Since the 1910 Mexican revolution, rural feminist and indigenous movements have struggled against the colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist Mexican state to liberate themselves from systemic oppression. EZLN feminists combined feminist ideals and neo-Zapatismo ideology to argue and organize behind unique conceptions of intersectionality and autonomy. This paper traces the origins of the neo-Zapatista movement to an unsolved Mexican agrarian crisis, repressive actions of the PRI, and centuries of indigenous oppression. Then, it discusses the history of women’s organizing in Mexico from the revolution to the 1994 EZLN Uprising. Finally, it analyzes the ideology of Zapatista feminists and explores their legacies and achievements.
Overview of the Literature:
For general overviews of the 1917 Revolution consult Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution by Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau. The book tracks the legacy and historiography of the Revolution through the 20th Century until the PRI’s loss in the election of 2000. The book contains helpful information regarding Zapata and an overview of the EZLN and the 1994 Uprising in context to its relation to the 1917 revolution. The book further questions when was the true end of the revolution and what was attained for the state, the rich, and the poor. In my essay, I heavily consult this source for key historical details on Caárdenista policies, Salinas’s neoliberal economic agendas, and Zapata's original goals. This source does contain some history of women’s involvement in the revolutionary struggle, (which Büchena and Joseph would argue did not end till the fall of the PRI in the 2000 election) but generally focuses more on the historiography of the revolution and the utilization of its history for oppressive or liberatory purposes.
Emiliano Zapata’s Plan de Ayala is a quintessential text of the Mexican revolution. Zapata launches a fiery critique of the reformist liberalism of Madero, comparing him to Díaz and calling for his ouster from rule. He also lays out his plans for land redistribution and labor reform, the influence of which can be found in Articles 27 and 123 of the Constitution of 1917. Analyzing the article helped me to understand why the EZLN used Zapata's legacy as the historical reference or“legitimizer” of their movement.
Important texts to the study of Mexicanidad are Octavio Paz’s “Son’s of La Malinche,” Gloria Anzaldúa’s “The Homeland, Aztlán,” and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s “The Problem of National Culture.” All three of these articles posit different positions on Mexicanidad specifically centering legacies of colonialism and the contradictory notion of Mexico’s unique position as simultaneously “European” and Indigenous, creating a wide mestizaje. While I did not end up discussing these topics in my essay, defining women out of Mexican identity and therefore civil rights had often been a tool of Machismo elites and these essays give interesting insight into how these narratives were broadened in the late 20th century.
Primary source documentation of a multitude of EZLN demands, grievances, and ideological positions can be found in the “First Declaration of Lacandon Jungle” and the “Demands at the Dialogue Table,” both by the EZLN. Both documents lay out Zapatista’s concerns with indigenous rights, neo-liberalization, and land, but the “First Declaration of Lacandon Jungle” features more military strategy whereas the “Demands at the Dialogue Table” presents the Zapatista’s vision for a more just, equitable, and liberated Mexico. Both documents are cited and one is analyzed in the paper. Marián Peres Tsu’s “A Tzotil Chronicle of the Zapatista Uprising” provides further primary source accounts of indigenous empowerment after the emergence of the EZLN. It shares interesting perspectives into the pseudo-mythological tone often used when sharing stories of Subcommandante Marcos and shows resistance to the military's advancements at the grassroots level. This source was not used but would provide important primary source information for research into popular attitudes towards the Zapatistas and the PRI.
The “Indigenous Women’s Petition” found in “Demands at the Dialogue Table,” and “Women’s Revolutionary Laws” found in El Despertador Mexicano, Issue 1, are the two foremost primary source documents detailing the demands of women in Zapatista leadership. They both demonstrate key themes of Zapatista feminism that are critical to understanding its nuance. Both are cited and analyzed in the paper.
In “Rural Women’s Grassroots Activism, 1980-2000: Reframing the Nation from Below,” Lynn Stephens details the history of female grassroots activism in Mexico. This overview makes exceptionally compelling arguments about women’s effectiveness at reshaping the nation through their exertion of soft power and collective direct action. I utilized this source extensively to background the history of rural women’s movements. Furthermore, Stephens’s argument that feminist NGOs stood in the place of the welfare state while also appeasing Marxist organizations to protect rural women is very compelling.
Similarly, Jocelyn Olcott’s Revolutionary Women in Post-Revolutionary Mexico discusses how women negotiated their role in society following the upheaval experienced during the 1910s and 20s. It dives into how women’s rights were often seen as a non-priority to many male revolutionaries and how women utilized this progressive era to contest their rights. I did not end up citing this in the essay but would have if I chose to focus more on women in the first three phases of the revolution.
The EZLN’s Beginnings
“We are the inheritors of the true builders of our nation. The dispossessed, we are millions and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join this struggle as the only path, so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable ambition of a 70-year dictatorship led by a clique of traitors that represent the most conservative and sell-out groups. They are the same ones that opposed Hidalgo and Morelos, the same ones that betrayed Vicente Guerrero, the same ones that sold half our country to the foreign invader, the same ones that imported a European prince to rule our country, the same ones that formed the “scientific” Porfirsta dictatorship, the same ones that opposed the Petroleum Expropriation, the same ones that massacred the railroad workers in 1958 and the students in 1968, the same ones the today take everything from us, absolutely everything.” - EZLN Command
On January 1, 1994, the Mexican state of Chiapas exploded in political, economic, and social revolution. This movement became known as the neo-Zapatista uprising and was led by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The EZLN did not overthrow the Mexican government nor engage in a long-term military conflict; instead, its influence is felt in the social revolution it inspired among the indigenous, poor, and oppressed people of Chiapas, Mexico, and, broadly, the world.
The Maya people composed a vast majority of the EZLN. The economic conditions for the indigenous Mexicans had deteriorated over time and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had stayed in power since 1929, seemed unwilling to push forward key economic reforms for the poor. The foremost economic and political problems facing these indigenous communities were rampant poverty, hunger, racial marginalization, and lack of land ownership. In addition to these issues, 30 years of governmental “Dirty War” violently suppressed leftist and worker resistance movements. The EZLN’s self-identification as Zapatistas reflects these grievances.
Emiliano Zapata, born in 1879, was of Nahua and Spanish descent and led and organized the campesinos of his home state of Morelos to reclaim land from monopolistic hacienda owners and wealthy capitalists who had exploited them. This commitment is epitomized by Zapata’s “Plan de Ayala,” which laid out his vision of land redistribution and contestation of the revolutionary potential of the Francisco I. Madero regime. He saw Madero continuing the same trends of repression found in the 31-year Porfiriato. In Mexican political consciousness, Zapata is canonized a martyr of the revolution after his assassination in 1919 and, as evidenced by the EZLN’s identification with his ideals, he continues to inspire revolutionary agrarian movements to this day.
In the decades following the revolution, the PRI worked to consolidate state power wholly under its banner. However, no President did this more effectively than Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. The Cárdenas regime oversaw some of the most significant economic reforms in the country's history. 49,580,203 acres of land were redistributed to small farmers and campesinos and ejidatarios began to take out essential loans from the newly founded Banco de Crédito Ejidal. Cardenas also oversaw the formation of the Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM) which, despite its internal Marxist leanings, would become a key ally in the application of Cardenismo policy. Finally, under Cardenas, women’s organizing was at a high, and organizations like the Women’s League for Social Struggle pushed suffrage and gender-inclusive economic and social reforms. Cardenas’s pro-worker reforms earned him respect across Mexico and, to this day, he is idolized as a hero of the post-revolutionary state. However, his policies allowed for the entrenchment and growth of the PRI. In the following decades, the PRI reforms would all but destroy many of the hard-fought achievements of the revolution and shift the country towards submission to the neoliberal capitalist world order.
If Madero’s “betrayal” of the values of the revolution led to Zapata’s Plan de Ayala, then this history is echoed in Carlos Salinas de Gortari's revisions to Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the subsequent uprisings of the Zapatistas. These revisions allowed for the privatization of ejidos, the strengthening of foreign capital influence in agriculture, and ended any processes of land redistribution. The original articles carry with them incredible cultural importance as they can be seen as the direct influence of Zapatista ideology and exist as one of the only protections afforded to the rural worker’s agrarian rights. Salinas’s neoliberal vision for Mexico came to a head with the enactment of NAFTA on January 1, 1994, which removed many key trade restrictions, reduced tariffs, and overall improved trade relations between the USA, Mexico, and Canada. However, many Mexican intellectuals strongly opposed this adoption of American globalist foreign policy. To Subcommandante Marcos, the widely popular spokesman of the EZLN, “modern globalization, neoliberalism as a global system, should be understood as a new war of conquest for territories.” Marcos and the EZLN viewed NAFTA as an open-door invitation for foreign “conquest” and foretold an incredible economic and personal loss for the oppressed Mexican farmer, worker, indigenous person, and woman.
On January 1, 1994, the day of NAFTA’s enactment, the EZLN, with a force of approximately 2,000 rebels, seized San Cristóbal, Ososingo, Altamirano, and Las Margaritas in Chiapas. Salinas’s government responded to this insurgency by swarming the province with around 12,000 military personnel. After 11 days of fighting, the army had retaken most of the territory, and a cease-fire was agreed upon. Most of the EZLN then fled into the Lacandon Jungle, where many would be forced to live in hiding for the coming years. Certain key figures such as Marcos himself and Subcommandante Elisa had a massive influence on the EZLN, but the movement itself featured a wide variety of communities, sympathizers, international allies, and indigenous groups who all enacted Zapatismo goals with relative autonomy.
Neo-Zapatismo, as an ideology, was distinct from past pan-Maya resistance movements for many reasons, but, it differed mainly in that it integrated intersectionality into its political vocabulary. It should be noted that intersectionality was a word rarely used outside American feminist intellectual circles, but generally, Zapatista ideals align with the academic theory. EZLN members recognized the intertwining systems of oppression of being indigenous, poor, a woman, black, or LGBTQ+ and felt that these identities, and the struggles that came with them, had to be integrated into their movement. Many feminists thus joined the Zapatista movement and created new conceptions of neo-Zapatista feminism.
Mexican Women’s Organizing: Rural Movements and Urban Feminists
The history of formalized women’s organizations in Mexico began in the 1920s and 30s and coalesced in the founding of the Sole Front of Women’s Rights (FUPDM). But, before this, many women had participated in the revolution as soldaderas and had played pivotal post-revolutionary roles in the labor organizing of the tortilla and textile industries and tenant strikes in Veracruz. Many middle-class women also participated in counter-revolutionary conservative Catholic organizing during this period, often working to undermine the new land and labor rights attained in the 1917 Constitution. During the Cárdenas Presidency (1934-40), rural women began to attend schools which increased literacy and some women attained committee positions in various new governmental bodies, such as the Committee for the Proletarian Child, and the Committee against Vice.
From the 1940s to the early 50s Mexican feminists turned their attention towards suffrage. The movement was able to secure legislative approval for a women’s suffrage amendment in 1939, but due to the PRI’s fear of the voting power of conservative Catholic women, it would not be ratified until 1953. This made Mexico the last Latin American country to grant women the right to vote. Finally, women were granted the right to citizenship, 132 years after the country's independence.
Weeks before the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, a series of large grassroots anti-PRI demonstrations raged across the capital city. The primary organizers of these protests were middle-class students, many of whom were women who held important organizational positions and who were disillusioned with the party's anti-democratic practices and the police brutality committed against protestors and the indigenous. On October 2, 1968, the Gustavo Díaz Ordaz Regime ordered student protestors in the Tlatelolco neighborhood to be put down by force, and, subsequently, army and police personnel fired into crowds of students, murdering hundreds of people. This shocking action echoed Porfiriato policy and signaled to many Mexicans that the PRI seemed more of a dictatorship than a democracy. Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, two important scholars of Mexican history, argue that the Tlatelolco Massacre was simultaneously a long-brewing act of state repression and spurred the emergence of a new era of anti-PRI sentiment.
From the mid-1970s to the early 90s, as the PRI showed its true ideals and began to pivot from revolutionary nationalism and social welfare toward global capitalist integration, many urban leftist intellectuals in Chihuahua, Nueva León, Durango, and Oaxaca, began to organize and contend with the oppressive and violent establishment. In the countryside, rural pan-indigenous revitalization movements began to emerge and unite communities through labor and cross-cultural organizing. In 1981, the National Council of Urban Popular Movement (CONAMUP) was formed. These female leaders within the organization who felt they were being marginalized would go on to create the Women’s Regional Council, which focused on mitigating violence against women and educating women on leadership skills for organizing. In the countryside, rural women attended the 1974 Indigenous Congress in San Cristóbal de las Casas and witnessed and participated in some of the first pan-indigenous decolonial initiatives. It should be noted that this congress, and the subsequent founding of organizations like the proto-neo-Zapatista National Coordinadora Plan de Ayala (CNPA), laid the foundation for indigenous unification in Chiapas that was essential to the existence of the EZLN.
In the early 1980s through the 90s, urban Mexican feminists began to formalize their ideals into comprehensive ideologies and worked to create movements of their own. In 1979, the feminist movement founded the National Front for Women’s Rights and Liberation, and then in 1985, a network of several important women’s organizations centered in Mexico City developed the doctrine of feminismo popular, or grassroots feminism. This discourse centered on women's safety from male violence and argued that reproductive control and freedom from male domination and sexual violence were equally as important as demands for human, civil, and economic rights made by NGOs and leftist organizations. Furthermore, many radical women began to integrate these ideals into their work with NGOs and groups like the Mexican Worker’s Party and the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, setting the stage for EZLN-feminist ideological integration and proliferation of these radical feminist ideals into rural communities.
Neo-Zapatista Feminism and its Legacies
Neo-Zapatista feminism is built on second-wave feminists’ emphasis on sexual rights, reproductive rights, and social equality, while further emphasizing intersectionality, autonomy, and self-determination. However, many Zapatista feminists have to contend with their unique position as making up around 30 percent of militants and occupying positions of high leadership while functioning in the EZLN but, at the same time, potentially existing under machismo oppression within their communities outside of Zapatista influence. Women in the EZLN may sometimes have to foreground their identities as indigenous or poor and put their feminist struggles on the metaphorical back burner. These contentions are reflected in the two primary pieces of Zapatista Feminist ideology, the “Indigenous Women’s Petition” in “EZLN Demands at the Dialogue Table” and the “Women’s Revolutionary Laws” in the first edition of El Despertador Mexicano.
In the “Indigenous Women’s Petition” the indigenous women demand that the government provide better access to gynecological services, daycare centers, access to food and food service facilities, the materials to raise livestock, facilities and the materials to supply them for important trades such as baking and craftwork, markets to sell products, schools for technical education, and finally better access to transportation. This text demonstrates some poignant paradoxes within the Zapatista feminist movement. The text’s demands center women in the domestic sphere, not addressing needs for workplace equality or access to higher education. The existence of female professionals is acknowledged, but only as teachers, cooks, and bakers. Furthermore, there is no analytical dive into the reasons for women's specific deprivation of these services beyond the deprivation of the indigenous community as a whole. Rather, these women use gender essentialist notions of what they can attain, such as better domestic sphere conditions, to demand improved, but not altered, realities for the indigenous women in their communities. However, the existence of the separate section alone is enough to show that the EZLN recognizes the demands of women as specific yet intertwined with the oppression they face as members of indigenous, poor, and rural communities.
“Women’s Revolutionary Laws” further analyzes the intersectional oppression women face while also integrating gender equality into the codex of the neo-Zapatista revolutionary goal.
In the just fight for the liberation of our people, the EZLN incorporates women into the revolutionary struggle, regardless of their race, creed, color or political affiliation, requiring only that they share the demands of the exploited people and that they commit to the laws and regulations of the revolution. In addition, taking into account the situation of the woman worker in Mexico, the revolution supports their just demands for equality and justice in the following Women's Revolutionary Law.
First: Women, regardless of their race, creed, color or political affiliation, have the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in a way determined by their desire and capacity.
Second: Women have the right to work and receive a just salary.
Third: Women have the right to decide the number of children they will have and care for.
Fourth: Women have the right to participate in the affairs of the community and hold positions of authority if they are freely and democratically elected.
Fifth: Women and their children have the right to primary attention in matters of health and nutrition.
Sixth: Women have the right to education.
Seventh: Women have the right to choose their partner, and are not to be forced into marriage.
Eighth: Women shall not be beaten or physically mistreated by their family members or by strangers. Rape and attempted rape will be severely punished.
Ninth: Women will be able to occupy positions of leadership in the organization and hold military ranks in the revolutionary armed forces.
Tenth: Women will have all the rights and obligations elaborated in the Revolutionary Laws and regulations.
In this text, the EZLN clarifies its beliefs in women’s complete equality in their struggle and argues that women should have a level of autonomy in their decision-making rarely afforded to them. Furthermore, the opening preface to the revolutionary laws succinctly summarizes the EZLN’s stance on the intersectional nature of their shared oppression. However, the analytic “knife” is still not turned towards machismo or the patriarchy. The lack of these basic rights for women is argued as objectives to be attained in the broader de-colonial agrarian struggle rather than analyzed as problems stemming from specific sexist systemic oppression and machismo attitudes that require specific feminist action.
However, the EZLN did attain many important feminist goals within Zapatista communities and created important discourses around intersectional feminism at home and abroad. Women have strong positions of power within the governing bodies of autonomous Zapatista communities and although the EZLN sees “feminist struggles as one of many components of their fight, not the primary component,” many women have been attracted to and joined the movement because of its general progressive attitudes. Furthermore, Stephens argues that “Not until the mid-1990s, when indigenous women from Chiapas began to participate, did Mexico’s women’s movements include ethnicity as an additional basis for women’s inequality.” Furthermore, both internal and external Zapatista media attention has brought female leaders and their demands to the national stage. For example, at the 2016 CompArte festival in San Cristóbal de las Casas, convoked by EZLN leadership, female artists and performers, such as La Dignidad y Resistencia, put on a concert and art show in which performers sang songs about female resistance, justice, and autonomy and artists displayed political art of Zapatista women arguing for the movement's values. Overall, Zapatista women have made great strides for both indigenous and women’s rights in their communities and the EZLN’s non-focus on feminist issues is not an ignorance but rather a foregrounding of other struggles.