Diana Sierra Becerra
Assistant Professor of History

OFFICE HOURS
BACKGROUND
I’m a historian of women and gender in Latin America who specializes in social movements and revolutions.
My forthcoming book, The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador, will soon be published by Cambridge University Press. The book covers five decades of struggle, from 1965 to 2015, telling the stories of peasant and working-class women who organized class struggle against landowners, military officers, and imperialists. I demonstrate how women confronted sexism and developed a vision of women’s liberation within radical movements. The book narrates a dynamic and contentious political process in which rank-and-file women changed the meaning and course of revolution. As a result, I challenge dominant characterizations of revolutionary movements as monolithic, static, and dominated by urban intellectual men.
My book makes two major contributions. First, I build on recent scholarship that has identified peasants and teachers as popular intellectuals. In contrast to other studies, I show the role of gender in shaping the lives of those workers and labor organizers. I specifically demonstrate how women built powerful labor movements that organized fifteen years prior to the start of the armed insurgency in 1980. These women continued organizing during the war itself, from 1980 to 1992. Second, I document the transnational making of revolutionary feminism, a theory and practice that confronted both patriarchy and capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. This constitutes the book’s most original contribution. It challenges dominant binaries (within and outside academia) that situate feminism in opposition to socialism and armed struggle.
As a public scholar, I have collaborated with Salvadoran and U.S. museums and art galleries as well as global networks of historic sites. At the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador, I curated exhibitions and developed educational programming. At the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, which organizes food system workers in three counties in Western Massachusetts, I used my popular education training to cultivate worker leadership. These experiences have fundamentally shaped my pedagogy, which encourages students to approach history as a tool to address current-day injustices.
Most recently, I worked with scholars Jennifer Guglielmo and Michelle Joffroy, and organizers from the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) to develop the project “We Make History.” The project views history as an organizing tool to mobilize domestic workers on a massive scale. It includes a digital timeline on the history of domestic worker organizing, four educational videos, a political education curriculum, biographies and hand-painted portraits of twenty-one movement ancestors, and a website for curriculum facilitators. Committed to language justice, the project translated its materials into five languages, including English, Spanish, Tagalog, Nepali, and Haitian Creole. The curriculum slides are now available as a podcast in English and Spanish. In 2022, the National Council on Public History awarded “We Make History” the Outstanding Public History Project award.
As the popular education coordinator, I researched domestic worker history and developed a curriculum composed of 17 workshops that draw from the history presented in the digital timeline. The curriculum is divided into two parts. Part 1 explores how oppressive systems such as capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, and patriarchy have shaped domestic work, and how domestic workers have organized radical alternatives. Part 2 explores NDWA strategies to build power and improve labor standards. Additionally, I trained a cohort of sixteen domestic worker leaders as historians, and thirty-five NDWA affiliates across the country to implement the curriculum in their own organizations. In May 2022, over 400 domestic workers graduated from the curriculum. Another cohort will be graduating in 2024. As a formerly undocumented immigrant and the proud daughter of a former domestic worker, I dedicate the spirit of the curriculum to my mother.
PUBLICATIONS
- Ted Ed Animation (2022), Ugly History, The El Mozote Murders
- “Harvesting Hope: Building Worker Power at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 19, no. 1 (2020): 209-236.
- “For Our Total Emancipation: The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in Insurgent El Salvador, 1977-1987,” in Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
- “The First Black Miss Colombia and the Limits of Multiculturalism.” Latin American Caribbean and Ethnic Studies 12, no.1 (2017): 71-90
- “Historical Memory at El Salvador’s Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen.” Latin American Perspectives 43, no.6 (2016): 8-26.
- Co-written with Kevin A. Young. “Hillary Clinton and Corporate Feminism.” Against the Current 175 (March-April 2015): 18-22. (English and Spanish versions)
- Co-written with Kevin A. Young. “How ‘Partnership’ Weakens Solidarity: Colombian GM Workers and the Limits of UAW Internationalism.” WorkingUSA 17, no. 2 (2014): 239-60.
COURSES RECENTLY TAUGHT
- US Empire and Solidarity in Central America
- Exhibit Design Seminar on Student Activism
- Women and Revolutions
- Women and Gender in Latin America
- History and its Publics