Mapping International Feminism: The Works of Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez

Abstract

A s one of her bibliographers (of both her published and unpublished work), what I find most striking in Elizabeth Betita Martínez is the breadth of seemingly limitless subjects she took up in her activism and resulting works. For over fifty-five years, Martínez produced an expansive body of writing that included seven books, over 560 articles, and countless reviews. Additionally, she contributed to an equally vast trove of collectively authored, unattributed, and unsigned opinion pieces, critical treatises, collaborative essays, and speeches, as well as countless personal, private letters of support, encouragement, guidance, and meticulous editorial critiques (both solicited and unsolicited)—all gifted with joy, hope, and love—to generations of activists, scholars, community members, and young people. This essay looks closely at how Martínez wove an internationalist feminist vision into her activism and writings after years of multiracial organizing. I claim that throughout her long career as an agent of history, as an organic intellectual and as a movement historian, documenting the intersectionality of the struggles of marginalized peoples all over the world, she engaged in intergenerational knowledge transmission through an internationalist feminist lens. When