Mujeres Unidas en Acción: A Popular Education Process

Eva Young and Mariwilda Padilla present a challenging and touching discussion of the struggle of a group of Latina women in Dorchester, Massachusetts to educate themselves. The authors provide an overall description of Mujeres Unidas en Acción, Inc. — a nonprofit community-based agency offering educational programs to low-income Latina women — in terms of its development and structure, and take an in-depth look at one of its educational components, the Spanish program. Young and Padilla illustrate the core and spirit of the agency by providing concrete examples of its participatorial approach — through which the voices of all its members are heard and validated at all levels of functioning — and by including testimonies of the program participants. The authors reflect on the philosophical stance of the agency through a discussion of the connection between the daily lives of these women and the teaching-learning practices experienced at Mujeres. In this discussion they pay particular attention to the social, political, and economic context from which the women come and in which they presently live. In this article, Young and Padilla have opened up a window for readers to see and understand the nature of their struggle and the ways in which they make sense of their own reality. The fact that the authors are Latina women who participate in and share this struggle offers a different perspective for doing educational research,explaining reality as an insider in a way that is valid to the lives of those being investigated.