras in social history analyses (Espinoza, 1988; Garcés, 2002; Garcés and Leiva, 2005), but social history in Chile has a checkered and sometimes contentious relationship with feminist history. ⁴ Additionally, it has tended to minimize the importance of gender and sexualities, focusing instead on the class-based aspect of pobladora political organizing. More recent social history studies that reference pobladoras include some gendered elements in their analyses of communitarian experiences of neighborhood political organizing and human rights activism during the dictatorship (Bruey, 2018; Valenzuela, 2014). However, studies of pobladoras that play down the importance of feminist praxis and theory in popular-sector mobilization are still unfortunately common.

Primarily taking into account the literature on Chilean pobladoras and popular feminism written by feminist academics (Calvin and Toro, 2003; Hiner, 2011; 2013; 2019a; Raposo, López, and Acuña, 2014; Richards, 2004; Toro, 1997; Valdés and Weinstein, 1993; Valenzuela, 1987), the following components are usually referenced in referring to popular feminist groups: (1) having a majority of group members who identify themselves as being from the “popular” class, describing themselves or their families as poor, working-class, peasants, popular-sector, pobladores; ⁵ (2) proposing popular feminist work that is aligned with the interests and needs of popular-sector women, for example, the creation of communal soup kitchens or food banks, communitarian responses to violence, and/or the organization of cooperatives in order to promote community sustainability and economic survival; and (3) generally promoting a neighborhood-based, communitarian approach to solving problems and addressing women’s needs (and their families’ needs), often through dense networks of horizontal, reciprocal relationships that promote collective responses to moments of crisis. Additionally, many feminist historians have pointed to the fact that shantytown women were important leaders of land occupations and the local grassroots organizations that emerged in these locations, since they were primarily concerned with everyday responsibilities associated with motherhood and caregiving (Raposo, López, and Acuña, 2014). Sometimes this leadership led to their building bridges with the Chilean feminist movement, especially through antidictatorship opposition work, in this manner becoming popular feminists in the process.

Methodological Note

My work with the Yela group has been an ongoing situated feminist reflection, ⁶ one that seeks to learn from feminist pasts in order to create feminist futures. This article is only one limited dimension of that reflection. Research for this article was done between 2008 and 2012 and included oral histories, ethnography, national and regional press review, and a detailed analysis of Casa Yela archives and Yela women’s personal archives. Recognizing the implicit power differentials involved in doing interviews and ethnography with women and especially pobladoras (Gluck and Patai, 1991; Srigley, Zembrzycki, and Iacovetta, 2018), I echo Florencia Mallon (2005) in stating that I consider my work with the Yela women to have been centered on promoting productive dialogues between us, dialogues that do not diminish the limitations of the “partial histories” that can be drawn from them.

Pobladoras and Maryknoll Sisters, 1973–1986

During the 1960s and 1970s the northern suburban areas of Talca, such as Villa la Paz and Villa José Miguel Carrera, were founded, many through land occupations led by women. This is when the majority of mestiza pobladoras who would later make up the Yela group arrived, many from the surrounding countryside and therefore coming from the huaso culture. Studies of the leadership of pobladoras in the land occupations and the formation of settlements (Calvin and Toro, 2003; Hiner, 2011; 2013; 2019a; Raposo, López, and Acuña, 2014; Richards, 2004; Toro, 1997; Valdés and Weinstein, 1993; Valenzuela, 1987) remind us that popular-sector women were already quite organized and politicized during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, in many of these shantytowns there was also a strong Catholic Church presence, particularly due to missionaries and laypeople who worked together to form Christian base communities ⁷ and strong local parishes (Smith, 1982). In this context, the Maryknoll sisters ⁸ Laura Magallanes and Jessie Poynton ended up settling in this same Talca neighborhood in the early 1970s. ⁹ The 1973 coup and the state terrorism and mass poverty that followed led the sisters to intensify their organizing efforts, establishing a common pot (olla común) and a popular kitchen (comedor popular) in the parish. These strategies of collective organizing to combat hunger, which amounted to many popular-sector women’s coming together, making small donations to buy food or having the Church provide some basic foodstuffs, and then collectively cooking and distributing meals to neighborhood families, including their own, were very common in poor and working-class areas throughout Latin America in the 1980s.

Over time, and as neighborhood women began to spend time together and trust one another, these spaces also became places where women could speak about difficult subjects, including the intimate-partner violence that they were dealing with in their homes. This is the historic moment, around 1986, when the Yela group, named for the two sisters (Ye for “Yessi” [Jessie] and La for Laura), was founded, dedicated to combating violence against women in the neighborhood. As Leonarda Gutiérrez, a pobladora Yela group member, reflected (interview, Talca, December 13, 2008):

We opened a [popular] kitchen, and through the kitchen we began to detect women that were living with violence, because they came to get their meals. . . . It bears repeating that the common pot was very common [smiling at play on words]. But we started to realize that the women were arriving beaten up, with their eyes blackened. . . . At first, and to be able to start, so the husbands would let them leave their homes, we sent a notice that there was going to be a meeting in the [popular] kitchen. . . . That’s when we began to awaken them, make them recognize that they were living with violence.

In this manner, by clandestinely talking about violence against women while also formally obtaining “permission” from husbands for them to work in the popular kitchen, the Yela group was able to establish trust with its neighbors and the women that it was working with.

The leaders of this group were the Maryknoll sisters, who had a privileged place in the community as organizers of activities in the parish and missionary women who had access to materials and discourses that were circulating in the Global North concerning violence against women, particularly with regard to the new feminist-oriented theology and its explicit rejection of patriarchy, machismo, and violence. It has become difficult to remember that for many years, and especially during the dictatorship in Chile, the Catholic Church enjoyed a broadly appreciated privileged status as the country’s moral compass and leader in human rights protections (Cruz, 2004). Situating my discussion of religiosity and popular feminism largely with regard to the Catholic Church and its women missionaries, however, means that I must introduce two key caveats. First, while I will be talking about the positive contributions of some missionary women religious to Latin American feminist activism, I am not unaware of the brutal and violent impact of the Church on Latin American women, particularly nonheterosexual and non-cisgender people (Galindo, 2016) and Afro-descendant and indigenous women (Curiel and Galindo, 2015; Espinosa, Gómez, and Ochoa, 2014; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010). Nor am I unaware of the imperialist associations that accompany missionary work, based on the idea of a “civilizing mission” and “bringing progress” to the underdeveloped world, which can be easily translated into the paternal, “under-Western-eyes” way of seeing Third World women as submissive and beaten-down (Mohanty, 1991).

Additionally, although it may seem obvious, it bears remembering that the Catholic Church is patriarchal and sexist in its very nature. For these same reasons of inequality and differentiated roles due to gender stereotypes, women religious are commonly assigned to caregiving tasks and sent to the poorest and least desired locations to do missionary work. For these reasons, then, it should not surprise us that second-wave feminism had a direct and interesting effect on many women religious, particularly by bringing new ideas and practices related to the women-church movement and a questioning not only of patriarchy more generally but also of patriarchy within the Church (Drogus and Stewart-Gambino, 2005; Gervais and Sjolander, 2015; Hunt, 2009; Ruether, 1988; Wallace, 1988). As Rosemary Radford Ruether (2007) has written, the women-church movement was established in 1983 in the United States, seeking to unite men and women in equality to reflect as a community on the liturgy and social justice work. The Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) was founded in 2007 and brought together renowned feminist theologians working on social justice issues. Mary E. Hunt (a cofounder of WATER), Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, as important feminist theologians of the time, helped to cement the influence of the women-church movement and its connections to women religious throughout the world. This movement was not merely concerned with the inequalities that women religious faced within Church hierarchies but also extremely critical of androcentric and misogynistic interpretations ¹⁰ of Christianity and its key tenets and doctrines.

In the case of Latin America, while liberation theology ¹¹ opened up the possibility of a “poor people’s church” and more horizontal relationships between clergy and laypeople in Christian base communities, women within the Church continued to occupy a secondary position (Gilfeather, 1979). For this reason, instead of liberation theology it was the introduction of the concept of “women’s liberation” related to ties with feminist social movements (Alvarez, 1990) that opened up new and interesting horizons for women religious and Catholic women. This was particularly the case for many missionary women religious, although their overall numbers have been small. ¹² However, as Ann Drogus and Hannah Stewart-Gambino (2005) have explored in detail, the feminist leanings of progressive women religious had direct and important implications for Latin American popular feminisms. The Yela group’s Maryknoll sisters, for example, were influenced by secular feminist ideas as well as by the women-church movement. As Sister Jessie Poynton reflects, “We were reading Mary Daley, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sister Joan Chittister, and Sister Sandra Schneiders, besides becoming awakened by input from our own new younger sisters. We had to agree that the position of women in society around the world and in the Church is, to say the least, second-class, subordinate, inferior, and oppressive” (e-mail interview, February 25, 2010).

Out of this, the first women’s centers and shelters for violence against women were established in Chile, generally in shantytowns and with the participation of women religious. In 1985, the Casa Sofía was founded in Cerro Navia, followed by the Casa Malén in Lo Prado a year later; both projects were led by missionary women religious who included Carolyn Lehmann (Maryknoll Sisters, United States), Peggy Moran (Franciscan, United States), and Monica Hingston (Sisters of Mercy, Australia). These projects inspired the founding of the Yela group in 1986 in Talca. Returning to Sister Jessie’s recollections of this time:

We sent some of our Talca women to workshops given by the women’s centers in Santiago. Our women were responding wholeheartedly. They were able to reflect on and participate in the presentations and recognize and appreciate that the dignity and value of a human being is innate and comes from God and not from society or men. Women were not created to serve men but to share equally in the joys and fulfillment of life. This was truly consciousness-raising and affirming.

Sister Jessie’s use of the term “consciousness-raising” alerts us to the influence of second-wave feminism on antiviolence work, since it was in small, participative feminist consciousness-raising groups that women began to talk about the gender violence that they had experienced. ¹³ Out of these often-cathartic sessions, new political strategies and frameworks were born.

The Yela Group Finds its “Casa” (1986–1994)

From the moment of its formation, the Yela group began to be very active in learning about violence against women and sharing that knowledge with local pobladoras. For example, in 1987, several Yela women attended the First Popular Women’s Meeting in Santiago, organized by Casa Sofía, Casa Malén, and Siempre Vivas. In 1988 the Yela group organized two important activities in the parish, both based on the feminist model of consciousness-raising groups. The first, held in April 1988 and called “Is There a Place for Me?,” was an opportunity to meet with the women who had organized the popular women’s meeting the year before. In the materials from this meeting what is interesting is the extent to which a Christian women-church perspective is integrated into the work they were doing (personal archive, Elena Valenzuela). For example, solidarity is studied through the Biblical story of the friendship between Ruth and Naomi, and the Old Testament is used to show that women were treated as sexual objects. Connections to the Church were still so strong at this time that the Talca bishopric’s newsletter, Comunicando, covered this meeting in its pages.

A few months later the Yela group, now identified publicly as such, invited pobladoras from the northern Talca neighborhoods to a consciousness-raising meeting called “What Is Patriarchy?” Clearly, this was an important moment for the Yela group, since it had now begun to use common feminist symbology (such as the woman symbol) and reference feminist discourse (using the word “patriarchy”). This signaled a shift toward more secular feminist views within the group.

By 1988, the Yela group was rather well organized, between the Maryknoll sisters’ leadership and its work with a core group of around 10 pobladoras from the area where they lived. This was a key year in Chile, since on October 5, 1988, a nationwide plebiscite was held to determine whether the Pinochet dictatorship would continue for another 10 years. Masses of Chileans turned out to vote, and the final tally was 44 percent yes and 56 percent no. As a result, new democratic elections were set for 1989. The Yela group decided to march in support of Anti-Violence-against-Women Day on November 25, 1988. Elena Valenzuela, who was very close to the Maryknoll sisters and would later lead the Yela group for many years, spiritedly remembered this first march (interview, Talca, February 15, 2010):

We said, “Let’s go march with these women!” The first time in Talca, we didn’t even ask for permission first from the authorities. . . . We put T-shirts on, we made signs—which weren’t very well done because we didn’t have the resources—we had chants, we did all kinds of things that came from our imagination, and we marched down the main Talca street. And, you know what? They threw stones at us [from construction in the center of Talca]! The bosses of the stores stood in their doorways and said, “Crazy women!,” “Go make us lunch!,” “Fools!,” and many other worse things.

In archival photos that Elena had kept from this march we see the Yela women in their new T-shirts with violet lettering that read “Never Again a Woman Beaten” holding hand-painted signs with phrases such as “No More Beatings!” A list of chants included in her personal archive included phrases such as “Women, Wake Up!,” “Don’t Let Them Hit You!,” and “Let’s Be Optimists, the Machistas Are Done for.”

By the 1990s, then, the Yela group had accomplished a number of its goals. It was a functioning women’s group that attended to pobladoras’ needs in the northern shantytowns of Talca; it was able to do some limited travel within Chile, was recognized by other groups working on violence, and was creating its own materials and conducting workshops.

Additionally, it had achieved a rare feat for its time: marching publicly on November 25 to protest violence against women. During the 1990s the Yela group would become “Casa Yela” as it managed to secure its own house and open a battered-women’s shelter. In fact, Casa Yela was one of only a few battered-women’s shelters available in Chile, and so it began to receive women from all over the region and even some from outside the region, to appear in the press, to participate in state-funded antiviolence projects, and to be recognized both regionally and nationally for its important work. This was a “golden age” for Casa Yela and popular feminism in Chile more generally as communitarian strategies for working on violence against women were made more potent by a state that had little practical experience in antiviolence work and therefore worked with popular feminist antiviolence organizations. Additionally, during this period there was still a great deal of international attention being paid to Chile for having recently emerged from 17 years of dictatorship and therefore a relatively large amount of international donor interest that could be funneled into international financing of local popular feminist projects.

The 1990s also saw a number of shifts in Casa Yela that would noticeably alter its dynamics and strategies. Perhaps most important, the Maryknoll sisters left Talca in 1990. After their departure, Elena Valenzuela became president of Casa Yela. At the same time, the Yela group moved away from the Church, becoming much more explicitly “feminist” through its experiences combating violence and through training sessions with Santiago-based feminist groups that certified it as a domestic-violence monitor. Second, the house that the Yela group ended up buying with help from an international NGO in 1994 was not in the neighborhood where it was formed but in a slightly more middle-class one, and this meant a certain amount of fragmentation of the original project as the locus of antiviolence work shifted from a communitarian, neighborhood-based scheme to one that attended to greater numbers of women from Talca and other areas of the Maule region and beyond. Finally, the new presence of the National Women’s Service and state interest in violence-against-women policy meant that the Yela women became involved in an urgent and increasingly complicated dialogue with the state, usually personified by regional directors and family-violence workers many of whom had only limited knowledge about violence against women. For a variety of reasons that I have explored elsewhere (Hiner, 2011; 2013; 2019a), in 2009 Casa Yela shut its doors.

Final Reflections on Casa Yela and Popular Feminism in Chile

Why is it so important to recover the feminist histories of groups like Casa Yela? On the one hand, as a feminist activist–academic historian I feel that younger generations should learn how the Yela women articulated themselves in a context of extreme poverty and authoritarian repression. Their rebellion against the patriarchal norms of their families and neighbors and their work together to combat hunger and violence in their community should be part of Chilean history, which is all too often dominated by the androcentric narratives of (male) elites and (male) workers. Even when pobladoras have been included in Chilean history, it has been through the lens of class-based or human rights organizing and seldom through explicitly feminist or gendered frameworks. Finally, in any number of texts written by feminist activist academics from the 1980s on the focus has largely been on shantytowns in Santiago. My work on Casa Yela, then, seeks to contribute to Chilean historiography and Chilean feminist historiography on pobladoras as well as to the analysis of contemporary Latin American popular feminisms.

At the same time, though, we must study the challenges that groups like Casa Yela faced. The potent mix of popular feminism that I have presented here—economic-need- based, pobladora-led communitarian projects, women-church feminist theology and antiviolence work, and a larger feminist pushback against patriarchal authoritarianism—existed in a situated space and time and had its strengths and its weaknesses. The manner in which this antiviolence work was framed, for example, was already wearing thin for the Yela group itself by 1990. The group’s decision to incorporate some aspects of sexual education and reproductive rights into its communitarian work put it at odds with the Church hierarchy; many Yela women blame this, at least in part, for the departure of the Maryknoll sisters. In their travels to other cities and meetings with feminists from other groups, the Yela women also began to question their ingrained notions of traditional Christian gender relations and how they affected their antiviolence work.

However, several Yela women also mentioned that Talca was a conservative city, and it was very difficult for them to broach more controversial feminist issues. Elena Valenzuela expressed doubts about what feminism meant to her and to the Yela group (interview, Talca, February 15, 2010):

We started out as a feminist group, but a feminism that wasn’t so extreme. Where we really fit in with feminism is with the idea that you shouldn’t hit women. That was something that we really understood. When they interviewed me, they would say that I was a feminist. If by “feminist” you mean defending the rights of women, I am a feminist, [but] I don’t run through the streets naked, I don’t “burn my bra” because of men. Men are really good people. I love them. I am single, but I don’t have anything against men. Feminism was also making men suffer and fighting against them. I didn’t agree with that. . . . Feminism for me was: speaking out about violence against women, not that other extreme feminism. . . . Of course, sometimes I was all about feminism—when I had to fight for women’s rights, for example—but, yes, the word “feminism” was very strong for some women.

Many political parties and even popular-sector groups continue to see feminism as a divisive political discourse. The Chilean feminist philosopher Alejandra Castillo has written at length about the preoccupation of Chilean feminism throughout the twentieth century with defining itself as “good” feminism, a gentler, more maternal, feminine feminism set up as a direct refutation of the “bad” feminism of women in the Global North, which was seen as too hard, extreme, and masculine (Castillo, 2005; 2014). In part, this is surely some of what Elena is referencing as “extreme feminism” and “running through the streets naked.” However, her comment also touches upon class divisions among educated, elite, urban feminists and the way pobladoras like Elena think about their own popular feminism, one that is predicated on the everyday fight against violence and that takes pains to note that men, particularly men from their own families and communities, are not the enemy. On the one hand, this is clearly a reference to “good feminism,” primarily heterosexual, maternal, and feminine—all characteristics that were surely bolstered by the women-church Christian influence on the Yela group. On the other hand, it echoes working-class U.S. black and Latina women’s questioning in the 1980s of radical separatist feminism and its tendency to divorce feminist political struggles and antiviolence work from communitarian and antiracist struggles (Combahee River Collective, 2015 [1977]; Davis, 2004; hooks, 2000 [1984]). Men from the working-class community are not the enemy because the community must work together to end gender violence and overcome the numerous socioeconomic hurdles associated with neoliberalism and extreme poverty.

At the same time, and in contrast with women-of-color antiviolence groups throughout the Americas, we also must recognize that, beyond relating violence to class and the shantytowns, the Yela group generally did not work on violence from an intersectional perspective. Race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity were absent from their discussions. Some Yela women did go on to work with LGBTQ+ groups. For example, Benedicta Aravena and Guacolda Saavedra, as part of the Centro Social Quidell, were close allies of the Talca group Transgéneras por el Cambio and worked with it on antiviolence initiatives in the region. However, in general, this was not an aspect of Casa Yela’s work. Again, we cannot help but wonder what role Catholic values may have played here. While this was understandable in the 1980s and 1990s, when these topics were generally not talked about, by the mid- to late 2000s it was perhaps more questionable even in a small city in the Chilean heartland. However, at that point, Casa Yela was on the brink of collapse.

Popular feminism is once again flourishing in Chile in relation to indigenous, black, and migrant women’s struggles and younger student-based movements and newer political parties. It is quite different from the older models that we have seen in this paper. Much new feminist antiviolence work, particularly work related to black, Latina, and trans women in the United States, has focused on transformative justice and community accountability (INCITE!, 2006; Sokoloff, 2005) and to a certain extent this has also begun to happen in Chile. However, as we have seen here, community-based popular feminist antiviolence work also existed previously. In both Global North and Global South contexts, it might be interesting to think about the possibility that community-based initiatives could have progressive faith-based components and about the pros and cons of integrating the religious and the spiritual into popular feminist antiviolence work. In the case of present-day Chile, for example, the huge political and social awakening that has taken place since the October 18, 2019, uprisings in conjunction with the COVID-19 health and economic crisis has spurred the creation of new ollas comunes in popular-sector neighborhoods, many related to popular feminist and women’s groups and some also to local churches. In this current context of renewed economic crisis, state human rights abuses, and popular feminist grassroots organizing, Casa Yela’s story is intriguing in the possibilities that it offers both as a Latin American popular feminist project and as an example of applied women-church feminist theology in antiviolence work. As it called for dignity in the 1980s, so we do today, renaming Santiago’s Plaza Italia the Plaza de la Dignidad and centering dignity as a key demand in recent Chilean social upheavals hasta la dignidad se haga costumbre (until dignity becomes the custom).