By Teresa Marrero

“In Highland Chiapas women have many problems, tradition requires that they remain in their homes… for any behavior that does not go along with the customs and traditions [of the community], women are ill-regarded and criticized” --Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, Tzotzil Mayan,1993.[1]

“Our path was always that the will of the many be in the hearts of the men and women who command” --Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee High Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (La Jornada, February 26, 1994)

The contrasting quotes above signal the tensions that mitigate indigenous women’s lives in Chiapas today. On the one hand, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz’s testimony exposes the restrictive position of indigenous women within their own ethnic communities and their growing consciousness of the damage they suffer by adhering to traditional practices. De la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinoza are founding members of the only Chiapas indigenous women’s theater and community organization, FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya, or Strength of Mayan Women). On the other, the statement by the High Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) foregrounds the nature of their military leadership, “men and women who command, ” a position that stands in conflict with traditional community and national patriarchal practices.

In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which Highland Mayan women are constructing new identities shaped by a revolutionary performantive praxis. I argue that both the self-proclaimed politically neutral theatrical/cultural group FOMMA and the radical action of the women within the Zapatista military structure are creating new possibilities for their own representation in the public arena. “Indigenous women have assumed the position of public and political subjects only since 1994” notes Castro Apreza (20), the year that marks the advent of the EZLN into the national scene. The Zapatista insurgency is the first Latin American armed group that includes a set of bylaws articulating the demands and needs of its female combatants. The feminization of the armed Zapatista conflict presents a unique historical moment in Mexican and Latin American cultural history.

Through acts of personal defiance and acts of civil disobedience, indigenous women are carving these new possibilities in spite of tremendous odds and physical danger. Recasting the “india”[2] as a positive historical agent avenges the stale, colonial legacy of the indigenous woman as the “chingada” (fucked) victim of the Conquistador. As key witnesses to their own lives, indigenous women stand in the face of entrenched systems of denial, a denial that can be seen functioning from the local to the national levels.

Performativity and Contestation

From observations of the Zapatista movement since 1994, my acquaintance with FOMMA’s work since the early 1990s, and my work on Latinas in the U.S. since the mid-80s, I find the notion of gender identity as a socially constituted, performative activity particularly useful to the analysis of contemporary culture. Seen as the public representation of a set of relations, Teresa de Lauretis suggests that these relations conjure the notion of the body as an historical construct rather than a “natural fact,” a position also found in Butler, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Foucault, and others. In simple terms, this can be described as a biological determinism accompanied by socio-culturally permissible modes of behavior. However, I am not suggesting that the social construction of the identity of “woman” can or should preclude biological differences with respect to men or differences in class, race and culture from other womenand from men. Indigenous women make a point to claim their biological and cultural distinctions as a point to be defended.

Theorist Judith Butler suggests that “gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status” (1990:271). This contestatory aspect helps us theorize a strategy employed by Highland women against the social implications of biological and social determinism in the context of their contemporary experience. I would like to underscore that whatever achievements I highlight here, parity (or in Zapatista terms, caminar parejo, to walk shoulder to shoulder) in most instances remains an imperfect, often fleeting work-in-progress.[3] And, while I am looking at both a theatrical performance (FOMMA’s work) and political action as performance (the Zapatista women insurgents), they are not to be conflated. Each responds to a different set of positionalities (FOMMA is politically neutral; the Zapatista women are armed combatants). I have joined them here as a means to explore the range and limitations of possibilities for indigenous women in Chiapas.

On Tradition and Nation

In a constant yet quiet way, some Mayan indigenous women are undermining the traditional patriarchal power structures at the local and national leadership levels, challenging notions of ethnic tradition and nation building as patria. Patria, Diana Taylor notes, is a feminine term for nationhood which remains “entangled with patriarchy” (original emphasis 1997:77). In the Mexican cultural imaginary, women have been miscast and recast for over 500 years as Malintzin, the raped mother penetrated by the Conquistador, engendering “los hijos de la chingada.” (a commonly used Mexican term meaning “children of the fucked one or the great fuck”). Yet, indigenous women have also “been there all along” and not invisible.

Nation and tradition join as unholy forces, particularly for indigenous women. The use of the term “traditional” is highly problematic, given the complex historical processes that have modified indigenous life since the Conquest. In its most negative sense, traditional implies the calcification and misuse of power by local indigenous authorities (such as the case in which indigenous women’s human rights are violated by the tradition of institutionalized acceptance of family violence). It also implies the reproduction of colonialist Spanish values by indigenous patriarchal structures of thought. These traditions in Highland Chiapas have pre-Columbian, colonial, post-colonial, and postmodern traces (Gossen 1999). The more literate indigenous women, such as Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinoza, rightfully discern that the machista models of behavior –including high levels of alcoholism in males-- are part and parcel of the Spanish conquest legacy.

Stemming from the San Andrés Peace Talks (signed in February 1996) between the Zapatistas and the Mexican Federal Government, the term usos y costumbres (ways and customs), circulates within the Zapatista camp to indicate the right to indigenous autonomy rooted in a revisionist sense of tradition.[4] This contemporary perspective includes a critical look at the misogynist practices that are perpetuated as tradition. Given the dimensions of the real and theoretical problems related to tradition, I restrict my use of the term to signify the present status quo, represented by the patriarchal, township community structures in place in Mayan Chiapas communities and the challenges to that system.

Eso no pasa aquí

The Spanish in the title, “eso sí pasa aquí” (that does happen here) stands in defiance to “eso no pasa aquí,” a theme that emerged from a tape-recorded conversation with Petrona de la Cruz Cruz in Texas, 1992. In the interview, she emphasized the resistance to stage her play by the Highland Mayan men in the acting group to which she then belonged, Una mujer desesperada (A desperate woman 1992). It deals with the prevalent problem of alcoholism and spousal abuse among the Highland Mayas in Chiapas. The men argued that such things do not happen in the community (eso no pasa), and there was no need to stage them for the gringos in Texas. De la Cruz Cruz persisted and her insistence overrode the men’s impetus to silence her.

A trail of similar denial can be traced through many levels of political, economic and social life in Mexico, particularly where the sanctioned privilege of the status quo is threatened. The “theatricalization” of power in what Auslander has called mediatized (particularly televised) culture exclusively serves the economic/ political interests of institutionalized power.[5] Within Mexican circles, it is common knowledge that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (or PRI, the ruling party from the 1920’s until the presidential elections in 2000) influenced the broadcast content of mayor television networks, newspapers and radio.[6] An example of media disinformation occurred during President Ernesto Zedillo’s first few months of presidency in 1994. He launched an urgently televised campaign to discredit the emerging Zapatistas as foreign and therefore a problem of political infiltration. The ruling party’s publicity machinery went out of its way to disinform the public that the rebels were not, in fact could not be, Mexican, but rather guerrilla infiltrators from Central America. Subsequently, the Mexican executive intentionally misinterpreted the call for indigenous autonomy by attempting to conflate “autonomy” arguments with “separatist” ones in popular journalistic and televised discourse.[7] In early 1995, President Zedillo put on the best show possible to convince the world and its investors that the eruption of an armed, indigenous insurgent army was not possible in today’s Mexico. In other words, “eso no pase aquí.”[8]

From the onset, the Zapatistas have also exploited the public media. They exploded into the national and international scene as a carefully orchestrated disruptive protest of exiting president Salinas de Gortari’s pet project, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the dawn of its inauguration date, January 1, 1994. In recent years the repercussions of NAFTA have been publicly brought to the foreground by the Zapatista movement’s socio-economic analyses of neoliberal politics (see Cleaver 1997:2). The overt appeal to public opinion has created publicity for the Zapatista cause (and its detractors), but more importantly, it also has made visible the plight of a specific sector of the indigenous population: its women.

Performing Acts of Erasures and Rape

Accompanied by the burden of a neocolonial social fabric and corrupt political structures, the contemporary indigenous woman’s condition is exacerbated by an overt misogyny and the insidious denial of violent acts against her. Petrona de la Cruz Cruz’s articulation of Highland Mayan women’s condition is significant because it stands as an act of physical and symbolic defiance against implicit power structures that enforce the silencing of indigenous women at the most basic of levels: that of the self. Being an Indian woman within her own ethnic community “implies all of the subordinate, colonial relations; the negation of all autonomy; the negation of the Self in favor of biological reproduction and its model of subordination; it implies the negation of their own lives, their sexuality, the expression of their affect…” (Olivera 1995:174).

Indigenous patriarchal cultures derive their definition of woman through both biologically deterministic and behavioral models. Women are deemed subordinate to men sexually, socially, and politically by virtue of their biological “femaleness.” In Highland culture this expresses itself through the vulnerability of women to penetration and rape, actions deeply feared by indigenous women due to repercussions that are specific to Highland culture. These include being sold in marriage to the rapist (Rosenbaum 1993). According to Concepción Villafuerte, co-founder in 1967 of the alternative local Chiapas newspaper El tiempo: “The indigenous parents request a "dowry" of the rapist and hand over the girl, but he is not punished…And it is very common, almost the norm, one could say, this ill treatment of men towards women among the indigenous people... is almost like their destiny, they have to put up with it” (in Rovira 1997:32). In addition to all else, women fear being violated because rape neutralizes their most significant leverage, the one-time privilege of being acquired by a legitimate husband in marriage trade relations.

Similarly, the symbolic interpretation of her physiological/biological vulnerability assigns women the culturally-coded task of reproducing the machista model of the first india in the Spanish colonial imagination, Malintzin, Malinche, Doña Marina, as the chingada, the “violated, fucked one.” By analogy, indigenous men assume the (neo)colonialist role of the “conqueror” historically attributed to Hernán Cortés, the first European chingón, the “big fucker” in the colonized Mesoamerican imagination. The act of rape by ladino[9] and indigenous men replicate the initial act of violence by the Conquistador, thus replicating the injury towards indias. Worse yet, unwittingly ladino and indigenous men refract themselves in the image of the odious subjugator.

The definition of a “good” india depends upon her willing, submissive obedience to established norms of behavior within her ethnic community. Within traditional ethnic norms in the region (Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Chol, Zoque), there is no room for a woman to perform in socially creative ways within her community. However, this does not mean that all women renounce attempts to influence their communities at various levels, regardless of restrictions.

The Quiet Revolution: FOMMA’s Theater and Literacy Project

Being an actress is considered a very daring activity, one is thought of as crazy, lacking modesty... but through theater we can expose family and social problems that could not be said in any other way (Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, 1993).

In a context that considers an indigenous woman subject to the unprotective law of the Father, being visible, and visibly pointing out her culture's violation of women's human rights indeed constitutes a "quiet revolution," to borrow the New York Times' writer Robert Myers' term.[10] In 1994, Isabel Juárez Espinoza (Tzeltal Mayan) and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (Tzotzil Mayan) founded FOMMA, a theater collective dedicated to literacy, training, and awareness related to issues that concern indigenous women in the Highlands. According to Juárez Espinoza, no questions regarding religious beliefs or political affiliation are asked of the women and homeless children who to come to FOMMA’s San Cristobal headquarters.[11] FOMMA conducts literacy, theater, breadmaking, dressmaking and weaving workshops and maintains a neutral stance regarding the political conflict between the government and the Zapatistas, with whom they are not affiliated in any way. While men are also welcome, very few come. According to Juárez Espinoza, the organization lacks stable institutional funding, relying mostly on donations made in the United States through the Fundación Maya in Vermont. Miriam (Mimi) Laughlin, partner and wife of Smithsonian anthropologist Robert M. Laughlin, has been and continues to be instrumental in raising U.S. support for the group.

Juárez Espinoza and de la Cruz Cruz met in the late 1980's while working and participating as members of Lo’il Maxil (Monkey Business) the performing branch of Sna Jtz'ibajom (The Writer's House), a literacy and theater group in San Cristobal de las Casas.[12] It was founded and directed by Tzotzil men from nearby Zinacantán. Juárez Espinoza was the first (and for a while the only) female indigenous actress in the Highlands. Both women eventually left The Writer's House due to internal conflicts that have been elaborated by Cynthia Steele.[13]

The founders of FOMMA share several characteristics with each other that both set them apart from and unite them with other women of their ethnic background. They both graduated from secundaria, or the equivalent of junior high school, which is considered higher education since most indias are not allowed by their families to finish primary school. De la Cruz Cruz has taken two semesters of high school. Unfortunately, rape is an experience that de la Cruz Cruz shares with other indigenous women. She raised her child conceived by rape, and has since had a second child outside of marriage. As a single mother, she left her community to find work as a maid in the city of San Cristobal at a time when she could have been in school. Juárez Espinoza was married but widowed at an early age and was left with a child to support. She too left her community to work in San Cristobal as a domestic worker; she has since had a second child on her own and has never remarried.

In spite of adversity, their achievements are noteworthy. De la Cruz Cruz was the first indigenous person to win the coveted Rosario Castellanos Prize for literature in 1992. Isabel Juárez Espinoza’s book, Cuentos y Teatro Tzeltales was published in 1994. In1999, for its work in radio, theater, and education in Mexico, FOMMA received a national award given by IMIFAP (Mexican Institute of Research on the Family and Population) and sponsored by the Summit Foundation. In November of 1999, Juárez Espinoza participated in the conference “Men and Women of the Millennium,” in Lima, Perú, an event sponsored by The World Bank.[14] They have presented their work in the United States, Mexico, and Australia. Their personal efforts to excel in the craft of acting, their educational achievements, and courage to publicly perform cultural taboos set them outside the conformity required of traditional women who remain in their communities.

Everyday Life and Social Drama

Because Juárez Espinoza's and de la Cruz Cruz's life/work surpasses traditional social norms, it is particularly fitting to explore of their work through Victor Turner's notion of social drama. After having read all of de la Cruz Cruz's plays, Juárez Espinoza's plays and prose narrative up to 1996,[15] and after having seen several performances both in the U.S. and Mexico, it is my hypothesis that their work revolves around issues of breach, crisis and redress. Furthermore, their plays can be seen as morality plays that offer an idealized version of reality.

Similar to the denial and silencing of dissent with the “eso no pasa aquí” attitude at the national level, traditional (and non-Zapatista) indigenous communities duplicate that practice. They seem unable to negotiate fair and acceptable reintegrative solutions, therefore leaving women who speak out against family violence no alternative but to leave their ethnic communities. Thus the fourth or final phase of Turner’s concept of social drama, reintegration, has yet to materialize.[16] In other words, indigenous women who break with patriarchal social norms must remain in “exile” from their own communities.

One of Petrona de la Cruz Cruz's early plays, Una mujer desesperada (A Desperate Woman 1991) stands out for being the first play written by an indigenous Highland Mayan woman about the real life social drama of family violence. It was created while de la Cruz Cruz was still a member of the male dominated Sna Jtz'ibajom, and the two-act play met with a great deal of resistance from the male members of the group due to its strongly stated subject matter. In Texas, the male members of the group preferred to stage the more folkloric, lighthearted El haragán y el zopilote (The Loafer and the Buzzard) 1989, thereby attempting to extend their control over gender and cultural representation of the women beyond local and national boundaries. De la Cruz Cruz did not let up, however, and the second act of her two-act play was performed on October 12, 1992 in Fort Worth, Texas.[17]

In Una mujer desesperada the conflict is three-pronged: the actual physical violence against women, the lack of confidence in local authorities to fairly address the situation, and the denial that such things happen. The play demonstrates how violence against women is tolerated as inevitable from generation to generation. In the first act we see a mother repeatedly beaten in front of the daughters by a drunken husband, until he accidentally falls and dies when a neighbor woman intervenes to help the mother. In the second act the mother remarries because she sees no way of surviving hunger without a man's economic and social support. The second husband also beats her, yet he now also wants to "take" (rape) the eldest daughter, because he believes she too "belongs" to him.

Based on real life drama, Petrona discusses the resistance to perform her play in 1992:

They tell me: No, why are you going to come out writing these things that men kill and fight over a woman, that doesn't happen in the community. Yes, it does happen in the community, because I lived it. I went through it, I tell them. In my family so many things used to happen, maybe for that reason my mother died, I tell them. So then, I lived part of my work... my mother was beaten eight days before dying. Therefore I lived part of my work... And another person (a woman) from Zinacantán was machetied... the grandmother and the granddaughter were machetied to death in their homes. So I became very, very focused, I tell them... I begin including the small parts into what I wrote. Yes, but this does not happen. All right, it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen (Sí, pero eso no pasa. Bueno, está bien no pasa, no pasa.). But I, I like it, it’s my way of writing, it’s my way of being able to do things, I tell them. Well, all right, they tell me. (Translation from the original Spanish transcription of an interview with Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, April 13, 1993, Ft. Worth, Texas).

“El qué dirán” (what will they say?), a Spanish phrase that indicates concern over public opinions regarding one’s private actions, is an attitude stereotypically assigned to class-conscious women of Spanish descent. In this case, however, the indigenous males assume the self-assigned position of protectors of the ethnic community’s image. In this instance, the men’s attitudes and actions represent an unwitting performance of the Spanish cultural value that hinges on notions of honor. The intended protection of the family’s (and by extension, the community’s) “honor” then amounts to performing –reenacting-- a (neo)colonialist social code. The men's refusal to admit what is common experience and knowledge –“eso no pasa en el pueblo”—also resonates with the policies of the supreme “father” of the country. Recall President Zedillo’s initial stance towards the unruly and rebellious Zapatistas. The motion of containment through denial and subsequent erasure and eradication of a known social problem, are parallel--not dissimilar-- moves.

The denouement of Una mujer desesperada questions the capacity of the redressive phase of ethnic community life. When the authorities arrive, the daughter experiences a sense of distrust and, fearful of her fate after killing her attacker in self-defense, suddenly commits suicide rather than submitting to them. The lack of trust in the system to which she would appeal functions as an indictment against the lack of justice (redress) in cases of rape and family violence in the communities.

In many pre-1996 works, de la Cruz Cruz writes the redressive and reintegrative stages into the plays as an idealized and exemplary version of reality.[18] FOMMA performs these plays in the various communities where they become subject of discussion. For instance, in Desprecio paternal, drama tzotzil (Paternal Disdain) the father rejects and beats the daughters for being female, a biological determinism that guarantees the paternal disdain. In Mujer olvidada (Forgotten Woman) de la Cruz Cruz creates a male character of a son who acts violently against his aging mother, who prefers him to the daughters because he is male. In La tragedia de Juanita (Juanita’s Tragedy) de la Cruz Cruz reveals the fate of a nine-year-old girl, who catches the eye of an old, powerful man. She is sold to him as his "wife," but when the drunken man rapes and then asks the child to cook for him, crying she says she doesn't know how.

Other issues that are performed for public scrutiny by FOMMA include Isabel Juárez Espinoza's early play Migración, which deals with the fate of the family once the husband leaves his terreno (plot of land). The migration of poor, indigenous peoples to large urban areas afflicts many regions of Latin America. Evident traces of post-colonial urban racism demands the erasure of all identity markers of “Indianness” from costume to language to self-sufficiency.

Works since 1997 include Ideas para el cambio (Ideas for Change), El sueño del mundo al revés (The World Upside Down), Víctimas del engaño (Victims of Deceit), La vida de las Juanitas (The Life of the Juanitas), and Amor en la barranca (Love in the Ravine) which deals with the issue of birth control and was part of the Summit Foundation prize won in 1999. The works develop from the participant’s experiences, and the act of speaking and sharing their lives, according to Juárez Espinoza, is often difficult but liberating for indigenous women. It is difficult for many to break a life-long practice of silence. To what degree FOMMA’s quiet, personal revolution may alter present cultural practices and understanding remains to be seen.

The Internal Revolution: Men Learn to Cook, Women Give Orders

If the cultural/theater group FOMMA has been busy helping displaced, indigenous women through infra-family social theater, the Zapatistas have thrown themselves into the national political theater by declaring war on the status quo. Such radical action has had deep effects, from the way in which the state has been forced to negotiate with indigenous people, to the way in which rebel indigenous men and women relate to one another within their communities and homes.

Within the Zapatista army, the inclusion and parity that indigenous women enjoy in the military ranks runs directly opposite to standard notions of womanhood. Thus, their participation challenges traditional male hierarchies. I am not suggesting, however, an over-zealous, idealistic notion of Zapatista indigenous women’s attainments to date. Both women and men see the possibility of social changes in generational terms. Machismo will not be eradicated without a radical change in the men. Journalist Rosa Rojas offers this interview of Antonio Hernández, a member of the hard-core Zapastista autonomous municipality of Las Margaritas: “…the women's struggle to get us men to collaborate with the exercise of women's rights is going to take a long time, because if the man doesn't let her, she simply is not going to have rights. Men, too, must become educated in women's rights, so that the habit of sharing life, sharing decisions, sharing work, in every sense becomes publicly known” (in Rojas 1994). Thus militant Zapatista women outside EZLN military ranks still live within the debated terrain of transitional personal politics. Remnants of traditionalist thinking can easily be perceived in a discourse that frames the rights of women within the patriarchal logic of “giving permission.” The construction of identities of women belonging to the same cultural groups (the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, Zoque) within the rebel Zapatista military structure as described above is based on a different set of guiding principles, antithetical to the traditional cultural model. Both men and women make choices concerning the level of participation within the communities that support Zapatismo. For instance, one may be an insurgente or insurgent, which means leaving one’s family, going into the mountains, and gaining military training. Or one may be a miliciana/o or militant, which allows the person to stay in their village and work as civilian support.[19] For women, involvement requires they be ideologically in agreement within their hearts (to use the indigenous unity of heart/ mind) with the evolving Zapatista social project. This project highlights the democratic, participatory, and community-based indigenous concept of “mandar obedeciendo,” that is, being leaders who govern by obeying the will of the majority.[20] Both positions require that women perform outside the biological definitions of their being, based rather on the performative junction of behavior and volition.

And women are crossing those boundaries. One of the notable aspects of the Zapatista struggle has been the visual presence of indigenous women outside the home. A full one third of the EZLN army is composed of indigenous women (Rojas 1995:vi). Diane Goetze in “The Zapatista Women: The Movement from Within” distinguishes the Zapatista women as a distinct movement because: 1) They have a collective identity, which is a different identity than that of the Zapatistas as a whole, 2) they have mobilized and acted as a distinct group from within the Zapatistas, 3) they have some demands and goals distinct from the Zapatistas, and 4) they have brought social change within the Zapatista organization as well as in the indigenous populations of Chiapas.[21]

The inclusion of women combatants as equal revolutionary partners also requires an adjustment in the role that men play. In Guiomar Rovira’s telling Mujeres de maíz (1997) an interview with Captain Irma reveals a significant aspect of that difference: “In the pueblos [indigenous traditional communities] it is the woman who works at home; only women make the tortillas and wash clothes. But not here, the men, the compañeros [comrades] also work; they also do the service detail (in Rovira 68). The social makers that define gender through the performative function of household duties are erased. In this new context, men do so-called women’s work as part of a shared rebel community. Men acknowledge that they must also obey the command of women, “as part of a military organization, they have no choice but to do as they are ordered) (in Rovina 68). Men must obey women of higher military rank. In the video Zapatista Women, Subcomandante Marcos discusses the courage of Captain Isidora, who saved the lives of an entire column of men, while wounded in Ocosingo in 1994. Thus insurgent women of military rank are respected on an equal footing with men due to their proven military performance.

On the subject of performing a traditional female role, Rolando, an insurgente being interviewed, says that: “At the beginning…the thing that was hardest for me to get used to was preparing the food. One day I burned the beans, imagine giving the compañeros burnt beans” (in Rovina 69). The transgressive act of men cooking daily meals while women give military orders occurs outside of normal village community life, and as such it transpires in the liminality of a state of war. One thing remains evident, insurgent women have found a new freedom and going back to traditional subservient roles will be difficult if not impossible. Within the new, multi-ethnic Zapatista military communities, gender parity (caminar parejo) is enforced.

From “Universal” Male-Directed Revolutionary Concerns, to the Specificity of Women in Conflict

It may be a little known fact that the person who commandeered the take- over of the key city of San Cristobal de las Casas that fateful dawn on January 1, 1994 is a Tojolabal woman: Mayor Ana María, then twenty-five years of age. (She joined at the age of 14). In February 28, 1994, Mayor Ana María responds to the question of who they are and why they have taken up arms. “There are some ladinos who are here. They are those who are helping the ones who understand. For example, Subcomandante Marcos is a ladino. But they are not foreigners. We know where he is from. We are not being fooled by anyone. It is we, the campesinos and the indigenous people who think that this needs to be done, what we did in January.”[22]

According to the declarations of Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatistas as an indigenous, grassroots movement was born on November 17, 1983 (LeBot 1996:65). The ten-year gestation period afforded them an organic evolution that is and is not Marxist, that has some aspects of indigenous fundamentalist and millenary thought and of previous indigenous resistance movements. Speaking of the decisive years of 1993-4, Marcos notes that Zapatismo “ was mixture of all of this, a cocktail that is mixed in the mountain and crystallizes itself in the combative force of the EZLN, that is, in the regular troops” (Marcos in Le Bot 1997:99). Within the gestation period, the issue of women’s specific demands emerged as of 1992. Prior to this, between 1990 and 1992, the Zapatista demands were “universal” (Marcos in Le Bot 1997:322). In 1992 the communities in arms voted in favor of war, and a juridical corpus was created that would establish the “revolutionary laws of war.” The highest organizational level of the EZLN asked the women to draft their proposal. “This was the result of the struggle of the women Zapatista officers” (Marcos in LeBot 1997:322). And while women had already gained the right and responsibility to combat on equal footing, at the social level the Zapatista women saw the need to address their biological and reproductive right, among other social issues. The insurgent ideology of Zapatismo had taught them to question and analyze their own exploited position within dominant power structures, and they did, leaving nothing unexamined, including Zapatismo. Marcos has often commented that the EZLN is not feminist, that the men would have rather retained their privilege, but that the militant Zapatista women would not allow it (in Le Bot 1997:322). Within the Zapatista General Demands to the federal government, the 29^th point articulates the Petition of Indigenous Women. Thus indigenous Zapatista women insurgents engendered the right to self-representation within a revolutionary organization.

Insurgency: From Huipiles to Masks to Military Camouflage

One of the most visibly surprising aspects that the Zapatistas brought to Mexico and the world on that chilly Highland January morning were the images of “so many women, most very young” (Millán 1996:9). What Millán does not mention in her excellent analysis, yet evidently emerges in the photographic and video images, is the implicit revolution that took place previous to the public appearance of heterosexual indigenous Mayan women publicly wearing men’s military clothing (Figure ). Perhaps a more accurate reading might be to equalize the cognitive field by seeing both men and women publicly wearing the same costume, regardless of gender, ethnic or community identity markers. As in a theatrical context, dress functions as a visual sign that may uphold or subvert consensus of the roles being assumed by the performing body.

In this manner, strategic dressing serves as another way to address the issue of roles and performance. Feminist theorists have discussed performance in transgendered costume, moving from Shakespearean dramas to contemporary discourses of transvestism. Considering the transgressive implications offered by the Highland Chiapas context, it is not a stretch to consider the donning of male military attire a transgendered motion, not sexually but representationally. One must consider that for traditional Mayan women to shed their ethnic/village identifying woven huipiles (brightly colored woven wool blouses) is to shed their ethnic markings of origin. According to Walter Morris, in his landmark book, Living Maya: “When a Maya woman puts on her huipil she emerges through the neckhole symbolically in the axis of the world. The designs of the universe radiate from her head…Here the supernatural and the ordinary meet. Here, between the very center of a world woven from dreams and myths, she stands between heaven and the underworld” (1987:108).

If women’s traditional clothing marks a cosmological, sacred world order, one which speaks a certain language understood only within the context of ethnic tradition, then the shedding of such a costume implies the overriding choice to assume a different role and convey another meaning. If the traditional huipil also marks normative behavior and roles that differentiate indigenous Highland women not only from men, but from other women belonging to different ethnic groups and from ladinas, then the shedding of these markers functions as a move away from the fragmenting ethnic towards the unifyingly political, from ethnic/gender identity to macro politics.[23] In this way, the politics of dress assumes wider implications.

The use of ski masks by a subversive group has acquired symbolic capital in a nation that has traditionally used masks as markers of institutionalized power. In ancient times, Mayan, Zapotec and Aztec religious/political leaders used ritual masks to represent animistic forces. The donning of a self-effacing head cover erases individual markers, allowing the individual to transcend to a collective level of experience for and by the group’s well being.[24] In contemporary Mexico, the entrenchment of the ruling PRI over the past eighty years has bestowed a more cynical connotation to ritual anonymity. In modern political discourse el Tapado (hooded or covered man) refers not to a corporeal, actual mask, but to a ritual of the state “the apotheosis of the mask, the veneration of the mask for its own sake” (Hiriart 1995:94). El Tapado refers to the secretly anointed successor or the incumbent Mexican President. In light of this practice, Subcomandante Marcos refutes critics of Zapatismo’s public use of ski masks, “Why the big deal over the ski masks. Isn’t Mexican political culture one of ‘hooded men’”? (Marcos in Documentos y comunicados, 1994:98). The duplicitous face of a simulated democracy lacks the moral weight to tear away the Zapatista’s self-protective mask (Marrero 1998a:99).

The donning by Mayan Zapatista insurgent women soldiers of not only the mask but the outer clothing of men functions both as a subversive and normalizing element by reassigning the gendered qualities associated with the theater of war. For men to be willing to accept women wear “their” signifiers of power implies a revolution within. While there is nothing innovative about the idea of women and men assuming unisex military garb, there is a qualitative difference in the donning of this clothing by women from taboo-regimented, closed, and generally isolated ethnic communities be it in Latin America, India, Africa or the United States (consider the Amish, for instance). This difference carries serious implications at the deepest level of social organization and its willingness to represent and perform an empowered female.

Pacifist and radical feminists may rightfully object to my suggestion that indigenous women are being empowered through the co-optation of masculine military signs. Ximena Bedregal, for instance, makes such an objection in “Un Diálogo con Mercedes Olivera: memoria y utopía en la práctica feminista.” As a radical Mexican feminist, she believes that any involvement in military action constitutes participation in patriarchal structures/logic of domination, and therefore defeats the efforts to create/imagine new social options for women (1995: 185-198-d). Mercedes Olivera, on the other hand, makes a case for a less utopian perspective, one in which the gains can be accounted for in light of the real conditions of life. In my opinion, the empowering of women as soldiers in the case of Chiapas is an evident fact. Entrance into the world of fighting for the rights so long denied to former colonial objects of racist rule requires seizing opportunities wherever they may appear. At this junction in the process, performing contestatory and combative behavior requires entrance into the world of military logic.

Concluding Thoughts: Performing Public Resistance

If the women’s group FOMMA has taken up their communities’ social ills through dramatic, symbolic performance, offering ideal redressive and reintegrative conclusions, Zapatista women continue their public struggle for physical survival, redress and reintegrative practices in the non-fictional space of live political struggle. By doing so, each in their own way, they have not only called into question and reconfigured conventional notions of revolution, they have feminized the public field of war, and social revolutions. In Latin America (and possibly the world), a contemporary declaration of war by an insurgent group that includes the specific demands of its women is a first.

Public demonstrations by indigenous women against the incursions of the Mexican federal army have been documented. In a show of civil defiance against encroaching Mexican military tanks, women in traditional clothing stand in a person to person cordón de resistencia (resistance line). In an incident recorded by Mexican videographer Carlos Martínez Suárez, unarmed Tzotzil women and girls form a protective single-file on the outskirts of the community of Oventic in order to prevent the encroaching tanks from entering.[25] These striking images show indigenous women standing defiantly before the federal soldiers (Figure ). For women who have been socialized never to raise their gaze at men, this staring at the face of institutionalized, governmental power bespeaks of a new public social role. For ladino men, socialized to ignore indias as the unworthy bottom rung of society, having to contend non-violently with defiant shoulder-to-shoulder faces covered with red bandanas must indeed constitute a supreme act of self-restraint. The soldiers do not look at the faces of the women, perhaps in yet another act of collective unwillingness, of collective denial. In any case, the feminization of the conflict has fundamentally altered the ways in which civil disobedience is conceived. In the Mexican national consciousness, these acts of civil disobedience by indigenous women single-handedly revolutionize the collective casting of post-colonial indigenous women as subjects and historical agents. Perhaps, finally, Malintzin is avenged. Indeed Zapatista insurgentas are accomplishing what the much-maligned soldaderas [26] of the 1910 Revolution could not: to be respected. It is crucial to acknowledge that by performing acts of personal, cultural, and civil disobedience indigenous women behave in ways antithetical to the conditioning of the past five hundred plus years. Thus they are front-line players in one of the most important social rethinking in Mexican history since the Mexican Revolution of 1910. FOMMA’s theatre of resistance and their rearticulation of women’s issues in Highland culture are no less important. Their painstaking role is to raise consciousness one member of the community at a time.

While television cameras in Mexico and the U.S. do not acknowledge the effort of a few thousand barely literate Chiapas Mayan women, to themselves and to the world they no longer remain invisible and silent.

Notes

[1] All translations from Spanish are mine, unless otherwise stated.

[2] I use the terms india and indigenous woman alternatively. India can be seen as a pejorative term alluding to the subjugated status of post-Colonial indigenous women. In Spanish, it is also a term that they use to refer to themselves with and without the negative connotation. Indigenous is the more acceptable term in English. Most often each Chiapas community refers to themselves by their own ethnic name.

[3] For instance, even in self-proclaimed autonomous Zapatista communities, indigenous women presently do not have the legal right to own land.

[4] See Díaz-Polanco, Xib Ruiz and Burguete.

[5] See Auslander’s Presence and Resistance: Postmodernis and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance, 1992.

[6] Notable exceptions are the newspaper La Jornada and the magazine Proceso, both published in Mexico City which are instrumental in the dissemination and political analysis of Zapatista political thought.

[7] See Marrero 1998b.

[8] See Marrero 1998a, 1998b.

[9] Ladino and ladina are terms used by indigenous people in Chiapas and Guatemala to denote a non-Mayans. For instance. Mayor Ana María refers to Subcomandante Marcos as a ladino. According to Underiner, it refers to neither white nor mestizo, but to “those who aspire to the privilege of a Western lifestyle” (1998:354, footnote 17). Originally, Ladino is a term used to refer to the language spoken by Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in the 15^th century.

[10] See “Mayan Indian Women Find Their Place Is on the Stage,” September 28, 1997.

[11] Telephone interview with Isabel Juárez Espinoza, 22 November 1999.

[12] For further research on general Highland and Yucatec Mayan theater see Frischmann’s work. On De todos y para todos by Lo’il Maxil and Migración by Isabel Juárez Espinoza see Tamara Underreiner’s “Incidents of Theater in Chiapas…”

[13] See Cynthia Steele’s “A Woman Fell into the River....”

[14] Isabel informed me via a phone interview that her participation had been procured by Cynthia Steele (22 November 1999).

[15] Their work between 1997 and 1999 was created in group improvisations and summarized but not written as scripts.

[16] See Turner 1974.

[17] Their Texas 1992 visit was hosted by Texas Christian University; the group was invited by Donald Frischmann.

[18] This idealized redressive characteristic is also noted by Frischmann in the work of Sna Jtz’ibajom, in the piece “Herencia fatal” by Diego Méndez Guzman. See Frischmann’s “New Mayan Theater in Chiapas.”

[19] See the video Las compañeras tienen grado/Zapatista Women (1994) for a more detailed discussion.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Goetze, no date, downloaded from www.actlab.utexas.edu/geneve/zapwomen/ goetze/thesis.html, article A:1.

[22] Downloaded already translated from www.flag.blackened.net/ revolt/mexico/ womindx.html.

[23] See indigenous lawyer Margarito Xib Ruiz & Araceli Burguete’s “Los pueblos indios y la refundación del estado,” and Héctor Díaz Polanco’s excellent La reblelión zapatista y la autonomía.

[24] See, for instance, “Máscaras y sombras: del concepto ritual a la práctica cotidiana del anonimato” by Juan Anzaldo Menesses, 1996.

[25] See Martínez Suárez’s video, Sueños y palabras sabias de las comunidades tzotziles y tzeltales, 1995.

[26] See Diane Goetze’s “Revolutionary Women: From Soldaderas to Comandantas. The Role of Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Current Zapatista Movement.”

References

Alva de la Selva, Alma Rosa. “Retrospectiva de los medios electrónicos en México durante 1999.” Revista mexicana de comunicación. México: año XII, número 62, marzo/abril 2000:7-11.

Anzaldo Menesses, Juan. “Máscaras y sombras: del concepto ritual a la práctica

cotidiana del anonimato.” Ce-Acatl, Revista de Cultura de Anáhuac, número 81, junio 1996.

Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance, Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

Bedregal, Ximena. “Memoria y utopía en la práctica feminista: diálogo con Mercedes Olivera.” Chiapas, ¿y las mujeres qué? Rosa Rojas, editor. México: Ediciones La Correa Feminista, Centro de Investigación y Capacitación del a Mujer A.C. 1994:185-189.

Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, Pensar nuestra cultura. México: Alianza Editorial, 1991.

------. México profundo, una civilización negada. México: Grijalbo, 1987, 1989.

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue Ellen Case. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990: 270-282.

Castro Orepeza, Inés. “Mujeres indígenas en Chiapas: el derecho a participar.” Memoria, Revista Mensual de Política y Cultura, México: Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero Socialista, No. 139, Septiembre 2000:20-22.

Chiapas 3. Mexico, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, Universidad Autónoma de Mexico y Ediciones Era, S.S. de C.V., 1996.

Cleaver, Harry. “Nature, Neoliberalism and Sustainable Development: Between Charybdis & Scylla?” Downloaded from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/

Cleaver/port.html 1997:1-13.

-----. “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle.” Downloaded from http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/port.html, 1995:1-26.

De la Cruz Cruz, Petrona. “La educación, el teatro y los problemas de las mujeres en los Altos de Chiapas,” speech delivered April 1993, at Texas Christian University.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender,” Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987:1-30.

Díaz-Polanco, Héctor. La rebelión zapatista y la autonomía. México: Siglo XXI Editores.

Frischmann, Donald H. “New Mayan Theater in Chiapas: Anthropology, Literacy, and Social Drama.” Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, & Theatricality in Latin/o America, Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas, editors. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.

---. “Active Ethnicity: Nativism, Otherness and Indian Theater in Mexico.” GESTOS 6.11, 1991:113-126.

---. “Contemporary Mayan Theatre and Ethnic Conflict, The Recovery and (Re)Interpretation of History.” Imperialism and Theatre, Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance 1795-1995, edited by J. Ellen Gainor. London & New York: Routledge1995:71-84.

García Canclini, Néstor. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. México: Grijalbo, 1989.

----. Consumidores y ciudadanos, conflictos multiculturales de la globalización. México: Editorial Grojalbo, 1995.

Goetze, Diane. “The Zapatista Women: The Movement from Within.” Downloaded from www.actlab.utexas.edu/`geneve/zapwomen/ goetze/theis.html. No date:1-17.

------. “Revolutionary Women: From Soldaderas to Comandantas. The Role of Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Current Zapatista Movement.”

Downloaded from www.actlab.utexas.edu/`geneve/zapwomen/ goetze/theis.html, 1997:1-14.

Gossen, Gary H. Telling Maya Tales, Tzotzil Indentities in Modern Mexico. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Hiriat, Hugo. “Máscaras mexicanas.” Mitos mexicanos, Enrique Florescano, coordinador. México: Aguilar/Nuevo Siglo, 1995:93-98.

Islas Cardona, Octavio & Fernando Gutiérrez Cortés. “La política informativa del gobierno mexicano en la red de redes.” Revista mexicana de comunicación. Mexico: aňo XII, número 62, marzo/abril 2000:23-26.

Juárez Espinoza, Isabel. Cuentos y Teatro Tzeltales. México: Editorial Diana, 1994.

Laughlin, Robert M. Of Cabbages and Kings—Tales from Zinacantán. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1977.

Le Bot, Yvan. El sueño zapatista. Madrid: Plaza y Janés, 1997.

Marrero, María Teresa. “La construcción visual de la Nueva Revolución Mexicana: El Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.” GESTOS 13.25, April 1998a:75-104.

------. “El Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional: publicidad, presencia y automía indígena.” Revista de Ciencias Sociales 5, June 1998b:190-207.

Marcos, Subcomandante. “Unas palabras sobre nuesro pensamiento.” Crónicas Intergalácticas EZLN, Primer Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y Contra el Neoliberalismo, Chiapas, México, 1996. México, 1996:65-76.

-----. EZLN, Documentos y Comunicados. México: Ediciones Era, 1994.

Millán, Márgara. “Las zapatistas de fin de milenio. Hacia políticas de autorrepresentación de las mujeres indígenas.” Chiapas 3. México: Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas de México, Ediciones Era, S.A. de C.V., 1996:19-32.

Morris, Walter F. Living Maya. Photographs by Jeffrey J. Foxx. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987.

Myers, Robert. “Mayan Indian Women Find their Place is on the Stage.” The New York Times, September 28, 1997.

Olivera, Mercedes. “Práctica Feminista: El Movimiento Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.” Chiapas, ¿y las mujeres qué? Rosa Rojas, editor. México: Ediciones la Correa Feminsita, Centro de Investigación y Capacitación de la Mujer A.C., 1995: 168-184.

Rojas, Rosa. “Indigenous Autonomy in Chiapas: The Women are Missing.” Chiapas, and the Women? <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">Rosa Rojas, editor. México: Ediciones La Correa Feminista, Centro de Investigación y Capacitación del a Mujer A.C. 1994.

------. Introducción. Chiapas,¿y las mujeres qué? Rosa Rojas, editor. México: Ediciones la Correa Feminsita, Centro de Investigación y Capacitación de la Mujer A.C., 1995a.

-------. “Las mueres en el gobierno de transcicion en rebeldía de Chiapas.” Chiapas, ¿y las mujeres qué? Rosa Rojas, editor. México: Ediciones la Correa Feminsita, Centro de Investigación y Capacitación de la Mujer A.C., 1995b

Rosenbaum, Brenda. With Our Heads Bowed, The Dynamics of Gender in a

Mayan Community. Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, The University at Albany, State University of New York, 1993.

Rovira, Guiomar. Mujeres de maíz. México: Ediciones Era, 1997.

Steele, Cynthia. “A Woman Fell into the River”: Negotiating Female Subjects in Contemporary Mayan Theater.” Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latin/o America, Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas, editors. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994.

----. “Indigenous Rights, Women’s Rights Human Rights: Mayan Politics and Theater in Chiapas.” Pacific Coast Philology XXIX.1, September 1994: 119-123.

Taylor, Diana. “Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.” Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, & Theatricality in Latin/o America, Diana Taylor & Juan Villegas, editors. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994:275-305.

------. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Tedlock, Dennis. Breath on the Mirror, Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya. San Francisco: Harper, 1993.

Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974.

Underiner, Tamara. “Incidents of Theater in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yacatán: Cultural Enactments in Mayan México.” Theater Journal 50, 1998:349-369.

Xib Ruiz, Margarito & Araceli Burguete. “Los pueblos indios y la refundación del estado.” La autonomía de los pueblos indios. México: Grupo Parlamentario PRD. Poder Legislativo, Cámara de Diputados, LVI Lesgislatura, 1996:13-22

Videography

Zapatista Women (Las compañeras tienen grado). Gustavo Montiel Pages, Hugo Rodríguez and Marina Stavehagen. Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México, April 10, 1994.

Sueños y palabras sabias de las comunidades tzotziles y tzeltales. Carlos Martínez Suárez. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes de Chiapas y la Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas. Video Trópico Sur, Chiapas, 1995. 60 minutes.

Día Internacional de la Mujer. Carlos Martínez Suárez. San Cristobal de las Casas , Video Trópico Sur, Chiapas, May 1996. 37 minutes.

Las mujeres en la lucha zapatista. Carlos Martínez Suárez. San Cristobal de las Casas, Video Trópico Sur, Chiapas, May 1997. 45 minutes.

Comment on this page