Voices of change: Leadership’s role in the rise of social movements
Many sparks fail to start fires where conditions seem right, while others flare up into fires where nobody would have expected. Few movements in recent history provide as good an example of this as the Green Tide.
In 2021, the US State of Texas enacted what were then the most severe abortion restrictions in the country, banning all procedures after six weeks of pregnancy. Shortly afterwards, Mexican feminist activists sprang into action, sending abortion pills to Texan women and offering free advice over the phone about how to use them. These activists upend a long-standing image of the US as being more progressive on reproductive rights than its neighbours to the south. They also represent just a sliver of an increasingly successful movement across Latin America. For example, Argentina’s Congress legalised abortion in 2020, while Mexico’s Supreme Court and Colombia’s Constitutional Court decriminalised it in 2023 and 2022, respectively.
Tracing the roots of a social movement’s success
This Green Tide movement, named after the colour of the bandannas worn by members, started in Argentina in the early 2000s and has been spreading through Latin America since. Much of the Green Tide’s success is connected to urbanisation, as Latin American cities have grown quickly and the region is now 80 per cent urban by population. Movement activism there relies on interconnected, densely populated areas for public displays of messaging and meeting up. Political graffiti and murals are ubiquitous.
Shared physical space is easy to overlook, but it’s a crucial ingredient. Much like union members who work side by side, people who live in the same city neighbourhood have more opportunities to witness others in successful acts of resistance. These kinds of shoulder-to- shoulder interactions are vital both for reducing prejudice and for persuading people that resistance is alive and thriving. These are just a few of the key background structures that, when in place, provide wind to fan the flames of a growing movement.
Gains made in economic independence and social mobility were also key background factors. Many of these trends predated the stunning 21st-century growth of feminist movements in the region and so preceded the Green Tide. The size of these social and economic gains reflected how far many Latin American countries still had to go. Through the better part of the 20th century, women’s freedom to work was severely restricted. Legislation prevented them from opening bank accounts, signing contracts and appearing in court. Men made the laws, holding more than 90 per cent of lower or unicameral legislature seats throughout most of the 1990s.
Beginning in the 1970s, in part due to reductions in teen pregnancy, gains in education and spikes in economic insecurity, more women joined the labour market. Movement organising began to rise along with the number of working women and these changes reinforced positive feedback loops, in the manner of when success begets success.
The role of female leadership
Women are taking more leadership positions, too. Improvements in education, reproductive justice and labor power have corresponded with greater gender parity in legislative representation under both left-and right-wing governments. As of 2023, 11 countries in Latin America have passed reforms requiring gender parity, for example, among candidates for the legislature. Women comprise around half of at least one chamber of congress in Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Nicaragua. As Mexican senator Adriana Díaz put it: “[It] is not making space [for women], it is not implementing a quota, it is sharing in decision-making so that together we [men and women] can be co-responsible in the true development and advance of democracy.”
Changes in global economic conditions have pushed more women into urban centres and the labour market, which highlighted inequities in their political rights, fostered organising and led to successful structural changes in political representation. These developments, in turn, gave women a greater voice in Latin American politics and culture. This greater voice feeds back into the process, inspiring more organisers to persist in the struggle for gender justice.
The Green Tide has its own charismatic fire starters, like Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, Daffne Valdés Vargas and Paula Cometa Stange. Together, they make up the Chilean feminist, trans-inclusive collective LasTesis. After they performed their protest song, Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path), in front of a police station in 2019, the song went viral on social media. Soon, huge crowds of blindfolded women were singing and performing the coordinated dance in major cities like Santiago, Mexico City and Bogotá.
All kinds of factors need to come together for a movement to grow and succeed. It requires the right leaders, where “right” includes personality traits like moral charisma and the creativity to bring people together. Those leaders also need to fit well into the structures and circumstances in which they operate. They have to possess the knowhow that will allow them to align their strategies with the specifics of their situation. When it all comes together, social movements have the potential to rise in visibility very quickly.
Excerpted from Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press, copyright 2025.