Meet the Latinas Reclaiming the Stories History Tried to Erase
Credit: Mika Martinez
It doesn’t have to be Women’s History Month for these Latina trailblazers to get their flowers. We remain some of the most underrepresented when the time comes to recognize women’s historic impacts. And writers Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda and Mirtle Peña-Calderón are on a mission to change that.
In The Book of Awesome Latinas, which was just published on March 17, the authors elevate mini-biographies of 70+ women from the U.S., across Latin America and in the diaspora, past and present, whose stories have been overlooked, downplayed, banned, forgotten or erased altogether.
This book arrives at a moment when the same playbook of erasure, alienation and dehumanization is being used against Latino communities in the U.S. today. But through retelling the stories of both recognized and unsung leaders, Ojeda and Peña-Calderón aim to remind us that powerful Latinas have made great strides throughout even the darkest of times.
“Everything going on today, from the raids to the despair to the heartbreak, sets us up to be robbed of our joy. Our joy and hope are the most sacred thing we have and nothing and no one should get in the way of that,” Ojeda tells Remezcla. “What is happening in the world right now is also history being written in real time, and if we are not the ones documenting it, someone else will. And we have seen what happens when someone else tells our story. We cannot afford to let that happen again. We need more storytellers like us. That is not just important, it is the only way forward.”
The representation in the book spans leaders from multiple generations and geographies: from U.S.-based heroines including American labor leader and feminist activist Dolores Huerta, and Katya Echazarreta, the first Mexican-born woman to go to space, to Latin America-based leaders such as m Margarita Mbywangi, who went from enslaved child to internationally recognized indigenous leader in Paraguay, and Marileidy Paulino, the first woman from the Dominican Republic to earn a gold medal in any sport.
“So many Latina figures have historically been left out of mainstream historical narratives because those narratives were never built with us in mind. The people who decided whose stories were worth telling — who got a chapter in a textbook, who got a statue, who got remembered — were not us, and they were not writing for us,” Ojeda says. “What this book made me see clearly is that the erasure was often very intentional and there was also this layer of intersectionality where the women who faced the most erasure were often those carrying multiple identities: Black Latinas, Indigenous women, queer women and femmes, and working-class women. The further you were from the center of power, the more invisible you became in the record books.”
Many of the women featured in The Book of Awesome Latinas, such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Berta Cáceres, challenged power structures in their own time. While collecting their stories, Ojeda says she noticed a common thread across generations of Latina resistance: the creativity of how these women pushed back. It’s that throughline that anchors the book, showing how resistance has always been as inventive as it is defiant.
“Berta Cáceres organized a human blockade. Lucía Ixchíu used art and music as a form of activism. Sor Juana Inés became a nun so she could keep learning and writing. Renata Flores took Quechua, an Indigenous language that the world has largely tried to erase, and put it in a rap song so a whole new generation can hear it,” Stoyanov Ojeda shares. “These women didn’t just resist, they built something and created spaces where their communities could belong, be heard, and see themselves reflected.”
While Peña-Calderón and Ojeda worked on the book, the two discussed how the book could reflect their roots. While Peña-Calderón was born in the Dominican Republic and settled down in the U.S. in her youth, Ojeda was born in the U.S. and maintained cultural ties to family in Mexico. One of their top priorities while working on this project was to make sure their stories weren’t bound by borders. The result is a book that invites readers from all backgrounds to see themselves in the stories of women who refused to be confined to a single title or identity.
“As Latinas growing up in the U.S., we don’t often get to learn about women from our home countries, let alone those of other countries,” Peña-Calderón says. “The book is meant to show that our power is collective and widespread. Our beauty, fire, grit, determination, and wisdom is de aquí y de allá. The women who never left matter just as much as the women whose families did, and there is beauty in that tenfold.”
The Book of Awesome Latinas is now available.