Manolis Glezos is considered the first partisan to have removed the flag with the swastika of Nazi Germany from the…
Maria Gil, Women Cigana, Activist.
THIS STORY WAS TOLD TO US BY OUR ESC VOLUNTEER: NATACHA, 26 YEARS OLD, PORTUGUESE.
Also known as Maria da Fronteira, she is a leading figure in the promotion of ‘Mulheres Ciganas’ in Portugal. She fights for intersectional feminism, because no woman should be invisible.
Feminism is still a movement led by and for mostly white women, and other women are usually forgotten. Maria started doing theatre, forum theatre, theatre of the oppressed and community theatre to give voice to this invisibility.
Women in the Gypsy community suffer double discrimination. They are women and they are ‘ciganas’, which leads to many negative perceptions. Even within the community, they are afraid of losing their position, culture and traditions if they take a different path. So Maria fights. She fights for freedom of choice, the freedom to decide whether she wants to study, work or marry the ‘Mulheres Ciganas’. That is why she gives voice and face to this cause.
In July 2013, Maria was a speaker at the Intercultural Meeting for Inclusion in Tomar. In 2016, she was one of the faces of a national campaign against discrimination against Roma by the European Network Against Poverty in Portugal, which aimed to reduce prejudice against this community.
discrimination is lack of education
In 2017, Maria launched a movement based on the idea:
Mulheres e Ciganas. Existem e Resistem
she wrote on a poster during a demonstration in Porto when she realised she was the only ‘Mulher Cigana’. The women of the Roma community are still fighting for rights that others have already won. But some steps have been taken, such as the possibility of obtaining an education or a job, which is difficult for them because of institutional and structural racism in Portugal.
When asked what feminism means to her, Maria Gil answered in an interview with Vogue – Portugal in 2019:
Right. Right to life. Dignity. Human dignity.
ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe:
The communication campaign ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe was born from the experience of a workshop on multi-channel communication that further enriched the personal background of the young volunteers of the ESC project, European Solidarity Corps who have been living for months at Il paguro Ostello, a small house for young Europeans, a property confiscated from the Casalesi family in which Giosef Italy has created a youth hostel, in Casapesenna.
During the past few months, the young people involved have had the opportunity to learn about the history of Italy, through a series of meetings whose main theme was the history of the Antimafia.
From the realisation that such an important and well-known history in our country is often ignored by other young Europeans, this project was born.
We said to ourselves, what if we now tell our readers stories that changed the history of your home countries but are not known by the Italian public?
Thus was born the idea of THE ESC FACTOR, a project to share stories of movements and people who have only one thing in common: the courage of freedom, the desire for justice, the fight for the affirmation of civil rights, in all their forms, beyond all borders.
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