It was that crack of time between the cold night and the warm afternoon. The sun had sunk into the mountains about a half hour earlier and a gray light hung over this little indigenous town just inside Zapatista territory. At the far end of town a small knot of men stood arguing around an old cargo truck with its hood raised up. Up the road, an old water spigot stood in front of a small cluster of buildings. A few feet from the spigot a long column of smoke curled up out of a pipe poking through the roof of a stick and mud building. It was a community kitchen and inside three women were making corn tortillas at a furious pace. Huge stacks of fresh tortillas--hundreds of them--were lined up in rows on a rough wooden table. The women laughed and shouted out a greeting as we passed by the door.
Later, as we sat around our campfire, I thought back on the indigenous women I met in all the little towns and villages I visited in Chiapas. According to figures published by the National Institute of Geographic and Informative Statistics, indigenous women between the ages of 16 and 40 have an average of five children and work 16 to 18 hours a day. The work day begins between 3 and 5 a.m. and ends at 8 or 9 p.m. Women oftentimes spend five hours making tortillas by hand, then hauling water from rivers and wells and searching for firewood. In many communities the women must also participate in working the milpas, the family cornfields. The rate of maternal death in child birth is 8.5 per 1,000 live births. Only 12% of indigenous women have even heard of family planning, and deep within the Zapatista territory the annual birth rate is actually 53% and 50% of the population is under 15 years old.
In town after town the conditions of life for indigenous peasant women are the same. The women are very isolated from the world outside of the village or town. Many indigenous women speak only their indigenous language and a few words of broken Spanish. It is not uncommon in indigenous villages to see huge meetings of town councils or committees--sometimes 100 or more people--without even one woman present.
A young woman activist in San Cristóbal explained the situation like this. "There's a social marginalization, because the woman doesn't participate in these assemblies, she doesn't speak. In the assemblies all the heads of households have to participate. But in some communities, when the man doesn't show up, the children go, or in that situation, the woman can go. But in other communities, the women don't go. They're simply invisible subjects, and they can't speak, in any kind of sense. It's only in the religious activities that women have participation and organization. Now, I'm thinking about a case in a very backward community where there is traditional Catholicism. There are others where they have different levels of participation among women.
"Most women do go to school. Many go, but when they get to the 6th grade, or the 8th grade or maybe the 4th or 5th grade, the fathers take them out of school so that they won't have other kinds of problems in school in terms of relationships between men and women. It's very marginalized that way. They don't want women to openly direct themselves to a man, unless there's been an arrangement made between the parents. In some places things are changing. But for most of them, when they finish the 6th grade, that's it. That's the end of their studies and they don't go on, because some get married, or they stay to take care of smaller children, or they help with the family economy."
A young woman, Ana Maria, now active in the Zapatista movement described the situation for the average campesina in an interview with the Mexican press: "She doesn't rest a minute in the day. The peasant woman gets up at 3 a.m. to make the limed corn and the men's breakfast and lunch. If she needs firewood, she goes out to hunt for firewood, if she needs corn she goes to the cornfield to carry a load of corn or vegetables or whatever is there. She goes and comes back, her baby on her back or on her chest, and prepares the meal. And that's how the whole day goes until night falls, from Monday to Sunday. In the communities the men at least have a chance to go out and have fun on Sundays, to play basketball or cards, but the women don't, they take care of everything every day, they never take a break."
The burden passes from one generation of women to the next at an early age--as the oldest daughters in the families are expected to care for the other children and help their mothers with the work of maintaining the family and the household.
"As children we begin to carry our little brothers and sisters to help grind corn, make tortillas and sweep or wash clothes," Ana Maria explained. "There's no chance to go to school even though there is one in the village. We have to help our mothers. The mother herself has no choice but to keep her daughter at home to care for the baby while she goes out for something or to work in the cornfield. She leaves her baby in the charge of the oldest daughter, and the daughter leaves school because she has to care for her little brother or sister, she has to help her mother. That's what happened to me, and that's what my life was."
People who visited Chiapas in the past have come away with strong images of indigenous women. Sometimes it is the women carrying the huge loads on their backs or vending in the marketplace or on the streets. Many think of the indigenous women in the rural areas weaving beautiful pieces of clothing on backstrap looms. Since the New Year's Rebellion another, a different image of indigenous peasant women in Chiapas has come into focus.
Now, there are scenes of indigenous campesinas--from teenagers on up to older women--with machetes and rifles, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the men as part of--and even leaders of--the uprising. And this new image has inspired many throughout Chiapas--women and men. I could see it in the proud laughter of the women vendors in San Cristóbal who took special delight in creating and selling dolls modeled after women leaders of the EZLN. And it was clear in the discussion we had with a group of indigenous youth--cigarette and chiclet vendors--in the zócalo of one of the larger towns. These young guys stopped selling their goods so that they could excitedly tell us what they thought of the uprising. And one of the first things they mentioned very proudly was the role of the women in the battles. They were especially proud of one story they heard about the women in their home village--who had helped to prepare for the uprising by smuggling arms and ammunition under their long traditional woolen skirts.
The interview with Ana Maria gives a sense of what drew the women into the movement: "Death means nothing to us. In other words, even before, we felt like the disappeared, they never took us into account. There have been many deaths from hunger and disease in the villages; we say it's as if we were already at war. Now we die if they kill us. Sure we mourn those who have died, but someone had to die, someone had to give their life to bring about the liberty and justice which doesn't exist in this country. We women are convinced of our struggle and we are not afraid to die. It's more painful to watch the children die of curable diseases, cholera, measles, whooping cough, tetanus, diseases which the government claims no longer exist. I don't have children, but I have seen two baby girls die in my arms. We couldn't do anything for them. Their mother died and there was nothing for these babies to eat. Thousands of children like them have died; it's not right. During all this time that we were struggling peacefully without achieving anything, many of our children died; every time a disease went around it left destruction in its wake, every year the communities' cemeteries got bigger. And this is very painful, and that's why we make this commitment.
"Many women make the decision because they see that they have no rights within their own community, they have no right to education, to training. They are kept as if blindfolded without being able to know anything, they are mistreated and exploited.
"They have no rights at all. They are not paid any attention, we're pushed to one side. I'm talking about the sisters in the villages and women in general in our country, who suffer the same injustices. But really we are capable, we can do other things besides housework and child care. We can learn. Those of us who are in the struggle came in without knowing how to read or write and we learned. Now we stand for something, we stand for our sisters, for the village women and the women fighters. We can do many things, it's just that they've never given us a chance. They've already treated us like an object, like something worthless. That's also why we are in the struggle.
"Women are the ones who bring their children and husbands into the struggle. Many send their young daughters so that they'll learn to read and write in the EZLN, which is a big cultural leap. Those who couldn't make it in the mountains as fighters returned to their communities and taught and spread what they'd learned. Besides, during their stay they were able to experience a different way for relating between the sexes.
In the Zapatista town we visited, Ricardo, the long time EZLN soldier, talked about some of the ways things have changed for women in the areas controlled by the EZLN. "Our justice is different. Zapatista soldiers cannot just do whatever they want. There are punishments. If someone rapes a woman then the Zapatista army will shoot the rapist. Women need to have their rights as well. There has not been total change in our areas yet but there is some.
"One big difference here in our areas is that the women do collective labor, they have cooperatives. And the women have respect from the men. Before no--before we did what we wanted. The Catholic religion did control things some when it came in but still women did not have the respect. And when our fathers worked on the fincas, the women got up at 3 a.m. to make toast for the patrón, to grind salt with the stones. They don't have to do that anymore. The women are in the Zapatista army. Women are officers in our army and the men have to respect and obey them. Collective child care has already started in some of our areas."
Ricardo constantly referred back to the Revolutionary Law on Women. This law was first published in El Despertador, the EZLN newspaper distributed during the uprising. According to the Zapatistas, the law was drawn up by Zapatista women who travelled throughout the countryside discussing the oppression of women with indigenous campesinas. First among the principles listed in the law is the guarantee that women have the right to fully participate in the struggle "wherever and however their desire and capacity permits." The law also guarantees women the right to work and receive a fair wage, the right to decide on their own how many children to have, the right to participate in community affairs and be elected to official positions, the right to priority attention to their health and nutrition, the right to an education, the right to choose their spouse and to not be obligated to marry. This law also outlaws physical abuse of women and promises severe punishment for rapists.
Within the EZLN itself, women are also guaranteed the right to choose to have an abortion and to have it carried out by a proper physician in the best available facility. Finally, this law guarantees women the right to hold positions of leadership and officer's rank within the revolutionary armed forces, and it declares women have all of the rights and responsibilities listed in all of the other revolutionary laws and regulations.
But the women of the EZLN are the first to say that it took much struggle within the movement to win these rights.
Ana Maria spoke to this in the interview: "In our organization there is respect, especially among the fighters. In the communities there is still abuse, but in our ranks there is a lot of equality. The work the men do, the women can do, too; they receive the same education and the rank or responsibility they can rise to is the same, too. For example my rank is Insurgent Major, Infantry. I command a battalion of fighters, I lead them in struggle and in battle, I know that I can move them. I did it in the takeover of San Cristóbal."
"Men aren't used to seeing women participate in public affairs....We insisted to the village brothers that the women also had to get organized, to stand for something, to do something, not just the men. Because whenever we entered the communities only men would be in the meetings and in the study circles we held. We worked hard to get women to rise up and have a chance to do something. They themselves requested it of us: `If the men are going to study and learn things, why can't we? We want to be trained, too, we want to learn something. Besides, our village has sisters who are insurgents and they've proved that they can, that we women can; give us a chance.' This is how many militiawomen get involved.
"The militiawomen are fighters, too, but they live in their villages and when it is their turn to fight they go off to battle; they are trained, they go out and get training. As insurgents, our job is to be working for the people all the time; we divide up to go into the communities to teach battle tactics, a little politics, a little schooling so that the people learn to defend themselves and to speak, things which never before existed for women.
"We demand the right to education because in the indigenous communities and villages there is nothing. I learned to speak a little in the struggle itself, in the EZLN, but when I came...I spoke only Tzotzil. We demand a special women's school where they can get ahead, study, even if they are older, learn to read and write. And birthing hospitals, because up to now babies are born at home, the baby is born onto the dirt floor, into the dust, and the cord is cut with a machete, the same machete that the man takes to work in the fields. There is no sanitation to prevent the baby from getting sick or to care for the women properly. We demand gynecologists; also workshops, machines to make the artisans' work easier--they do all of their embroidery by hand--and a market where they can sell their products.
"Girls get married very young, at 13 or 14, often against their will. That's why the Revolutionary Law on Women of the EZLN includes the right to freely choose a spouse, so that they are not forced.... In many communities if a boy likes a girl he doesn't ask her if she likes him, he goes directly to her father and asks for her. He takes along a bottle of whiskey and says, `I love your daughter.' When the girl finds out, she's already been sold (the average bride price in the region is 2000 new pesos). The father gets the whiskey or a meal. They obligate them to marry by force. Many women go to the groom's house or to the altar in tears, they don't like their husbands. There is no such thing as having a boyfriend or being boyfriend and girlfriend like in the city, that's a sin. That's the custom."
The comments of the Zapatista women about the conditions of women in the countryside reminded me of a conversation I had with a young man freed from prison by the Zapatistas. He explained to me why he had no land to work even though he lived on an ejido. His father had died before he was born, and his widowed mother had no right to land ownership and no young sons to pass the land on to. Consequently she had no way to eat, shelter or support her child and herself.
The change in the land laws--especially the so-called ejido reforms and the other amendments to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution--has been pointed to by the EZLN as one of the most radicalizing events that led many indigenous people in Chiapas to support the Zapatistas and the armed uprising they led. Indigenous women have been especially hard hit by some of these changes--specifically the fact that individuals will now be allowed to sell off ejido plots. Men, acting as the heads of households, can now unilaterally decide to sell off what was once considered an inheritance to be passed down through the father's side of the family. The only right women will have is the right to have the first option to buy the land their husbands decide to sell--a right that could rarely if ever be exercised.
In nations oppressed by foreign imperialism a revolutionary solution to the land question is an essential part of breaking free of imperialist domination. And, from a Maoist perspective, a key part of this revolutionary resolution of the land question--and to eliminating the oppression of women in the countryside--is guaranteeing the rights of "land to the tiller" including the rights of peasant women to land ownership.
In the first phase of the new democratic revolution, the policy of "land to the tiller"--not based on family ownership, but on distributing land per person--is key to breaking up the old system of land ownership. It is not the goal of the revolution, but an important part of the process. If the old precapitalist ways are not destroyed in this way, the peasants cannot step by step develop new cooperative forms of farming--the old oppressive relations of male domination and inequality between rich and poor peasants will survive in new "collective" disguises.
In Chiapas and throughout the rural areas of Mexico this will be a major question. A woman who worked among indigenous women in remote rural areas of Chiapas told me a little about the situation of women and land ownership under the ejido system. "It is the heads of families, the men, that have the right to the ownership of land. Women don't have access to the land, except through their relationship to their son or their husband or their father. So when the women get married, there's a relationship like a buying and selling relationship because things are given to the parents of the woman. They give them presents, drinks, and after all this relationship, the couple commit themselves, and the woman passes from the tutelage of her father to the tutelage of her husband. And then the husband goes to live for one or two years with her family, so that the husband will also work a little for the girl's father. It's a way in which the boy pays the girl's father in work. That's why you have a kind of buying and selling relationship. They even pay 1,000 or 2,000 pesos to get married.
"If a woman is a widow and wants to get married again, she loses all her rights to the land. Why? Because it goes to the oldest son. And so all that land belongs to the son. Right now there's some proposals for rural councils, advisory councils, and they're also looking at the possibility of women having rights to the land. It's on the level of family possession. But right now, it's the father of the family that has the right. The widow is completely without any kind of support.
"If the husband dies, and if the woman stays with the children, then she still has the land. Whether the land is her property or her children's property changes from one community to another. In some, widows are recognized as having right to the land. In others, it's the children that have that recognition."
So far there is no policy on land ownership for women coming from the EZLN. The Revolutionary Agrarian Law of the Zapatistas speaks of expropriating land from the big landowners but envisions redistributing land along lines similar to the current ejido and communal land systems. This is not the same kind of "land to the tiller" vision of the new democratic revolution, and there is no provision for women to own land.
This is a point of struggle. One woman in the Zapatista ranks explained her desire for the EZLN to take a firm position on this, "Men and women struggle for the land. That's our main demand, because without land the peasants can't survive....The government's law doesn't give women the right to own land, but we want our laws to include that demand. But we want good land, not that land all full of rocks we have now which is impossible to cultivate."
But even among the women of the EZLN, there is not a clear understanding of the need to demand land ownership for widows and unmarried women. As in many other aspects of the line and practice of the new insurgency, there is the sense that this problem in the EZLN program stems from the fact that they do not envision a real thoroughgoing destruction of the old order.
The morning sun was hidden by clouds and a light drizzle. The forests on the hillsides were shrouded in low clouds. A line of big black turkeys remained on their roost. A group of men arriving in the town on horseback caused a brief commotion and then disappeared into the woods. Some folks had already started baking bread in the small clay ovens that stood in front of some of the huts. Down the hill a half a dozen giant cooking pots used to make a sugar product laid overturned in the dirt. We walked through the town for awhile and then sat on a small dirt hill to watch the goings on.
Ten minutes after we sat down, one of the local youth passed by. He was in his mid- teens and we met him earlier at the roadblock where he did sentry duty a few days a week. He was on his way back out to the roadblock when he stopped to talk. He was shy and found it very difficult to speak about the struggle and why he joined. But when he did, it was brief and powerful:
"I am a professor of war. Yes,it was a big decision for me to become a professional soldier. But I had to do it, it was a necessity. We are fighting to change many things.
"We are not afraid to die. Yes, it is better to live and win the struggle. But our people are not afraid to die because the point of dying is to get rid of all of the bosses, to make it so there are no kings of the world."
By the time we loaded our equipment and climbed onto the truck for the long ride back to the city, the youth had already taken his spot at the roadblock. Some of the townspeople gathered around our truck to say goodbye. A Tijera--a beautiful bird named after a pair of scissors because of the shape of its tail feathers--flew down low over our heads. As the roadblock and Zapatista territory faded into the distance a horse running free galloped down a path on the side of the road.
Back in San Cristóbal we learned that the military had dramatically increased its troop and equipment strength in the city. Rumors about a major military offensive against the Zapatistas were everywhere. And a big subject of discussion was whether the EZLN was going to continue on with the village consultations as a key part of the process of negotiations with the government. As I talked with people about the negotiations, the elections, and the need for a revolutionary solution in Mexico, I remembered the youth I had last seen standing serious and proud at the roadblock. I remembered how full of hope his face was and how his eyes danced when he talked about the struggle and the future he wanted to be part of making. It seemed to contrast with the direction of the negotiations, and as things have developed over the year, my questions about the Zapatista program have deepened. But as I recall these stories of the people in the Chiapas countryside, it is clear that the potential for a deep and thoroughgoing revolutionary struggle in Mexico exists today.
Searching through some of my notes, I came across a bullet casing a young campesino had given me. As I rolled the shell in my fingers, I could see the youth standing at the roadblock, ready for war.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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