“¡Ay! ¡Meencantala politica!”(“Oh! Iadorepolitics!”) exclaims Silvia Barajas, a recent arrival in Boston from the Dominican Republic. For her, politics is reaching out to other women and improving their living conditions. Jesus Carrillo, a Cuban-American activist, talks about politics as creating political organizations and increasing Latino electoral representation. The voices ring in my ears, Latina women and Latino men talking about their visions of politics and Latino political participation in Boston. I hear Maria Luisa Soto, a Puerto Rican who moved to Boston many years ago from New York City, talk about the years she has...

To talk about “discovering” Latina women in politics is a little like Columbus “discovering” America: just as the land already existed for its original peoples, Latina women know they have been active politically in Boston for years. Latina women in Boston demonstrate the full range of traditional political roles: running for office, mobilizing voters, mobilizing communities for concrete benefits, and providing political education for new members of the community. In addition, when the definition of “What is political?” is expanded beyond the traditional behaviors of electoral politics, Latina women consistently are the force behind political participation and mobilization in the...

Connectionmay mean many things: intellectual connections between seemingly different ideas, the concept of “having connections” (i.e., being able to wield influence by knowing powerful people), and connection as interpersonal connectedness—developing and maintaining personal relationships and networks.

Julia Santiago voices what many Latina women see as politicspeople connecting personal problems with public issues—when she says: “Politics is making connections. How you relate your personal problem to other people’s problems and then to a community or to a class and you see the contradictions and then you have to decide, ‘Okay, this is what is happening, this is reality....

Dalia Ruiz has been a student at the Mujeres Unidas en Acción women’s center for three years. She is forty-two years old and came to the mainland United States from the island of Puerto Rico almost twenty years ago. An outreach worker from Mujeres¹ invited her to sign up for the ESL (English as a second language) program. At the center, she receives advice about her son, learns English, and develops personal skills “en cuanto a como relacionarme con las demas personas, porque yo antes ino hablaba con nadie!” (“insofar as how to relate to other people, because, before, I...

In traditional, liberal democratic theory, the termcommunityseems narrowly defined as a collection of individuals bound by geographical proximity, as in the “Jamaica Plain community” or the “South End community” in Boston; or by racial and ethnic characteristics, as in the “Latino community” or the “black community.”Communityalso comes to mean a type of political entity through which individual interests—held in common—are asserted; Ackelsberg (1988, 298) suggests that, under liberalism,communitycomes to mean merely a group of individual interest maximizers. Within such a limited-concept of community, diversity and dissension are suppressed in the pursuit of...

For Latina women, political participation is inextricably linked with the development of the political self. At the same time, the political self evolves in conjunction withpersonalself-development. In reciprocal fashion, political consciousness—a sense of “being political”—contributes to, and emerges from, personal and political self-development.

Political consciousness and personal development are also closely connected to community empowerment. Aracelis Guzmán is a Mexican-American woman in her late forties. She has been in the United States for twenty years. Her concerns about her two daughters motivated her first tentative then enthusiastic participation in the struggle for better education for Latinos...

One might well ask at this juncture, why, if Latina women’s emphasis on connectedness, collectivity, community, and consciousness promotes a participatory model of politics, is political participation in the Latino community not at a higher, more visible level. The major reason continues to be that much of the politics that exists is obscured by the definition of “What is political?” The political-mobilization efforts generally utilized by women—efforts promoting the creation of citizens, political consciousness, and the interpersonal relationships of politics—are reduced to a “lesser” form of politics than are elections and access to positions. Nevertheless, it would be...

Despite the constraints that face them as women, and in the process of challenging the constraints that face Latinos in the United States as a group, Latina women in Boston envision a political life that is more participatory than that envisioned by Latino men. The vision of Latina women is based on connectedness rather than personal advancement; collective methods and collective organization rather than hierarchy; community and citizenship generated from personal ties rather than from formal structures; and consciousness raising rather than a response to opportunity. The story of Latina women in politics in Boston is one that deserves to...