• In 1994 peasants and activists in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas staged a revolt against landowners, government authorities, and local armed thugs who were taking the peasants’ land. They called their movement the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, named after Emiliano Zapata, leader of a peasant army in the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Though the movement armed itself for defense, it did not wage war. Instead the Zapatistas employed a resourceful array of tools, including early Internet activism, to demonstrate to the world the abuses their communities faced. The viewpoints shared here are by women active in the Zapatista movement about the struggles through which they built their political awareness. After 1994 Zapatista communities were able to push for indigenous rights and peasant rights in Mexico, but they have also been victims of violence perpetrated by paramilitary groups like Paz y Justicia.

María

“Life on the plantation was very hard because there was never any rest from work. There was a man who was the overseer, who forced people to work all the time. We even had to work on Sundays, because there was a service we had to provide. We had to give a third of all the firewood we cut to the plantation owner. Another service was to clean the patio. All these “services” were not paid, of course. We had to provide them in exchange for the little piece of land where we planted our corn. . . .

As a child my life was learning to make tortillas, cook the cornmeal and wash clothes. My mother liked to work in the fields with my father, so she would leave very early to go to the fields. When I was about 13 years old, I was in charge of the household. My siblings were boys, so I had to do everything — wash everybody’s clothes, prepare the food and clean the house.

. . . We continued renting land at the plantation. My father grew potatoes, corn and beans on that land. Mostly, he planted corn. But after a few years, we were asked to plant grass, and the owner put cattle on the grassland. We couldn’t work the land after that. The plantation became a cattle ranch and it became more valuable for the owner. He had lots of cattle and good grassland, but we didn’t have anywhere to plant corn any more. We lost it. We lost our corn there.”

Guadalupe

“I’m about 50 years old, I think. My husband is about 80. He’s much older than I am. I married when I was 14 years old. I had no father and my mother didn’t want me to be alone, so she married me to this man. He was already very old. He doesn’t work any more. I work. I built my own house. I work in the fields. I plant sweet potatoes, yucca, tomatoes, chilies — whatever there is to eat. I’m used to work. I get up to grind the corn and make tortillas at three in the morning. Then I go to the cornfield. In my house I do everything. I carry the corn. I carry the wood for the fire. The government didn’t give me tin roofing for my house. The government didn’t give me a latrine. It didn’t help me with anything! I built my own house. It’s my own. I owe it to my work, not to the government. . . .

Now, in my community of Masolha Shukha we can’t go out to work. We can’t go to our cornfields. Paz y Justicia men are looking for people out on the roads. They have weapons and they kill people. . . . They killed all the cows my son had, and they ate the meat. They took my horses, too. I had seven good horses to carry wood and to carry the corn. They killed all my pigs. They even killed my dog with a machete.

Now the government says they don’t have money to pay us back for our horses and for our cows. Why did they allow Paz y Justicia to do this to us in the first place? . . .

I’m really angry now! We’ve been at this sit-in for two months waiting in front of the government building.”

Isabel

“I went to work as a maid. I was only nine years old. I cleaned the house and took care of the children, and I lived in their house. There was a school nearby, so I asked my employers if I could go there to study, and they said yes. . . .

I was very lucky that I worked with these people. Many indigenous women who come from the countryside don’t have it so good. A lot of them are mistreated. They get paid very low wages, or they don’t get paid at all and their only compensation is their room and board. There’s a lot of racism and discrimination here in San Cristóbal, and the indigenous women are constantly humiliated. I learned this later on, when I worked in theater because I interviewed indigenous domestic workers to get material for our plays. . . .

In 1992, Petrona and I . . . formed an indigenous women’s street theater group, and we began performing in village plazas, in the streets, in schools and in auditoriums. We invited two other indigenous actresses to join us, and we started preparing our first play, La mujer desesperada (The Desperate Woman). This is a tragedy about domestic violence and violence in general. We performed this play in San Cristóbal on March 8, 1993, on International Women’s Day.”

Source: Teresa Ortiz, Never Again a World Without Us: Voices of Mayan Women in Chiapas, Mexico (Washington, D.C.: EPICA, 2001), pp. 38–40, 82–85, 153–154. Used by permission of the author.

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