The Zapatistas have provided a very important political opening in Mexico for raising issues of indigenous rights, particularly indigenous autonomy--basically, the right to have a voice in all decision making that affects you whether it is political, economic, educational, health--broadly, development--and also to be incorporated into the national political life in a significant way, not through assimilation but through recognition and validation of difference.
The movement for indigenous autonomy didn't just begin with the Zapatistas. If you look at what people are struggling for, and why, and where, you'll see a continuity throughout Mexican history. If there is a Mixtec revolt that happened in the last century that was about the imposition of outside authorities--taxing people or telling them who would control liquor distribution--in a sense those are issues that are very much related to what people are talking about today in terms of political self-determination at local, regional, and national levels. Perhaps now for the first time we have a national articulation of what have been more regionally based struggles on the part of indigenous peoples.
What is "Autonomy"?
One of the things that is very interesting about the articulation of indigenous autonomy is that there are very different visions of what autonomy means in different parts of Mexico. The experience of the Yaquis, who have had a sustained territory that is identified with them for a fairly long period of time, is really different than the experience of people in the Lacandon of Chiapas, who came from other areas and moved into those areas in the past fifty, forty, thirty years, where you get a sort of multiethnic, regional definition. Or Oaxaca where you have a Mixe region where it has been subordinated historically by the Zapotecas; they are not really interested in being multiethnic with their contentious neighbors. You get more of a movement for a local or community autonomy.
There is tremendous variation within Mexico of what indigenous autonomy means and even what indigenous rights mean in particular places. They don't mean the same thing in [the state of] Chihuahua that they do in Oaxaca or Guerrero or Chiapas because there are very different regional experiences. So real variation and difference of historical experience is one thing. The other is that there are different gendered notions of what indigenous rights are.
Customs and Traditions
One of the most interesting set of discussions came out of the label "customs and traditions," which is included in the San Andrés Accord. These are accords on indigenous rights that were signed by the EZLN and the Mexican government in 1996, and which have never been implemented. Customs and traditions--"usos y costumbres"--have generated a very interesting discussion on the part of women.
At the first meeting of the National Indigenous Congress in the mid-1990s, there was a series of workshops that indigenous women did that received some very hefty criticism in the congress for sort of betraying the movement or splitting it. Their [the women's] suggestions were that not all traditions and customs were necessarily progressive and that it was possible to be indigenous and also change through time--that there was nothing about indigenous identity which had ever remained stable in any particular place. So things like women and men not choosing their marriage partners, women not participating in community assemblies, women assuming tremendous amounts of physical labor and long work hours, were not necessarily traditions and customs that indigenous women wanted to see continued. They also talked about the importance of democratization--indigenous women's rights in the home, in the community, in the political assembly. They didn't see it as a competition; they could be female, they could be indigenous, and they could also be activists. I think that is one of the most interesting developments--the emergence of this gendered space. I mean "gendered" in the sense of female, gendered space for indigenous women to meet nationally, to talk with one another.
Women and Revolts
When people ask about women and indigenous rights, a lot of attention is focused on indigenous women in the state of Chiapas who have been involved with the Zapatista movement. About thirty percent of the participants in the armed part of the Zapatista army are women. If you look at the history of indigenous organizing in Mexico, you can find indigenous rebellions and revolts throughout history, and you can even find women as figures in some of these revolts. There are always gender dimensions to indigenous revolts, which I read as part of the history of indigenous rights.
"Feminism" and Indigenismo
One of the important things to keep in mind in terms of the creation of this gendered space within movements for indigenous autonomy, is the relationships that indigenous women have had with non-indigenous women in other kinds of work. For example, a gendered discourse from NGOs [Non-Government Organizations] has interacted with indigenous women's own experience in their own communities. I by no means mean to say that indigenous women came to consciousness because of exposure to feminism or something. It is not that simple. Women have a great deal of gender consciousness simply as a result of their own experience and they have brought that experience into NGOs and put it out in not necessarily "feminist" terms, but in gendered terms.
One of the things that is very interesting about the human rights movement is that a lot of the staff are women who are offering their services to indigenous communities. There is an interaction that takes place, and I think if you do that kind of work through time it's an exchange.
A lot of people like to imagine that all kinds of activism--whether it is indigenous rights or human rights or women's rights or disabled rights or labor rights--just spring forth from this pure political context defined by whatever the goals of the movement are. The reality is that in all of the spaces where indigenous rights movements have taken place, it's been in the larger context. It may be the church, it may be labor, it may be students, it may be indigenous communities, but often there's a very rich context out of which that discussion comes. It doesn't happen in isolation, because indigenous communities don't exist in isolation now, nor have they ever in Mexican history.
