“WOMEN IN THE STRUGGLE”: WOMEN OF COLOR COALITIONAL RELATIONALITIES IN THE COLD WAR ERA

Abstract

This dissertation revisits the 1970s as a key period of unprecedented radical left organizing to explore the complex modes of solidarity integral to the political thought and activism of Black women and Latinas engaged in radical left grassroots movements during the Cold War. In doing so, this project complicates existing investigations of that period and notions of solidarity by exploring the fundamental role that coalition played in the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist Third World women’s organization. Utilizing the primary methods of qualitative expert interviews and archival research, I conduct a relational, interdisciplinary, and intersectional study of the coalitional organizing of the Black women and Latinas who spearheaded the Third World Women’s Committee to Celebrate International Women’s Day (1974-1980) stewarded by the Bay Area, California chapter of the TWWA and El Comité Lolita Lebrón (1974-1977), a committee of the New York City chapter of the TWWA. Through this analysis, I theorize coalitional relationalities as a broad framework for understanding the interconnected political, economic, affective, aesthetic, and ontological relationships that these organizers forged over racial/ethnic lines, time, and multiple scales, to resist colonial categories of difference and hierarchies of power toward freedom. Original interviews with Dr. Vicki Alexander, Frances Beal, Linda Burnham, Rebecca Carrillo, Dr. Concha Delgado-Gaitán, Cheryl Perry League, Dr. Patricia Romney, Dr. Melanie Tervalon, and Dr. Ana Celia Zentella, bring to the fore the everyday coalitional organizing practices and theories of Black women and Latinas who were active as rank-and-file members and leaders in both chapters of the Third World Women’s Alliance. Through archival research I layer into my analysis, close readings of Triple Jeopardy: Racism, Imperialism, Sexism, organizational records, internal position papers, and notes, along with other English and Spanish language movement ephemera of the TWWA and adjacent groups. Furthermore, I examine state responses to their organizing employing close readings of redacted FBI files, interviews, and organizational documents. I analyze the state’s racializing surveillance (Browne 2015), and repression of these activists as connected to capital’s routinized exploitation and surveillance of US Third World women workers. Additionally, I map the resistance strategies that these activists employed to survive and challenge such violence. State surveillance of the TWWA demonstrated the decolonial potentialities of coalitional organizing among poor and working-class women of color as the state engaged in a violent Cold War project of capitalist nation-building.