Revista Hispánica Moderna

In this extraordinary account, activist and scholar María Pia López provides firsthand testimony of the emergence and transformation of the #NiUnaMenos movement. Writing from the front line, López documents the practices, debates and desires of the feminist collective, the street mobilizations, and the organizational assemblies that have given shape to the movement in Argentina. In 2015, López, along with other Argentine journalists, activists, and artists, announced a call for action via social media to mobilize the public in protest against femicide, in response to the brutal murder of Chiara Páez by her boyfriend. On June 3, 2015, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Buenos Aires to express collective outrage and denounce gender violence in what would be the largest mobilization of women in Argentina's history. Since this groundbreaking march, the #NiUnaMenos movement has grown and expanded in its scope and complexity.

The #NiUnaMenos movement in Argentina displays self-awareness of its origins, lineages and the alliances that sustain it, in stark contrast to the #MeToo movement in the U.S., which achieved great visibility in 2017 through celebrity activism but until recently has been less reflective of its own grassroots past, links to Black [End Page 117] feminisms, and its founding by activist Tarana Burke in 2006. As Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay assert in their commanding foreword to Not One Less, the false notion that "the transnational feminist movement is some brand-new phenomenon, dating to the last three to five years, speaks to a temporal framing shaped by a blind (and in many cases irritatingly white!) English-speaking gaze from the Global North" (vii). A vital first step in achieving this "reframing" is the translation of critical works such as López's and its wide-spread distribution to English speaking audiences. Frances Riddle's meticulous and eminently readable translation of the book introduces Anglophone readers to crucial feminist perspectives from Latin America, drawing attention to the circuits of knowledge flowing from South to North and effectively refuting mainstream messaging that suggests, for example, that #NiUnaMenos is a Latin American version of #MeToo, or that Latin America lags behind the U.S. in its acknowledgment of gender violence.

López, a co-founder of the first #NiUnaMenos march, delivers a riveting account of the movement, attending to the genealogies of activism and feminism and transnational networks that paved the way and continue to support the current explosion of feminist mobilization in Argentina and across Latin America. She illuminates the deep histories of feminist action in Argentina—from the suffragist pioneers to the militants of the seventies, the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and the female piqueteras—and highlights the transversality of this action over time, inscribed in an international genealogy of Latin American feminists, Black feminists of the sixties, and trans-activists. López's book is theoretically broad-ranging and showcases critical perspectives from feminist theorists, activists, and scholars based in Latin America, including Rita Laura Segato, Verónica Gago, Lohana Berkins, Cecilia Palmeiro, Luciana Peker, Marta Dillon, Pilar Calveiro, Maria Moreno, and Rossanna Reguillo. Drawing on case studies from across the Americas, she establishes a broad, transnational framework for the analysis of systemic violence against women.

López writes consciously of #NiUnaMenos as a movement that is underway and open-ended. Indeed, both the movement's outcome and the origin stories are pending and in flux: "Some of us say that we are the daughters of 3 June 2015," yet others say they are daughters of the national women's strike on October 19, 2016 (97). Of significance here is the intergenerational inscription of positionality of its members, the acknowledgement of a legacy of collective action that precedes and continues to nourish current strands of feminism. At stake, according...