This article highlights the often-overlooked emotional and communal care work that sustains the movement for agroecology, carried out especially by women. Drawing from regional experience in Latin America and the Caribbean, this article explores how care, spirituality, and justice intertwine in agroecology to nourish transformative resilience.
Social movements advocating for food sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean have positioned agroecology not just as an agricultural production model but as a social and political force that drives socio-ecological transformation. These movements, including the Latin American and Caribbean Agroecological Movement (MAELA), promote resilience through both technical and political strategies. However, care and collective care networks, though essential for resilience, often remain invisible.
In this article, we share a perspective developed within MAELA, through the work of organisations such as the Mexican coffee producers association VIDA A.C. and women’s groups. We promote a form of agroecology that integrates spirituality, feminism, and collective care as pillars for profound, decolonial transformation.
Care as the backbone
Care, understood as affective labour, is essential for the resilience of agroecological movements
Care, understood as affective, community-based and life sustaining work, is essential for the resilience of agroecological movements. It highlights the need for self-care for both activists and those working on the ground and fosters collective care spaces that help communities overcome adversity by turning hardship into opportunity. Care supports us in developing processes of self-management and self-worth, helping us understand that our beliefs drive our actions, and giving us the opportunity to relearn and reinvent ourselves.
From an ecofeminist perspective, care is recognised as the backbone of resistance efforts, even though the burden of care work often disproportionately falls on women and other marginalised identities. In an academic paper, Trevilla et al. highlight how, from the standpoint of the feminisms of Abya Yala – the name used by various Indigenous peoples for the continent prior to colonisation – women have always centered care as a key principle in agroecology, both in theory and in practice. They balance care responsibilities within their families with active participation in community, organisational, and territorial work.
A spiral of awareness
MAELA has advanced the concept of ‘agroecology and spirituality’ by emphasising ancestral knowledge, community rituals, and collective organisation. This vision transcends technical aspects of agroecology to include a holistic way of life by proposing a spiral of awareness that weaves together the spiritual and the material, nourished by emotional and spiritual intelligence: listening to the body, intuition, and the heart.
The following key insights have emerged from collective experiences led by MAELA between 2021 and 2025. They are grounded in regional gatherings, women’s circles, territorial assemblies, and community dialogues held in nine countries. These reflections aim to propose practices to strengthen agroecology for transformative resilience, rooting it in spirituality, collective care, and social justice.
Three keys to agroecology for transformative resilience
- Spirituality as the political care of life: mechanisms for resilience
We propose integrating practices such as ancestral medicine, ceremonies, dialogue circles, and other forms of collective ritual as resilience mechanisms in territorial struggles. Participants from nine countries shared experiences of how spirituality serves as an antidote to activist burnout. Rituals such as lunar ceremonies, collective meditations, breathing exercises, and dance help regenerate energy in prolonged struggles.
Spirituality dismantles the internal-external divide, as proposed by the People’s Health Movement, which challenges the separation between ‘fighting out there’ and ‘healing in here’. Instead, it integrates the personal and collective through the spiral, an ancestral symbol that intertwines both realms. Seeds, wind, earth, water, and fire are viewed as teachers.
Spirituality is the invisible thread that unites agroecology, ancestral wisdom, and community
During the roundtable ‘Air: Freedom and Integration in Our Movements’ (May 2025), held within MAELA’s ‘Agroecology and Spirituality’ working axis, participants reaffirmed that these ancestral practices are technologies of resistance. As Laura Vanesa Reyes expressed, “Air invites us to feel freedom” – a form of spirituality that fuels our rhythmic heartbeat and reconnects us with the joy and grace of life. For MAELA, spirituality is the invisible thread that unites agroecology, ancestral wisdom, and community on a shared path toward harmony.
- Women’s circles as spaces of healing and community power
Despite being guardians of both spiritual and agroecological knowledge, women still bear the brunt of care work. Dialogue circles for women, as promoted by VIDA A.C., have become key tools for resilience among rural women. These spaces are conceived as rituals of emotional, physical, and spiritual self-care, fostering active and empathetic listening, dance, meditation, and exchange. According to facilitators, women’s circles build empathy, self-esteem, and empowerment, breaking through silence and isolation in rural contexts. Grounded in principles like respect, non-judgment, and shared voice, these circles foster trust networks that allow women to support and accompany one another in their daily lives and struggles.
- Toward a full and harmonious agroecology: care as a strategic axis
Through initiatives such as women’s circles and masculinity workshops, MAELA seeks to challenge entrenched gender hierarchies. At the 2024 Mesoamerican Regional Assembly, a collective analysis of care in agroecological movements was carried out. Women and men reflected separately and then shared their insights and challenges. While women focused on sisterhood, men explored self-care and responsible fatherhood. Tensions persist: men reported discomfort with expressing affection among themselves, and women emphasised the need for explicit policies, as the burden of care continues to fall on them.
For this reason, social movements must acknowledge care as a strategic axis of political action, with clear allocation of resources and time. Only then can they avoid reproducing the very inequalities they seek to dismantle.
Care as a visible, living and collective root
In a context of systemic crises affecting food systems, it is urgent to place care at the center of transformative strategies. Spirituality, when understood as a political practice of care, helps restore the physical and emotional strength of those defending their territories, and counters the exhaustion caused by prolonged activism.
At the same time, strengthening empathy, self-esteem, and both individual and collective empowerment contributes to building caring networks of trust and solidarity.
The ethics of care must move us to action. Only then will care cease to be the invisible foundation of resilience and resistance, and become its visible, living, and collective root.
Authors: Enriqueta Tello García is an environmental educator and professor in the Graduate Program on Rural Development (COLPOS, Mexico), and promoter of the social and solidarity economy. Gisella Illescas Palma is an agroecologist and activist on gender, peasant rights, and food sovereignty, and a member of VIDA A.C., Veracruz, Mexico. María Antonia Pérez Olvera is an agroecological producer and promoter, as well as professor in the Graduate Program in Agroecology and Sustainability (COLPOS, Mexico). Laura Vanesa Reyes is a social communicator and journalist, a Kundalini yoga instructor, a facilitator of ancestral Ayurvedic medicine and a member of the Organic Agriculture Network of Misiones, Argentina. All authors are members of the Latin American and Caribbean Agroecological Movement (MAELA). Contact: unpasitoengrande@gmail.com
Sources
- Federici, S. (2018). The Patriarchy of the Wage: Feminist Critiques of Marxism. Traficantes de Sueños.
- MAELA (2024). Care in Agroecological Movements. maelacontinental.com/cartilla-los-cuidados-en-los-movimientos-agroecologicos-feminismos-y-masculinidades/
- Toledo, V. M. (2011). Agroecology in Latin America: Three Revolutions, One Transformation. Agroecología, 6, 37–46
- Trevilla, E. D. L., Estrada, L. E., & Soto, P. M. L. (2020). Agroecology and Care: Reflections from the Feminisms of Abya Yala. Millcayac. Revista Digital de Ciencias Sociales, vol. VII, no.13.
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This article is part of Issue 3-2025: Weaving Resilience and Resistance
