Centro Presente’s Women’s Rights Center grew out of our Women’s Leadership School which served to develop the analysis and critical awareness of our female members. Building upon this educational and leadership development foundation, we wanted to create a focal point within our organization for feminist immigrant advocacy, and a space for our women members to exercise their new capacities to challenge and change systems of oppression, like patriarchy.
The Women’s Rights Center is a space to promote new female leadership through learning, connecting, and exchanging experiences. Together we learn about self-care tools and feminist healing. We use a participatory and popular methodology, which starts by recognizing the value of the experience of each one of the participants. The Center allows us to focus more on gender issues and address the very real gender-specific trauma that has been experienced by our members in their countries of origin, in their journeys here, and in their daily lives here in Massachusetts.
The Center provides the women who come to Centro Presente with accurate and clear information on topics that greatly impact their human, civil, and labor rights as immigrant women living and working in the United States. Within the Center they learn how the structures of power and democracy function, and how they can construct a society that is more inclusive, more democratic and more participatory.
The Center conducts a focused, popular educational series over a period of seven weeks covering topics such as:
- Structural causes of forced migration and the violation of human rights in our countries of origin.
- Immigrant Rights in the United States.
- Governance structure of the United States & Civic Engagement.
- Criminalization of immigrant workers.
- Patriarchy and our economic system, including ‘Free Trade Agreements’.
- Constitutional and Labor Rights of Migrant Workers.
- Women Leaders in Social Movements.
- History of the struggle of the African American Community & the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.
- Racism in the U.S. and Colorism in the Latino Community
- Self-care and healing.