Women in the Oaxaca Social Rebellion

Lynn Stephen
U Oregon

I am a woman born in Oaxaca of Zapotec and Mixtec blood. Our mission as women is to create, educate, communicate and participate. That is why we are here occupying the state radio and TV station. … From the countryside to the city, we Oaxacan women are tired of bearing this burden alone of the repression we are experiencing from the long line of people who have governed us and from our current governor, Ulises Ruiz. … Although the people who may read this are far away, we are living this crude reality of repressions and an impossible situation. … We went out into the streets on the first of August to tell Ulises Ruiz that he had to leave Oaxaca. We are women who don’t usually have a voice because we are brown, we are short, we are fat and they think that we don’t represent the people, but we do. WE are the face of Oaxaca. … We are here because we want a free Mexico, a democratic Mexico and we have had enough.

These words come from 55-year-old Fidelia Vásquez in Oaxaca City on August 5, 2006. Fidelia is part of a group of dozens of women who five days earlier occupied the official Oaxaca state television station “Canal 9” and state FM and AM radio stations after 2,000 of them marched through the streets of Oaxaca. She is also a teacher, a member of the Section 22 of the CNTE (large dissident confederation within the National Educational Workers Union) and a self-declared supporter of the APPO or Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca.

Fidelia’s testimony brings together an analysis of gender, race and class that suggests the roots of the ongoing social movement in Oaxaca and why women have had such a strong presence in it. Extreme social stratification, a regional political elite who have silenced opposition and narrowly defined the “culture” of Oaxaca, ongoing discrimination against women and indigenous residents, and a national and international political opening for the left have coalesced to move women like Fidelia into the streets and more importantly to invest in building an alternative vision of what politics can mean.

For several months the APPO controlled much of the city of Oaxaca, organized popular cultural events, ran radio and television stations, and set up local and regional assemblies throughout the state. The APPO’s goals were to develop a new state constitution and system of governance that would take into account the majority of Oaxaca’s citizens. While the women’s occupation of Oaxaca state public television and radio stations ended in late August, they continue to be active in all facets of the popular movement in Oaxaca.

After their occupation of the state television and radio stations on August 1, women affiliated with Section 22 and the APPO formed the Coordinadora de Mujeres de Oaxaca, Primero de Agosto (COMO). When paramilitaries shot out the transmission tower of the radio station that had come to be called “Radio Cacerola,” (Casserole Radio), COMO participated in the take-over of another radio station known as “La Ley” or “The Law” (renamed “La Ley del Pueblo” or The Law of the People).

Throughout the months of September, October and November women from COMO and the APPO were active participants in occupying state government buildings, radio stations, and in staffing hundreds of home-made barricades throughout the city that had been constructed to prevent paramilitary forces and undercover state police from entering neighborhoods and terrorizing people.

Women also organized branches of the APPO in other parts of the state of Oaxaca. For example, in October of 2006, Mixtec and Triqui women active in the Women’s Regional Council of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB) helped to found a regional branch of the APPO in Juxtlahuaca. There members of the Women’s Regional Council built and defended barricades, occupied the city hall, and marched around the city defiantly demanding the end of local and state governments controlled by the PRI.

According to FIOB organizer Centolia Maldonado, “the women from the indigenous communities were the bravest. They were not afraid of people shouting at them or of confrontation like some of the women from the town of Juxtlahuaca. They held their ground.”

From June 14 through December 10, 2006, the social conflict in Oaxaca resulted in 17 deaths, 450 prisoners, almost 30 people who are disappeared and many people who have been wounded. From November 25 through December 4 at least 192 people were taken prisoner in round-ups by the PFP, primarily in Oaxaca City. There were 46 women prisoners among those detained.

In August 2006, 2,000 women participated in “La Marcha de Las Cacerolas,” pounding on pans with kitchen utensils in a shrill demonstration against the Ulises Ruiz administration. Photo courtesy of Jorge Hernández-Díaz

Prior to these dates other women had been detained as well. Many of the women who were detained and sent to a men’s medium security prison in the state of Nayarit were threatened with rape and in some cases sexually assaulted. The threat of rape has been a consistent part of messages that women receive to discourage their activism. There are also accusations from young male prisoners that they were sexually assaulted by the Federal Preventative Police as they were transferred from the Tepic airport to a prison in the state of Nayarit.

Patricia Jiménez Aragón, one of the founders of COMO and a delegate of the founding Congress of the APPO relates the kinds of threats she has received for her activism. Her words also capture the determination of the thousands of Oaxacan women involved in the APPO movement who continue to be the leading edge of change in southern Mexico.

They tell us they are going to rape us, that they are going to kill our children, that they are going to rob our houses. We have been living with this fear for five months, that they are going to kill us, thinking about the worst that can happen. We are living a life that is totally different from the life we had before the 14th of June and for many women, before the first of August. We don’t live in our houses any more, we don’t go out to have fun and we don’t see our children. This social movement has changed our lives.

Women’s participation in the social rebellion in Oaxaca is still unfolding with much more to come as the APPO continues in its struggle to change political and economic relations of power. “Short, fat, and brown,” in her own words, Fidelia and many women like her are determined to see their images and ideas move into the mainstream of Oaxacan life. The women of COMO may play a critical role in the future of the APPO and the teachers’ popular movement as common issues of gender may bridge rifts between the different political tendencies within the APPO and a split between part of Section 22 and the APPO.

Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Zapotec Women: Gender, Class and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca (2005).