“Asamblea de Niñas”: exploring the bonds between children’s participation and the feminist movement in Buenos Aires

Abstract

In this work we seek to describe and analyse a feminist children’s participation experience called Asamblea de Niñas (Girls´ Assembly) which is part of a community-based organisation in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina), called AulaVereda. We will ponder upon the particularities of the children’s participation practices that emerge linked to the feminist movement and the shape adopted by the intergenerational relationships in this new global and massive form of political participation with its regional and local manifestations. With more than ten years of cultural and educational activism, AulaVereda has been working with children of varied ages that live in squatted houses (and other forms of precarious housing), promoting children’s participation. The Asamblea is conformed by girls between 10 and 14 years old and some of the adult (women) activists of the organisation. We will narrate the development of this Asamblea de Niñas experience between 2019 and 2020, years of expansion of the feminist movement in Argentina and Latin America, which has opened the door for multiple minorities towards social and political debate, including the youth. In order to shed some light over the girls’ participation modes, we will analyse some key moments of the Assembly’s trajectory: the preparation and journey of the girls to the Encuentro Plurinacional de Mujeres (Women’s Plurinational Meeting), a national event that occurs every year and one of the most relevant for the feminist movement in Argentina; their engagement with the December 2020 demonstrations, when abortion was legalized after years of political activism, and the functioning during the pandemic (through written letters and Internet dialogues) to support each other during hardship over quarantine. We will work with individual interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to reach this aim.We assume that childhood is a relational concept as children are permanently affected by their relationships with the adults they share their life with, including ourselves, two anthropologists that participate in AulaVereda as activists, and have been researching in this community organisation over the last six years as well. This paper will avoid a quantitative assessment of the children’s participation in the Asamblea de Niñas, in order to focus on what the girls signify by their participation there, as a proposal for the democratization of life amongst so many patriarchal, ageist, racial and class violences.