Season 2, Episode 2: #EstadoDeEmergencia: Organizing to End Gender-based Violence in PR

Zoán Tanís Dávila Roldán of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción

In our second episode, we interview Black feminist lawyer and activist, Zoán Tanís Dávila Roldán of La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción about the #EstadoDeEmergencia campaign.

As multi-pronged attacks and femicides have risen alarmingly after Hurricane María and most recently, during the Covid19 pandemic, women, Transgender women, and girls of color – especially from low-income, Black, immigrant, LGBTQ and Indigenous communities- Puerto Rican feminists have urged the government to declare Puerto Rico in a “state of emergency”.

In this patriarchal and heteronormative society, the majority of the cases of crimes driven by gender-based violence remain in impunity. Globally, numbers continue to rise exponentially and feminist social movements such as #MeToo, #NotOneMore, #Nos QueremosVivas have proven the urgency of this matter. Feminists in Puerto Rico have been fighting for decades, working on policy, researching and collecting data from a gender based lens, articulating proposals as well as gender perspective curricula. Yet the local government continues to ignore their demands.

Confronting patriarchy and its institutions serves as an antidote to the epidemic of gender violence that our archipelago is submerged in.