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| From the November 2003
Anthropology News
A Gendered View on Indigenous Autonomy Movements
June Nash Today indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere are advocating a changed relationship with the states within which they have been subordinated. Within these movements, indigenous women are for the first time in post-conquest history emerging as central protagonists, defining the values of their people in national and global congresses. When a gendered dimension is added, the oft-called essentialized postures of indigenous people related to their movements for cultural revitalization are further intensified. We can see this in the pronouncements of indigenous peoples in the turbulent 1990s when they began to figure in international conferences. Identification in Practice Should this self-identification of indigenous women of being indigenous and female linked with nature and endowed with immanent wisdom, failing a “scientific” rationale, be rejected as the iconic representation for a social movement? Or should we simply present this self-portrayal as ethnographic data, reaffirmed in the behavior and beliefs of the people we study? Or must we come to terms with these identities as aspects of social processes. Fearing that the deconstructive urge will leave us without comprehensive terms of identity and opposition, I choose to follow the latter course, seeking modes of identification in daily practice and social mobilization. To suspend the reader in ever more nuanced ambiguities would suspend the possibility of definitive action or judgments. Furthermore, in my experience with social movements, I’ve discovered that only when people embrace as their own the essential meaning of life shared with others can they communicate as a collectivity. I feel that it is incumbent upon me as an ethnographer to present the alternative goals of the indigenous people with whom I have worked in Mexico and to show how they mobilize collective alternatives in the context of a global encirclement. If they choose to claim special relations with the land and cosmos, that is the prerogative of a people forced to defend their way of life. Indigenous Women in Mexico Indigenous women’s engagement in organizations in Chiapas broadened the scope of civil society by their assertion of the rights of gender in relation to the rights of autonomy. Their statement formulated at the fourth National Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy (ANIPA) in December, 1995 demonstrates the importance of defining autonomy in instrumental terms:
Women relate their experiences of oppression to its root cause in the indigenous cultural setting: “We are educated to serve in house and communities. Families give preference to boys while girls leave school to work in the house. The government does not give credit or land to women. We do not work for wages, and we have nothing to pay for cultivation. When we ask for legal aid, officials ask for a marriage license, and if we are not married, they say they will not write a warrant. Women cannot be officials in their communities, and do not have the right to a voice, and our word is not worthwhile in court. With the bad treatment we receive, we see rage and suffering as something normal. We seek democratic and harmonious relations with equality and without discrimination and the sharing of household responsibilities.” Women have now formed separate groups within campesino and indigenous organizations to establish their own agenda as protagonists for change. Indigenous women stated with pride in the Convention of Indigenous Women in San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1997 that “the great cultural richness of our pueblos has been maintained, reproduced and enriched by we women.” They have defined as a future objective the prevention of the exploitative use by outsiders of “this richness used in a manner foreign to our view of life.” Changes of the sort women are experiencing can radically change expectations of what behaviors are acceptable, not only in the intimate spheres of the home but now, increasingly, in the mainstream of political protest and action. For instance, Chiapas women in the Zapatista movement promote egalitarian relations that deny the hierarchical order based on gender and wealth that were their destiny in the plantations from which they come or the traditional order from which they withdrew when they became committed to liberation theology. Men now often engage in childcare and cooking, just as women participate in public arenas. In their national appearances, the Zapatistas always maintain an equal number of men and women. The Zapatistas seek ways of overcoming any personality cult by constantly featuring new speakers, both women and men. These are the conditions that they want to replicate in any development enterprises and in their daily lives. Participation of women in civil society transforms the action and ideology guiding political life in the state. At the same time it threatens some sectors, particularly male youths of indigenous communities, who sense a loss of their control over women’s labor and bodies just when they are losing a sense of their own future in a declining agrarian economy. As the repositories of culture in indigenous communities that relied on their exclusion from the dominant sectors of political and social life, indigenous women’s demands for full participation in the emergent civil society is a premonition of the end of cacique (local political boss) co-optation and other features of male hegemony during the recent past. Women’s assertion of autonomy is, thus, crucial for the attainment of indigenous autonomy.
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