Carolina Gómez Mena
La Jornada newspaper
Monday, September 8, 2025, p. 8
To release the time of women, it is necessary to recognize, redistribute and reduce care, as well as “deacialize” these tasks, proposed Dr. Rosa Campoalegre Septien, coordinator of the work group Aphrodescencia and counterhegemonic proposals of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).
The Afro -Cuban feminist, rector of the University of the African diaspora, told The day That the majority of women who do careful and domestic care work are racialized: they are indigenous or Afro -descendants, and in addition to making these tasks to a greater extent, when they perform paid care they receive less pay than non -racialized ones.
The director of the Mandela Chair in Cuba, stated that Afro women generally face “more barriers and, more than gender gaps, gender and race abysses, with less access to classrooms, economy and the digital world. Not all racialized black women are in the same conditions, but we are a majority in the inequality matrix. We must break with that”.
The survey women who care: care from an intersectional view (2023)from the Simone De Beauvoir Leadership Institute, he says that indigenous and Afromexicanas in rural contexts, in addition to family care, also assume community and other derivatives of the lack of services in their localities, which generally experience poverty and extreme poverty.
They carry out work in the field, food production, backyard animals, go for water or firewood and carry out community and cultural activities related to their worldview.
Likewise, the analysis states that they conceive care as a practice for the common good, which pays for cohesion, sense of belonging and protection of their communities, but also “contributes to their overload and poverty of their time for rest, health care or the development of other economic, educational or cultural activities of their interest.” They also face strong resistance to redistribute care within homes.
For Afromexican women, the document indicates, “the overload of care work is exacerbated because they are in municipalities with the lowest provision of basic public services”, and also for the “neighborhood sense” and comadrazgo ties that are extrapolated to the community.
In another survey of the UN regional office for the Americas and the Caribbean on the needs, demands and recommendations of Afro -descendant women about care, it states that the main demand is to promote their participation in decision -making spaces.
“We need dialogue tables, taking into account Afro Women Organizations, which benefit us at the level of health, economy, education, politics, justice, active participation,” said people surveyed.
Among the main needs on care, 19.2 percent are related to health, unpaid activities that they carry out to take care of sick people.
That makes access to the labor market difficult and, for the youngest, interferes with their studies. In addition, overload of this unpaid work affects its physical and mental health, while racism, discrimination and violence decrease access to services by 33.8 percent.
