September is Hispanic and Latine Heritage Month.
It arrives this year as our government orchestrates violence, fear, and disappearance. People are detained without meaningful due process and denied visitation, dignity, and basic humanity. Families are separated, and children are left without their parents. People are afraid to go to work, seek medical care, report abuse, or simply leave their homes because any encounter with the state can become a pathway into detention and deportation.
Immigration detention is classified as civil rather than punitive. Deportation increasingly runs through criminal legal contact. People are held in cages under a legal fiction that says they are not being punished. That classification is precisely how the protections attached to incarceration can be withheld.
The word civil does not make a cage less of a cage. It makes the cage easier to build.
And the cage does not stop at its walls. A woman does not call the police when she is being hurt at home. A care worker accepts wage theft rather than risk contact with the system. A grandmother skips the clinic. A child stops showing up to school.
The damage is not measured in cases. It is measured in the ways fear teaches an entire community to keep themselves hidden.
But fear is not the only thing being organized.
Across generations, Latine feminists have built another way of understanding power: one that refuses the divisions imposed on us and insists that our freedom is bound together.
This is why the history we celebrate this month matters so much.
Gloria Anzaldúa, the queer feminist writer and cultural theorist whose work transformed how we understand borders, identity, power, and difference, wrote: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”
That is not an invitation to think positively. It is a theory of power.
Fascism depends on narrowing the possible. It tells us there is one kind of family, one kind of citizen, one kind of body, one way to belong. It turns difference into threat and complexity into hierarchy.
Feminism does the opposite.
It insists that our lives are interconnected. That freedom is not divisible. That a democracy worth having must make room for all of us. That the people most often pushed to the margins are not asking for a place at someone else’s table. They are showing us how the table itself needs to change.
This is what Latine feminists have been doing for generations.
Not simply surviving. Not simply resisting. Imagining differently. Building differently.
And that, to me, is the work before us right now.
The antidote to fascism is not optimism.
It is the stubborn, disciplined practice of imagining a world in which no one has to disappear for someone else to feel safe. Where care is infrastructure. Where difference is not a threat to democracy but part of what makes democracy possible. Where abundance is not something reserved for the few, but a condition we build together.
That is a much bigger promise than resilience. And it asks more of us than resilience ever could.
Juntes, y con amor,
Bia Vieira, she/her/elle
CEO, Women’s Foundation California