Since she was 5 years old, Maritza Dinora Martínez has been weaving hammocks, a tradition among the women in her isolated village in eastern El Salvador.

Life in her Cacaopera municipality, located in Central America’s Dry Corridor, is tough, marked by low precipitation for the area’s annual corn and bean crops and high immigration – to San Salvador, the capital an eight-hour drive away; and to the United States.

And for all of her 26 years, Ms. Martínez has lived with a two-pole hammock-weaving frame as a constant companion – first in her parents’ home, where her mother taught her the art, now in her own.

But what was once viewed as “just women’s work” has transformed into a symbol of the determination of the women of Cacaopera to build more stable and prosperous lives: not just for themselves and their families, but for their community.

Two years ago, the women of Cacaopera formed a hammock-making cooperative that they proudly named “Mujeres con Esperanza” – Women with Hope.

The cooperative is a small but vital piece of a global trend of women banding together both to feed their families and develop new means of moving beyond subsistence in the face of worsening food insecurity. And it is a source of resilience amid a pandemic that has adversely affected so many aspects of their lives.

In short order Mujeres con Esperanza has allowed the women to turn the weaving frames in their homes into tools for building higher incomes. Hammocks that went for $5 before the cooperative now fetch $20 or more.

Moreover, the cooperative, organized with the assistance of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), has encouraged expansive thinking on ways beyond hammock-making to improve community life.

For Ms. Martínez, the frames represent the resilience the women are building to face both long-existing challenges and new ones such as climate change and the pandemic – both of which have fueled a rise in food insecurity in El Salvador and neighboring Central American countries, and a recent spike in immigration to the U.S.

Healthier families

To get the word out about their cooperative and to develop new markets for their hammocks despite a national lockdown, the single mother of two small children learned how to build a Facebook page and to use WhatsApp as a sales tool – earning her the role of the cooperative’s social networks administrator.

“We’re making a better future for ourselves with our earnings and the new skills we are developing,” she says, “but we are also developing a resistance and ways to overcome our problems. That helps everybody,” she adds, “because we build a stronger community.” 

NickRoeder/Courtesy of WFP

Maritza Dinora Martínez, who has been weaving hammocks since she was 5 years old, is the social networks administrator of the women's hammock-making cooperative Mujeres con Esperanza.

Mujeres con Esperanza may seem small, involving fewer than three dozen women in a remote region of El Salvador.

But such modest initiatives by women in thousands of communities across the developing world have played a critical role in a number of positive trends over recent years, from poverty reduction to falling maternal and infant mortality and rising levels of education for girls.

“There is plenty of evidence from Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia that the emphasis on empowering women and girls has produced a wide array of positive effects. It’s undeniable,” says Sylvia Maier, a clinical associate professor and specialist in gender issues at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “When women are at the table of decision-making, families are healthier, incomes are higher, we even see reductions in domestic violence.”

Rising food insecurity

But this year on International Women’s Day, experts in the role of women in development are sounding an alarm: The global pandemic has only added to other factors that were already slowing recent gains in food security and other measures of progress for women and girls in particular.

Nearly 700 million people across the globe now live with the uncertainty of food insecurity, according to the WFP, while nearly 90 million women and girls are hungry. 

“To explain why global food insecurity is up, we speak of the three C’s: conflict, climate change, and COVID,” say Kawinzi Muiu, director of WFP’s gender office in Rome. “All of these factors have affected women’s ability to pursue the income activities they have developed,” she adds, “and as a result they absolutely have affected women and girls more.”

Moreover, evidence is emerging suggesting that as difficult as the pandemic has been for women, it may be posing the biggest setback to girls in the developing world by exacerbating the conditions leading to child marriage. In a new report released Monday, the U.N.’s child welfare agency UNICEF estimates that over the next decade an additional 10 million girls under 18 are at risk of becoming child brides – a reversal of recent progress in reducing such unions.

The ripple effect of the pandemic’s curtailment of women’s income-producing activities is stark. Studies show that when a woman starts earning an income, no matter how modest, she pours 90% of her earnings back into her family and community. For men, it’s more like 50%.

A “food-plus” program

This is one reason why international agencies like WFP and development nongovernmental organizations have shifted increasingly from basic food aid to assisting women in developing income-producing activities – often tied to food production – that help put them in the driver’s seat of their lives.

“We call it food-plus,” says Ms. Muiu, “because while it often starts with food, we then equip women with the ‘plus’ so that they don’t have to depend later on WFP” and other food-assistance organizations.

Thus in several Middle East countries women receive training in how to expand beyond family cooking to making food for sale, she says. In African countries, female farmers are trained to move beyond subsistence farming to production for local markets.

As with the Mujeres con Esperanza hammock-making cooperative, the idea is often to take traditional “women’s work” and give it added value – thereby transforming it from a symbol of women’s second-class status to a means of building stable and prospering families.

Not to mention “giving women and their daughters a strong sense of worth,” Ms. Muiu adds. Pointing to an initiative in Libya that helped women turn their sewing skills into mask-making, and one in Ivory Coast that trains women in tailoring, she says such activities “go beyond food to building livelihoods and self-reliance.”

New skills, and confidence

In many cases, women who have built new skills and confidence have used them to confront the new challenges posed by the pandemic.

Members of Mujeres con Esperanza didn’t just give up when the pandemic reduced hammock sales, for example. Instead, the women turned their attention to the small community grocery store they had recently started. With a national lockdown limiting trips to distant towns, the modest wood-frame market quickly became a lifeline for local families running out of essentials.

“The store provided a little income to our group, but we really understood its value to the community once the pandemic shut down access to other markets that are hours away,” says Elba Santos, the cooperative’s treasurer. “We’re providing a service to our neighbors,” she adds, “but [the store project] has given us new strengths we didn’t know we could have.”

For example, program officers with the regional WFP office cite the case of one member of the Mujeres cooperative who had difficulty overcoming depression after being deported from the U.S., where she left behind her American-born son to live with relatives. But participating in the store project has given this woman and others a new sense of purpose, the officers say.

The Cacaopera area has been hit with the same challenges affecting the rest of Central America and women in many parts of the globe – from crop failure due to climate change, rising food insecurity, and lost income as a result of the pandemic, to a pernicious, pandemic-abetted explosion of domestic violence, dubbed a “silent second pandemic” by some experts.

Still, members of the cooperative stick by their decision to call themselves “Women with Hope.” Despite the hardships, they say their activities have shown them they can confront the challenges and build better futures.

“Hope is the right word,” says María Santos Cortez Martínez, another hammock maker who works one day a week at the cooperative’s store. “Working together as a group we’ve learned we can improve our lives and keep moving forward.”

Steve Helber/AP/File

Susan Bro spoke with reporters in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 10, 2018. Ms. Bro's daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed in 2017 during what Charlottesville residents refer to as the "summer of hate." Ms. Bro credits Heather with teaching her lessons about racial justice that she is passing on to other Americans.

Susan Bro watched live footage as right-wing extremists marched into her home of Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017. To her, attendees at that day’s Unite the Right rally were little more than a small pocket of radicals – offensive but not a serious threat. 

Then came the afternoon, when Ms. Bro learned that her daughter, Heather Heyer, had been killed by a white supremacist while counterprotesting. The groups she once dismissed had suddenly caused ineffable pain. 

That’s why, when a coalition of rioters reminiscent of the one that took her daughter sacked the Capitol this January, Ms. Bro watched with different eyes.

In 2017, “I wasn’t taking white supremacists seriously,” she says. Now “I definitely pay more attention than I used to.”

Four years after Unite the Right, Charlottesville’s “summer of hate” is still adding historical layers. To many at the time the rally was a hideous but aberrant display of America’s worst tendencies. But as the country’s culture wars grow more confrontational and more deadly – taking lives in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Washington – the events of that August look less like an exception and more like a seed.

As the country investigates the Capitol riot, Charlottesville residents say their experience is what happens when the country ignores its barest divisions. Recovering from days as painful as Aug. 12 in Charlottesville or Jan. 6 in Washington requires addressing the circumstances that made them possible. To Ms. Bro, that involves regular citizens choosing to stay vigilant, and to heal, before more tragedies occur. 

“Either someone dies or someone has their rights taken away, and then [regular people] begin to notice” the dangers of extremism, says Ms. Bro. “And I would prefer that we pay attention before either one of those happens.”

Echoes of Charlottesville

For many Charlottesville residents, watching the Capitol riot was like watching August 2017 echo in history. 

Both were brazenly organized online, founded on a narrative of falsehood, and intensified by a sense of loss among the instigators. Both attracted a cacophony of far-right extremists resisting the democratic process – even featuring some of the same participants. Both ended in the loss of life due to violence. 

“Watching the storming of the Capitol on January the 6th ... definitely brought back memories of the scene in Charlottesville during the summer of hate,” says Claudrena Harold, chair of history at the University of Virginia and co-editor of “Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.” 

Perhaps most disconcerting in each event, though, were such abject failures of listening.

The Unite the Right rally crescendoed the long “summer of hate” in Charlottesville, preceded that summer by a Ku Klux Klan rally and tiki torch march led by Richard Spencer, a neo-Nazi and graduate of the University of Virginia. In addition to these public red flags, intelligence identified online warning signs ahead of time, says Timothy Heaphy, lead author of a report investigating the events in 2017, and university counsel for UVA since 2018.

“In Charlottesville, there was a lot of evidence available to law enforcement that there were going to be large numbers of people present at that event who were preparing for violence, and despite that, the plan didn’t prevent that,” says Mr. Heaphy. “I think we saw the same thing on January 6th.”

Steve Helber/AP/File

White nationalist demonstrators guard the entrance to a park in Charlottesville, Virginia, Aug. 12, 2017. Months of controversy over removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from the park led to the rally. The bronze statue still stands in the renamed Market Street Park.

Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, noticed similar telltales ahead of the Capitol riot, saying he contacted the FBI and received assurances the situation was under control. He didn’t feel that way when listening to windows break while lying on the Senate floor.

In 2017, Senator Warner sponsored a resolution condemning the violence and calling for an investigative review. The same, he thinks, is necessary in response to Jan. 6.

“We’re just at the beginning of trying to really sort this through,” he says. 

Legacy of slavery in America

White supremacy and violence driven by racial and ethnic animosity have a long history in America, of course. Slavery’s legacy has reverberated for more than a century and a half after it was ended by the Civil War.

In the South, white people seized back political and social control of their defeated homeland with organized terror, ending the period of Reconstruction. Jim Crow laws enforced that status quo. In 1898, a vengeful posse of white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, ousted the city’s biracial leadership in the only successful coup on American soil. Fifty-six years ago Sunday, Alabama state troopers clubbed and tear-gassed marchers demonstrating for voting rights at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

The perpetrators of the deadly 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City were radicalized by white supremacist and anti-government propaganda. White supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine in the Charleston church shooting in 2015.

But in the current era it’s perhaps been easy to see incidents as individual tragedies, instead of parts of a larger pattern. Both Charlottesville and the Capitol riot are evidence of a spreading white supremacist terrorism problem, some experts say.

Making sure history doesn’t repeat itself again involves analyzing these events in tandem, says Emily Blout, a historian and adjunct professor of communications at Georgetown University.

In early January, Professor Blout published a study on the 2017 violence in Charlottesville, proposing a framework called “immersive terrorism.” Two days later she saw the same phenomenon in action at the Capitol, and took it as a sign that the warnings of 2017 had not been heeded. 

“There’s a tendency and desire to move beyond this and just kind of forget,” says Professor Blout. “But we can’t.”

Anti-terrorism work, she says, rests on understanding the kind of extremism security wants to deter. In an era of resurgent white nationalism, it can be difficult to pick which dots to connect, says Michael Signer, mayor of Charlottesville from 2016 to 2018 and Professor Blout’s husband.

“Charlottesville was really the first perfect storm of all of this. But we have seen many other instances propagate since then,” he says, pointing to the recent confrontations in Berkeley, California; Portland, Oregon; Kenosha; and Washington. 

Though the circumstances varied in each, they all featured a confluence of armed citizens, national grievances, and cultural warfare. Charlottesville may be the archetype, but its legacy is still changing.

“Charlottesville … has become one of those touchstones in modern American history, like Selma or like Hurricane Katrina or like 9/11, where it’s gathering dimensions as history grows,” says Mr. Signer. 

“Charlottesville was really a turning point”

In four years, Charlottesville’s shadow has grown longer and darker. That’s all the more reason to act now, says Susan Corke, Intelligence Project director at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). 

Former President Donald Trump showed how emboldening political approval can be for extremists, she says. But hate groups have been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency, according to the SPLC’s research. In a time so polarized that partisans increasingly endorse violence, the potential for conflict is out there. 

“Charlottesville was really a turning point” for the far-right, says Ms. Corke. But, she says, neither it nor the Capitol riot is an “end of anything.”

Ms. Bro, who has spent the last four years mourning her daughter, can attest to that. 

By 2017, Ms. Bro had been slowly learning about issues of white supremacy for years, largely thanks to her daughter’s patient teaching. Having seen where hate leads, she now finds herself teaching others in an effort to embolden well-intentioned but unaware Americans, who could calm the country’s politics. 

Even if her daughter was terrified of public speaking, Ms. Bro sees her work as a way to honor Heather’s legacy. She wants to remind people that division is a choice, just like unity. That’s why, when white supremacists hector her on social media, Ms. Bro responds calmly. Everyone, like her, can still choose. 

“It’s because of what I learned from [Heather],” says Ms. Bro. “I saw a dropped torch and picked it up and I ran with it.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A co-living house sits on a corner lot in a residential neighborhood, on Feb. 19, 2014, in Berkeley, California. The city recently moved to expand opportunities for more multifamily dwellings, seeking to end exclusive single-family zoning by 2022.

The history of single-family zoning in America stretches back more than a century to what today ranks as one of the bluest cities in one of the country’s bluest states.

Now famous as a bastion of liberal politics, the Northern California enclave of Berkeley established a first-of-its-kind policy in 1916 that prohibited multifamily housing on residential land. City planners at the time cast the regulation as a preemptive move to protect neighborhoods from “the intrusion of the less desirable and floating renter class.” 

The restrictions served to segregate minority tenants from white homeowners, and in the ensuing decades, as cities and suburbs coast to coast followed Berkeley’s example, single-family zoning contributed to California’s and the country’s affordable housing shortage and a rise in homelessness. In the San Francisco Bay Area – a constellation of 101 municipalities that includes Berkeley and is beset by some of the country’s highest housing prices and rents – a meager 18% of residential land allows for multifamily development.

Last month Berkeley officials set in motion a plan to redress the lasting effects of its century-old rule and alleviate the city’s housing crunch, vowing to eliminate single-family zoning by the end of next year.

The proposed policy could enable the building of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in neighborhoods across the city, where half the residential land remains under single-family zoning and median rent for a one-bedroom apartment tops $2,000. Advocates suggest that the change would increase housing density and, by spreading the additional units throughout the city, create more living options for lower- and middle-income residents.

The Berkeley proposal arrived a month after the Sacramento City Council voted to start the process of abolishing single-family zoning in California’s capital, which has confined multifamily dwellings to 30% of the city’s residential land. Officials in San Diego, San Jose, and South San Francisco are exploring similar alternatives as the state attempts to address a housing deficit estimated at 3.5 million units.

The push to revitalize the so-called missing middle of housing – and unwind the legacy of exclusionary zoning and other discriminatory housing policies – has gained momentum since Minneapolis became the nation’s first city to jettison single-family zoning in 2018. Oregon lawmakers banned the policy in much of the state in 2019, and last year Portland officials approved a comparable measure to nurture multifamily housing.

SOURCE:

University of California, Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute; New York Times; Sightline Institute

|

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

America’s major metro areas proscribe anything other than single-family housing on about three-fourths of residential property. Reform advocates fault the constraints on multifamily dwellings, in part, for the country’s affordable housing gap of 7 million units, including 1.3 million in California, where recent legislative proposals to revamp zoning laws statewide have faltered.

Opponents of efforts to remove or loosen single-family zoning rules claim the changes would alter the character of neighborhoods, hurt property values, and accelerate gentrification. A coalition of groups in Minneapolis, citing environmental concerns, has sued the city over its plans to increase housing density.

Officials in Berkeley view such criticisms as misplaced, pointing out that ending exclusionary zoning would neither prevent the building nor authorize the demolition of single-family homes – a pair of common misperceptions. They further assert that the reforms would foster incremental change – much of the new housing would involve converting existing homes into duplexes and the like – and help the Bay Area meet a state mandate to add 441,000 housing units by 2031.

Beyond practical considerations, supporters emphasize the symbolism of rooting out a policy planted in the poisoned soil of discrimination. During a recent public discussion on Berkeley’s proposal, City Councilmember Ben Bartlett gave voice to that centurylong grievance.

“We cannot ignore that from the onset, zoning’s sole purpose was to segregate by race, to the detriment of people of color,” he said.

AP

A bumper sticker on a Baltimore police cruiser hints at reforms made since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.

For many Americans the trial of the white police officer implicated in the death of a Black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis last May is the most important test of racial justice in a generation. Officer Derek Chauvin faces charges of second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and possibly third-degree murder.

The trial carries heavy expectations. It comes at a time when Americans are increasingly aware that race can influence police tactics. A series of fatal encounters between police officers and Black men over the past decade, captured on cellphones and spread by social media, has exposed the disproportionate burden of excessive force borne too long by African Americans.

A desire for punishment in such cases is understandable. By proportion of population, Black people are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white people. Few officers have faced consequences in killings that were not justified as defensive. Video footage of the fatal encounter for Mr. Floyd shows Mr. Chauvin kneeling on his back and neck for more than eight minutes – well beyond the point when other officers nearby were able to detect the restrained man’s pulse. The incident sparked protests that swept across the country and throughout the world last summer.

While the trial is essential, measuring racial justice in the United States on the basis of one verdict and a long sentence risks disappointment. To convict Mr. Chauvin, prosecutors will need to prove he knowingly and intentionally acted in a manner forbidden by law. At the time of the incident, the methods of restraint used by Mr. Chauvin and his fellow officers were standard and approved practice in Minneapolis.

Perhaps more importantly, equating punishment with justice obscures the extent to which public thought has shifted on racial injustice since last summer. To be sure, a Gallup Poll released Friday found that 64% of Black Americans saw Mr. Floyd’s death as murder. Only 28% of white respondents agreed. Yet when questions of racial injustice are separated from the immediate legal issues of the trial, polls show Americans share more common ground. A range of surveys since Mr. Floyd’s death have confirmed that majorities of Black and white Americans support banning dangerous police tactics and support reforms that make police more accountable to the communities they serve. Polls compiled by the New York-based organization Public Agenda found last summer that nearly 60% of Americans agree that racial bias against African Americans among police and law enforcement is a “serious problem” in their community.

That public consensus is fueling a dramatic shift in government policy. Lawmakers in 15 states – red and blue – and the District of Columbia have introduced more than 330 bills this year addressing police reforms, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That follows a frenzy of activity last year following Mr. Floyd’s death: more than 700 bills in 36 state legislatures. Nearly 100 were enacted. At the federal level, the U.S. House sent a bill last week to the Senate that would ban life-threatening restraint tactics and make police more accountable for their actions on patrol.

Steps toward racial justice may be small or come in waves, but they must never be ignored during a time of crisis. “We’re talking about systemic racism in the context of policing but haven’t been able to eradicate that from our broader society in 400 years,” says Charles Ramsey, a retired Philadelphia police commissioner. “So it’s not practical to think we’re going to be able to eliminate it from policing overnight. That doesn’t mean there aren’t steps that can be taken to really minimize the opportunity for people to engage in that kind of behavior.”

The trial in Minneapolis provides another venue to build a common understanding of racial justice. Regardless of how the trial unfolds, the American conversation about race has already shifted toward a better understanding of equality, one not based on skin color or neighborhood but on a core principle that all people have a shared nature and an individual dignity worth preserving.