ABSTRACT
A cadre of Latin American feminists appeared to have acquired considerable skill in navigating the often murky waters of global and regional policy arenas. To contextualize the analysis of contemporary movement advances and contradictions, it is first necessary to trace briefly how Latin American feminists configured a distinct cultural-political identity during the 1970s and early 1980s. Most of the national and regional movement documents generated during the Beijing process emphasized the "plural", "multicultural", and "pluriethnic" character of Latin American and Caribbean societies and women's movements. In the 1990s, a relatively new phenomenon—the feminist nongovernmental organization (NGO)—came to play a prominent and highly controversial role in sustaining and articulating the constitutive webs of the expansive Latin American feminist movement field. Indeed, the absorption of some of the more culturally acceptable items of the feminist agenda fostered the increased specialization and professionalization of growing numbers of feminist NGOs dedicated to intervening in national and international policy processes.
