Roots of Resistance Wins the Sarah A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association

When Professor Suyapa Portillo Villeda ’96 began researching the 1954 strike on banana-growing estates in Northern Honduras, she only found a couple of books on the subject. Those works contained valuable information but only “tiny, fleeting” sentences about the role of women.

“I kept wondering, ‘Where are the women?’” Portillo Villeda said. “There’s a dearth of studies on women in labor in Central America—on women in general and, more specifically, working-class women in the first half of the 20th century.”

The book she wrote in response to that question, Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras, just won the National Women’s Studies Association’s Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize for 2021. The prize is awarded “for groundbreaking scholarship in women’s studies that makes significant feminist contributions to the topic of women and labor” and will be presented to Portillo Villeda during a ceremony on October 16. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) promotes and supports the production and dissemination of knowledge about women and gender.

https://www.pitzer.edu/communications/2021/10/15/professor-suyapa-portillo-villeda-96-wins-national-womens-studies-association-book-prize/