Debating Women

Abstract

My field notes remind me that it was a Wednesday morning in March of 1992, six months into the school year and a year into my stay in Santa Lucía. I left the house early and joined the flow of students as they headed to the first-period class at Liceo Parra. Each student sporting the requisite national uniform—blue jeans and beige or white shirts depending on their grade, blue sweaters on chilly Andean days—they created a nearly monochrome stream of disciplined informality that briefly transformed the otherwise motley, sparsely inhabited, and principally adult space of the street. I was looking forward to attending the first class that day. Ms. Martínez, the serious, soft-spoken young ninth-grade Language and Literature teacher, was holding a debate (“debate” in Spanish) on “the role of Venezuelan women in society,” and she was expecting me to attend.

Spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)

An earlier version of this chapter appears in Montoya, Frazier & Hurtig, 2002