ABSTRACT
Throughout the globe, and even in the most industrialized nations that boastfully advocate for gender equality, women of color face a world of hyperexploitation and dehumanization (Mohanty, 2003). Their harrowing experiences as racialized women are often met with a monstrous indifference (mostly on the part of Anglos, but also by men of color) that is incessantly condoned in today’s capitalist society. As such, Latinas constitute a double minority in our society-women in a man’s world and persons of color in a White world. In such a situation, it is often the case that even those who profess a shadow of a scruple choose not to acknowledge the plight of women of color, preferring instead to shut their eyes to concrete, racialized violence for the sake of remaining in the thrall of some abstract, rapturous belief that we inhabit a post-racial and post-patriarchal society or some juridical fiction that the government of the United States, while admittedly imperfect, will always in the last instance heed the beseeching cry of the poor and the needy and not rescind from its responsibility to the most vulnerable members of society. Globally, Latinas are structurally positioned within social, cultural, and economic relations of exploitation and domination from which escape seems impossible (Bauer & Ramirez, 2010). We highlight the word ‘seems’ here to underscore the fact that incontrovertible ‘laws’ of exploitation exist only insofar as human beings fail to intervene in order to alter them and thus turn these structures of oppression into a protagonistic history of resistance. Failing such intervention, Latinas will continue to live in a world that knows no single axis of exploitation, but rather, is populated by interlocking oppressions that exploit their bodies, attack their dignity, and treat them as less than human.
