Edinburgh’s Charco Press brings readers the best in Latin American fiction, but their latest book sees editor Carolina Orloff compile essays on feminism across the continent. We asked her to tell us why this project is so important to her and Charco Press.

La Lucha: Latin American Feminisms Today
Edited by Carolina Orloff
Published by Charco Press

What is the genesis of La Lucha? Why did you want to put this book together?

La Lucha comes from an intense desire that is the same one that gave birth to Charco: an urgent need to give visibility to Latin American voices and Latin American realities in the English-speaking world, which tends to be dominated by a mindset that, generally speaking, shies away from all-things translated, in the broadest sense of the term translation.

In recent years, women in Latin America have been leading profound social and political transformations, advancing feminist movements and human rights struggles in ways that are often unprecedented globally. As a woman living in the UK, where the realities of gender equality and social activism are very different, I felt it was essential for La Lucha to exist, and for people to access the experiences of these authors, activists and intellectuals. The book brings these voices and experiences to an international audience, offering insights into the courage, creativity, and resilience of Latin American women who are reshaping society, and inspiring readers beyond the region to engage with these vital struggles.

And Carolina writes in the Preface:

Feminism is ubiquitous (and so it should be) but not all feminisms are everywhere. This anthology arrives as both rupture and bridge: Latin American voices cross over not as guests, not as footnotes, but as protagonists in a global struggle for meaning and justice, where too often only a few feminisms are allowed to speak for the world. The pieces here collated are more than text: they are the catalysts of political consciousness, resistance, and transformation, taking place in a region which is generally neglected in the international weaving of idea formation. While bringing together a wide array of voices, this collection does not aim to smooth out or iron them into harmony; quite the opposite, it wants to celebrate and disseminate their differences, frictions, contradictions – their disobedient brilliance.

La Lucha, the title of this collection, expresses the powerful junction of feminist voices from Latin America. It is the noun in Spanish for fight, battle, confrontation. It is also the conscious action of resistance, the active representation of rage: an empowering sentiment running through the visions for change that bring these texts together. A fury that expands with and through the cultural complexities of a region marked by colonialism, social injustice, neglect, patriarchy. It is a common root igniting the women of Latin America to speak and fight for a life in dignity, for the acknowledgement of women’s rights, voices, bodies, actions, perspectives, desires, practices.

Rooted in testimony, reflection, and defiance, these texts do not represent a cultured invitation to ‘diversify’ the canon. Rather, they are a call to reorient the script, to deepen and widen the lenses through which feminist action – both everyday and revolutionary, intimate and historical – is understood and enacted. The aim is not to discard European or Anglo feminisms, but to decentre them, to demand recognition in a global arena of feminisms still unreflective of the plurality of streams that make up its political force, to leave a mark.

La Lucha wants to look at patriarchy in the eye, unravelling the literary and social fabrics of feminism through varied and deep-rooted genealogies – of land, labour, care, defiance, death, and resistance. In so doing, it rejects the quiet violence of absence and the polished coherence of singular narratives. From land-rights movements to city streets, from communal life to the solitude of resistance in the barrio, the ideas collected here create a shared space where contradiction need not collapse into confusion, and solidarity is not simplification

Latin American feminism is not a singular river but a constellation of moving, breathing, life-bearing currents. As such, what this anthology wants to offer is not curated harmony but rather a gathering of tensions: Indigenous, Black, queer, migrant, working-class, academic, literary, insurgent.

La Lucha aims to represent the struggle for life itself, for a new politics of care and self-determination. In a world still shaped by colonial and linguistic hierarchies, this book builds a politically diverse, horizontal space. In La Lucha, heterogeneity is not a challenge to be fixed via universalizing codes of conduct or understanding: it offers no artificial consensus, but instead opens a space for the mindful interplay of tension and convergence, solidarity and difference; elements that give rise to a still-unwoven landscape of feminist political imagination from Latin America.

La Lucha: Latin American Feminisms Today, edited by Carolina Orloff is published by Charco Press, priced £14.99.