MAMAS

We are MAMAS: a Chicago-based feminist of color reproductive justice collective, unapologetically confronting and dismantling systems of state violence - including prisons, war, colonization, imperialism, and migrant injustices. We build power among mother-survivors of state violence, developing mutual care and aid while nurturing resistance and working, in coalition, towards a world rooted in radical justice and love.

Our work is led by mothers & caregivers- both biological & non-biological “mamas”- who are survivors of state violence and organize through the political vision of Radical Mothering.

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"Mothering has always been a radical act; it is the backbone of our movements, the womb of our dreams, and the hand that rocks the cradle of our future."

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Revolutionary Mothering, Love On The Frontlines

Radical mothering insists that mothers and caregivers are the world’s most powerful forces of revolutionary change. It reminds us that when state violence–like police and prison violence–targets individuals, it also targets their loved ones, caregivers, families, and communities.

Black and brown mothers and caregivers understand the grassroots effects of state violence because sexist systems have held us responsible for the well being of our people. We know, with every breath we take, all the ways state violence damages community health, relationships and resources inside and outside the home. That’s why we labor for all forms of liberation—intimate and political, in the home and in the streets.

We are here to challenge the sexist idea that only certain kinds of people- cis men- are the true revolutionaries. Mothers and caregivers of color have always been laboring on the front lines–caring and fighting, nurturing and disrupting. We are here to disrupt activist cultures that sideline mother-activists and honor mamas of color only for our tears–as if we are nothing more than the mother of the man-hero, martyr, or survivor. We are here to interrupt all colonial-racist-sexist systems that scapegoat mamas of color for social problems like crime and poverty–as if our mothering is to blame for white supremacist wars, borders, and prisons.

Radical mothering uplifts all of our intergenerational kin on the journey to dismantling what has never worked and building and growing the world we want so that all of us can survive and thrive.