The Women of Casa Emma: Social Subversion and the Lives of Armed Anarchist Militants in Uruguay, 1967–1974

Abstract

Based on over 20 hours of recorded oral testimonies, this article provides a glimpse of everyday semiclandestine life in Casa Emma, a safe house of the Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, FAU). A microhistory set during a historical moment in which the Uruguayan Left was making a strong bid for popular and state power, it centres on the two women who maintained Casa Emma—Juliana Martinez and Ana Rosa Amoros—and ends with their arrest in March 1973. As caretakers of the home, Martínez and Amoros provided indispensable reproductive labour for anti-capitalist, anti-statist armed operations. By participating in economic production outside of the home as well as political militancy, they subverted hegemonic gender roles and took on a unique counter-subjectivity. Instead of providing household labour to reproduce a value-producing wage-earning male, they reproduced an armed apparatus that expropriated value via bank robberies and kidnappings.