Women Around the World: Valdecir Nascimento

For this installment, we focus in on Brazillian activist and advocate Valdecir Nascimento.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff
I never told your production of I Heart Radio guests,
And welcome to another episode of Women Around the World.
I feel like I need a little theme song after
I think we need a jingle or something. I need

(00:26):
some kind of fancy jingle. And today we are highlighting
an amazing activist in Brazil, Baldicia no Mento. Yes that
Simanto was born in Urguay, Brazil and has become one
of the biggest advocates for women's rights, and more specifically
black women's rights in that country. Right so, her long
career has been a lifelong dedication in creating equality and

(00:47):
justice to the women in Brazil. She's been advocating forum
everything like rights of domestic workers to women's sexual and
reproductive rights. She is the executive coordinator of the O
d a r A or Tudo da Negra or Black
Women's Institute, based in Salvador, Brazil. She also coordinates the
Black Women's Network for the Northeast of Brazil and was

(01:09):
one of the organizers of the historic Black Women's March,
which took place in two thousand and fifteen. She was
definitely a key proponent to that and if you kind
of look back on what that was, it was this
huge statement and we're gonna talk a little bit more
about advocating and being powerful women in Brazil and I
loved it. Yes, In two thousand three, she was granted

(01:30):
the ASCA Fellowship or perhaps Ashoka. We tried to look
up the pronunciation and could not and because of a
Soca from Star Wars, that's how I want to say it.
But she was granted the scholarship for her work and
advocating for the rights of domestic workers in Brazil. According
to reports, Brazil has the largest population of domestic workers
around the world six point three million according to some figures,

(01:53):
and at least of them are women, and within that
percentage of them are made up of black women. And
though she has been advocating for their rights, it wasn't
until the domestic workers were not treated equally as other
professions by law. Things like overtime, limited work hours, and
pension were not given until that law passed. So no

(02:15):
Cemento developed her program, the e A f r O,
which is linked with the Center for Asian and African
Studies of the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador. She
created a program that gave educational and learning opportunities to
accelerate in these girls educations and also gave them the
tools to be able to get degrees or move on
to higher levels of education. She focused on giving young

(02:35):
girls the opportunity to move forward in education by focusing
on Black culture and their identity, which would increase the
use self esteem and increase their likelihood and succeeding in
school and continuing on to get their education. She also
collaborated with the Domestic Workers Union and Units HAVE to
create the Expanding Rights and Horizons program, which quote aimed
at guaranteeing their rights of young domestic workers, professionalizing the

(02:57):
working relationship, and opening up new educational and professional opportunities
for the students. And since then, she has been working
for the rights of women and reprojective health and rights
in Brazil. She continues to speak on the lack of
accessibility of reprojective health care and the continued push for
criminalizing abortion in her country right as in, she's opposing

(03:17):
the push. Yes, yes, I don't know how glader that was,
but she's opposing this push to criminalize abortion. She is
a fierce advocate for black women around the country. She stated,
quote for Black women, sexual and reprojective health is not
only about abortion, is about access to all the sexual
and reproductive health services and rights. And she spoke about
the continued issue of maternal mortality rates and how it

(03:40):
specifically is affecting Black women as it continues to hit
harder in the black communities, partially due to lack of
access for healthcare, especially within the communities that have higher
Black populations. And as we mentioned earlier, she was one
of the main people to organize the women's March, which
brought out over seventy people. She said, women came by
buses and by boats. They cooked, they dance, they marched together.

(04:01):
It was beautiful. The march was supported by Angela Davis, who,
by the way, received a personal letter from Vladis Heir
about the march before it happened, and Mrs Davis publicly
advocated for the march and what the women of Brazil
we're trying to do and bring attention to. Right after
the march, she stated it changed the Black women's movement,
specifically quote for black women, it was an affirmation of

(04:24):
their strength and she continues to work there today with
the u N and has been highlighted through with different
organizations about her important work. And she has been doing
this for like forty years, and I can't say enough
about how amazing she has done. Obviously, the work that
she did for the domestic workers, it shows as it
eventually took place to changing the law and given protection

(04:48):
to those workers who are predominantly made up of women.
So I think it's amazing what you can see women
like the Cemento and what she does and how she
continues to fight and use her wise to push for
others and giving strength to others to fight as well. Yeah,
and this is a really huge, obviously issue when we're

(05:08):
talking about domestic care around the world and domestic work
and who's doing that and it's getting compensated for it
or not and getting those things like overtime or not
getting those things when it's such essential work. So yeah,
we're that's something we've been talking about revisiting in a
future episode, but in the meantime, listeners, if there's any

(05:30):
resources you want to send to us related to any
of this or domestic work, or if there's any women
you want us to spotlight and women around the world
jingle forthcoming, please email and to us or contact us.
You can email us at Stuff Media Mom and Stuff
at ihart met dot com. You can find us on
Instagram and Stuff I Ever Told You are on Twitter
at most Stuff Podcast. Thanks It's always to your super

(05:52):
producer Christina, Thank you, and thanks to you for listening.
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