Burned, Broke, and Brilliant: Latinx Community Workers’ Experiences Across the Greater Toronto Area's Non-Profit Sector

This paper explores how women and non-binary Latinx community workers (LCWs), in the Greater Toronto Area, navigate multiple interlocking forces of oppression like racialisation, heterosexism and neoliberalism, when advancing social justice across the non-profit sector. Using an intersectionality framework in tandem with testimonio methodology, including 37 testimonios, a workshop and participant observation, I show how LCWs are constrained by, but also contest, a white neoliberal non-profit funding structure and patriarchal political system. I also explore how community work has contradictory effects on the mental, physical and economic wellbeing of LCWs. Lastly, I demonstrate how LCWs persist by weaving together their family and community histories, personal experiences and women of colour feminisms to enact a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis. I consider what lessons a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis can bring to bear on debates in human geography around neoliberalism, the non-profit sector and social justice transformation.