CHAPTER SEVEN: POLITICS OF TRANSLATION IN MEXICAN CONTEMPORARY

FEMINISM

Márgara Millán

In this essay, I focus on the analysis of three important feminist publications and publishing

circuits that, in my view, constitute an important part of making visible a feminist politics in

contemporary Mexico. I am referring to Fem (1976), Debate Feminista (1990) and La Correa

Feminista (1991). I will give emphasis to what I call their “translation politics,” that is, the

concepts of feminism and/or gender they promote give the authors and critics they translate. In

this context, the notion of translation means two things: the choice of theory and authors to be

translated; and the way these align it with the local political context. These choices to translate

and circulate certain theories will be read according to how they participate in a broader political

standpoint, the manner in which they are edited (with other essays, and within a larger editorial

purpose) and in relationship, to their moment of publication, as a means of intervening in the

political arena. By envisioning translation as politics, I argue that this is one-way feminist groups

make alliances with social movements and political actors. I will address as problematic both the

space opened by the “dialogues” between women, whether referring to feminist groups and their

agendas, and women who participate in social movements. Rebecca E. Biron’s (1996) text on

feminist periodicals in Mexico was the main inspiration for this essay, which follows the

framework posed by Claudia de Lima Costa (2003; 2006; and this volume) on

transnationalism/translation as concepts in need of clarification from their global and local

meanings.

Construction of the polyvalence of the Feminist Subject

 Is it pertinent to talk about Mexican feminism, if we consider feminism as being

transnational, universal? It is essential for contemporary feminism to be able to see its

unavoidable placement, its relation to the national, and colonial/ postcolonial geopolitical

relations; its political context and its belonging to a political culture, in relation to which it

defines itself. It is from such location that we can discover the operations behind the translations

underlying the dissemination of feminism as a contemporary critical theory.

Feminism, as a theoretical and practical corpus, departs from experience in an awakening

of deconstruction of gender representation and rules. Yet, feminism is also implicated in the

paradigm of the Enlightenment involving progress, development and social change. Its critical

discourse is linked to the ideals for a socialist and liberal emancipation, but also to other

experiences and symbolic meanings of emancipation. Feminisms’ subjects have also undergone a

process of de/centering their own critical discourse, from a gender oppositional frame, to more

dialogic differences among women and their contexts.

The deconstruction of the subject by post-structuralism also applies to the feminist

subject. Woman as a global tale, a subject anchored merely in sexual difference, gave way to

women as the interaction of body/culture/race/age/sexual orientation, and more vectors,

permeating the concept of gender with meaning. Questioning “the national” and local feminisms

makes a lot of sense because of the nation’s internal contradictions, and the relationships of

hegemony/coloniality among the nations within the global system. This problem has been

pointed out in different ways, like the need for a multiracial or multicultural feminism, or the

need to decolonize feminism.

Theory, applied in questions of translation, is open to the constant

signification/appropriation of the reader/translator. However, “careless appropriations, which

have no concern for the historical specificities and features, and are insensitive to the debates

which constitute their contexts, result in a flattening of the difference and heterogeneity” (Lima

Costa 2003: 256). The place of the enunciation is important for a more complex understanding of

the elocution, as well as of its subject. This is essential for an intercultural feminist dialogue,

which must be conscious of the hegemonic places of the feminist enunciation.

Magazines, journals and editorial production must be considered as cultural/political

interventions. They bring together groups that enable public discussion of a set of topics while

also producing frameworks to understand them. As feminism(s) is a multilocated practice,

feminist publications are especially relevant in shaping communication between different kinds

of practices, as well as between local and global perspectives. Feminist magazines and journals

are a privileged place from where to articulate the complexity of the relationship between

feminist theory and activism, and national politics (Biron 1996). This relationship between

theory and politics is also a relationship between the transnational character of the academic

dissemination of theory, and its local processes of translation/appropriation/re-elaboration. Costa

(2003) clearly poses the tension between the metropolitan theories and their peripheral

translations/ appropriations. Underlying this is the problem already established in Latin America

(or Latino/America): does the South produce theory or is it merely the inspiring element for the

theory of the North (metropolis – Center). Under this scheme, the North and the South can

reproduce themselves as the internal borders between academia, scholars, intellectuals, and

subaltern social movements.

Nelly Richard (2001, quoted by Costa 2003) calls attention to the organization of the

phenomenon of translation, anchored in a “material-discursive apparatus.” Feminist magazines

and journals are part of such apparatus as translators/ disseminators of theories, serving as

cultural mediators.

In Mexico, feminism has not entered academia the way it has in the United States. There

are no women studies or gender studies majors at the B.A. level, and it is only since the nineties

that the first formal academic spaces appear. The Interdisciplinary Program for Gender Studies,

or PIEM, at the Colegio de México (1986), and the University Program for Gender Studies, or

PUEG, at the UNAM (1992), are both enclaves that have gradually developed gender studies

and, more recently, the cross between gender studies and other disciplines and interdisciplines. It

is important to also mention the social sciences postgraduate field of study on women, at the

Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, also created in the nineties.

Feminist magazines and journals reach a restricted audience. They are not part of the

common bibliography of the university curricula in the social sciences; they affect more literary

studies within Humanities, and even then, they are still marginal. Very few male authors

recognize and/or refer in their work to feminist theoretical criticism. It is in this context that I

will broadly locate the development of Mexican feminism, and the better-known publications

that appeared within it, taking stock of their translation politics in the context of the national

political scene.

Feminism as vanguard: from therapy to politics

In the seventies, the world experienced the boom of feminism. The cultural revolution of

that decade, together with the emergence of the guerrilla movements in Latin America, offered

the referents for a radical, militant and avant-garde feminism. The awareness of the need for a

movement for women’s liberation was, many times, parallel to that of national liberation, and the

socialist option. At the time, however, the main political parties and the leftist groups only
partially recognized feminist struggle, many times considering it as “petite bourgeois”

connecting it, if not subordinating it, to political revolutionary change.

Mexican feminism in the seventies1 was clearly fashioned as a vanguard politics: radical

middle class academic and intellectual women seeking emancipation, and especially

understanding feminism as a change in their own lives. This required both a self- consciousness

generated in the small group, and also public, symbolic, exemplary action. While political

intervention was considered necessary, political participation was, to say the least, problematic.

The politics of feminism was happening in the form of symbolic manifestations, discussions and

publications. Discussion happened around questions positing the relationship between feminism

and politics. Centrally developing was the counter-cultural aspect of feminism, as well as the

condemnation of violence against women and their sexual objectification.

A review of the publications of the time clearly illustrates the spirit of the militant left that

nourished Mexican feminism and which would rapidly overflow. The effervescence of the

feminist groups of that decade and the discussions among themselves and other groups, were the

testing grounds of the movement. Intellectuals, socialists, autonomists, anarchists,

institutionalists, heterosexuals, lesbians and homosexuals, were the identifying postitionalities

operating in Mexican feminism in dialogue with feminist theory, specially Anglo-Saxon, and

with Mexican political culture and its specific referents: an authoritarian state which exerted its

power through the double sided coin of repression and cooptation.2

The main feminist publications in those years were three: La Revuelta (1976), Cihuat

(1977) and Fem (1976). They all appeared as a result of the atmosphere created by the official

celebration of the International Woman’s Year in 1975, which favored, on the one hand, the
institutional opening towards groups of organized women, and, on the other, the activation of

independent organization by anti-officialist women.

Feminist groups of the times criticized, at the same time that they shared, many of the

schemes of the traditional left: radicality, authoritarianism and hierarchy as part of a common

political culture. Feminism criticized subordination, both of women’s demands within the

political discourse and of women themselves in the everyday political practice of the leftist

organizations. Many times, however, they were reproducing, within their own feminist groups,

the authoritarianism and the concentration of power that they were criticizing.

“Historical” feminism, the name now given to the feminism of those years, performed

emblematically symbolic actions; performative actions, where a group of women would burn

brassieres, and would protest the celebration of Mother’s Day, or would manifest against the

Miss Universe contest. They published a series of foundational writings belonging to the feminist

theoretical horizon. Marta Acevedo’s article “Women fight for their liberation. Our dream is in a

steep place”, published in the cultural supplement of ¡Siempre! Weekly, in 1970 reviewed the

feminist gathering that took place that same year in San Francisco. This text made its mark on

Mexican feminism of the era, showing the impact of U.S. feminism.

The three afore mentioned publications were published by established groups, which

found in publishing a practice that brought them together, a space from where to dialogue

internally and with other women’s groups.

Fem, the only one of these Guatemalan publications which is still being published, was

founded by renowned art and literary critic Alaíde Foppa, who was disappeared in her own

country in 1980, and Margarita García Flores, journalist and chief editor of Los Universitarios.

They both put together a great team of women writers and creators. Their first issue featured
Elena Poniatowska, Elena Urrutia, Margo Glantz, Nancy Cárdenas and Marta Lamas, among

others: women who would become the cream of Mexican feminist thought.

Fem is the oldest feminist magazine in Latin America. Its format, just like its contents,

defines it from the beginning as a magazine addressing a broad readership, with a poetic-literary

mark, cultural analysis, and reviews of movies, theatre and such. Its editorial policy includes

writing by males such as Carlos Monsiváis and Tomás Mojarro, among others. It published

vindicatory essays of women who became part of the feminist genealogy, and a few translations

as leading articles.

La Revuelta, by contrast, was produced by intellectual and militant young women, under

a radical and social feminism. It developed its theoretical approach from a basic principle of

feminism: the personal is political. The meetings of the small group offered the material for the

writing. The newspaper La Revuelta was distributed outside factories. It was an effort of an

erudite middle-class feminism to get out of itself and become involved with social struggles. The

Collective La Revuelta published its newspaper for nine issues, to then start a collaboration with

the newspaper Unomásuno, which lasted until 1982.

Cihuat was a political bulletin; the means of information for the Coalición de Mujeres

Feministas (Feminist Women Coalition), which would repeatedly denounce the situation of

oppression and exploitation of Mexican women, as well as persuading women to form a part of

organized struggle. There were only six issues; the last in 1978.

Fem is the media for a constant nucleus of Latin American cultural criticism. During its

first 15 years, it brought together a large group of women’s voices, intellectuals and creators.

Because of the length of its publishing life, as well as its contents, it offers a broad and ambitious

vision of feminism in Latin America. Polyvalent, it maintains a clear political definition without
being affiliated to a specific group, developing a theoretical preoccupation without locking itself

in the academic world. It connects with women authors and feminist movements of its time. It

presents few translations and functions more through its unpublished original essays and with a

large number of testimonial writing and interviews.

It also translated texts from a feminism that left its mark on contemporary cultural criticism3,

like its 1984 issue about the Chicanas, with a text by Cherrie Moraga, and in 1985, with a text by

Rosi Braidotti.

The seventies synthesized the libertarian spirit of the sixties, as far as a cultural

revolution. It was also a time of great politicization in Mexico: the ascent of the independent

social movements -critics of state corporatism-, and the development of the guerrilla proposals.

The feminist movement was discussing its relationship to the leftist groups and to the

“wider movement” of women. This process continued to define itself as the destabilization of the

model of “politics” as a relationship between the vanguard and the masses. In this process of

self-definition of feminism, two needs developed not without certain contradictions: the need to

depart from one’s own experience, of taking the personal to the terrain of politics, and the need

for feminism to act in partisan and institutional terms. Finally, this decade let us see that to

change life also meant to change what we understood as politics.

The “subject” of this feminism has been constructed on various fronts: the small group, the

partisan militancy, the struggles of the independent union movement, the academic world, the

mass media, the art world, the institutional sphere. A multiplicity of groups and people were

opening spaces, doing the hard work of the mole that builds subterranean bridges which would

become the base for cultural transformation in the long term.

 The interaction between the global and the local was clear in this decade. Many testimonials

refer to the organizing impetus that awakened women when the first of four women’s

conferences, organized by the UN, was celebrated in Mexico City in 1975. Spaces were opening

for various reasons: the official institutional spaces and the anti-establishment independent ones;

they were all disputing the same flag, that of “women”.

The local referents of Mexican feminism in the seventies were, on the one side, a left that did

not assume feminism as a central aspect of its project, and that thought of women as a

subordinate “sector” in the strategic struggle. On the other hand the authoritarian state aligned

women as a “sector,’ imposing the discourse of “development” assigning gender tasks for the

nation: family, reproduction, moral values. Feminism also walked hand in hand with the lesbian-

gay movement, which finally constituted itself in the following decade as an autonomous

movement, in dialogue, conflictive many times, with heterosexual feminism.

The authoritarian Mexican State developed a political system which was nourished by a

revolutionary and populist discourse, hegemonizing the historical and symbolic process of the

Mexican Revolution to define the Mestizo Nation, excluding anything that did not fit with the

“institutional revolutionary” project of development. Facing such a state, Mexican feminism

decided, just as the left did, to define itself as an independent movement. At the same time,

feminism happened outside the leftist political parties, maybe with the exception of Trotskyism,

which was also marginal within the left. The feminist groups, like the leftist ones, divided and

rearticulated themselves in relationship to the state, prefiguring the dilemma between the official

versus independent and the institutional and the autonomous, which later became even more

complex with international funding and the proliferation of non-governmental organisms in the

nineties.
Feminism as politics

During the last two decades, Mexican feminism shaped itself into a politics that transformed

current policies at the federal and state levels, constructing a strategy of alliances for its public

interventions. Particularly in the decade of the eighties, what we observe is a significant “micro”

organization of women through civil associations and NGO’s.

In the urban and peasant contexts, women acquired visibility structuring specific demands

within the organizations of unionized women. The two most important independent

organizations among the indigenous peasants appeared in 1982, at the First National Women’s

Congress celebrated in Mexico City, and in 1986, at the First Congress of Peasant Women from

CNPA and from the Coordinadora Plan de Ayala. The Red Feminista Campesina (Feminist

Peasant Network) was founded in 1987, as was the Red de Promotoras Rurales (Rural Women

Promoters Network). Women in the education field, maquila workers, domestic workers, those

belonging to the popular urban movement, they all discussed and articulated their standpoints,

while working against violence and for health benefits. A plural subject of feminism became

visible through the organization of women on these various fronts, at the same time that the

interaction between classes and the media reached its potential and found a vehicle through the

NGO’s.

The strategies of alliances and political participation were also modified: the National

Women’s Movement demanded that the State to participate by assisting women victims of

violence. The Guidance and Support Rape Center (COAPEVI) was created in 1987. As a result,

organized women in public institutions started to open spaces for the development of policies

related to women. Feminism moved from vanguard positions to social responsibility actions,

negotiating with the State for spaces, and broadening feminism’s political arena.
 In 1989, the Mexican State created both the Specialized Agencies on Sexual Crimes

(AEDS) and the Center for Support of Victims of Sexual Violence (CTA). In 1987, the State of

Guerrero established the first Ministry of Women's Affairs in the country. And, of course,

women were part of social programs like Mujeres en Solidaridad (Women in Solidarity) del

Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), which was the official program for social

development during the Salinismo period4, and an antecedent to the current Secretaría de

Desarrollo Social, (or SEDESOL, which is the Ministry of Social Development). On that fact,

Esperanza Tuñón (1997) states, “…There's no doubt feminist women are facing today the typical

logic of formal politics in the public setting –which considerably differs from the dynamics…

displayed before by them in the field of conceptual and cultural development of feminism, and in

the politicized spaces of daily life –and, not without resistance, they have accepted to participate

or support various projects sponsored by the State…However, within this attitude lies…the

difficulty to consider the “successes“ of the movement, whether it's a genuine legitimate

concession in the generated force or a cooptation manipulated by the feminist demands" (109).

A glimpse of the NGOization of feminism (Alvarez 1998) and of civil society in general,

became clearer during the next decade of the nineties, but only because of what had began in the

eighties. Poverty, citizenship, equality, legal advice, and civil rights were added to the issues of

violence and health. The more articulated politics of feminism around denouncement and the

struggle against violence came with the campaign for a risk-free maternity, joined to the axis of

democracy. The nineties were an eclosion in terms of the causes of the social movement: from

the use of language to multicultural rights. The lesbian and gay movement, which also broadened

its organization and visibility, started strategies to modify the current legislation, and in that way

broadening the definition of family to families, of implementing changes to the inheritance

rights, and of legalizing same-sex civil unions which were was recently approved in Mexico

City, in November 2006.

Feminist platforms during those years show growing complexity, there are conferences for

the valorization of domestic labor, but also campaigns like Taking Back Spaces, Access to

Justice for Women, as well the founding of the first feminist political association, DIVERSA,

which requested its electoral register.5 The Law for Assistance and Prevention of Family

Violence became instituted in 1997, in 1999 the Instituto de la Mujer, or Institute of Women’s

Affairs for the Mexico City government started functioning, and in 2000, the First National

Consultation on Women’s Rights was fostered.

Feminist politics is a sketch of a complex crisscross of actions, demands and interventions

representing a social subject increasingly more diverse, and capable of structuring demands, both

general and specific. The political dimension of feminism is more and more an intervention in

the general order of things, exceeding sectoral approaches and demands for equality.6

A new relationship seems to have been established between theory and the movement,

defying notions like “theoretical feminism” and “popular feminism”, giving way to a more

complex discussion within feminism itself, and among feminist groups from different political

tendencies. These developments are founded on the “cultural and symbolic capital” which, for

Mexican feminists, has represented the massive incorporation of women into education and

labor, as well as the interaction of organized women who have been working with poor women

in both urban and rural settings since the eighties. Feminist practices under NGO’s has followed

two tendencies: one, dominated by the Center’s directive bringing “development” to the rural

and poor areas, which are also the indigenous regions; and the other one, which is trying to break

through class and cultural fences that separate Mestizo women from Indigenous women, and
redefining up to a certain point, the enlightened basis of the Mestiza feminism. While the first

tendency behaves in assimilationist terms when facing poor and indigenous women, the second

tendency starts recognizing the cultural differences, and the critique of the capitalist model

implicit in indigenous cultural forms.

Parallel to these feminist practices it, internal discussions within militant feminist groups

keep developing around the need for autonomy, given the tendencies towards institutional

participation and funding sources. The dilemma of “being outside or being inside” the system

showed itself especially at Latin American feminist gatherings and congresses during the

nineties. It was difficult to reach an agreement in relation to policies of alliances, and even in

terms of setting feminist priorities.

NGOization comes with the trans-nationalization of feminism, as analyzed by Sonia

Álvarez (1998) for whom it is clear that the field of action for organized feminism in NGO’s, and

participation ting in the institutional settings of politics, like parties, states, institutions and

multilateral organisms, broadens the degree of thinking of gender as a global agenda. After the

boom, however, the NGOization of the feminist movement a critique follows asking how the

local feminist agenda must fit the requirements of the global agenda through the priorities of

funding. Moreover, the distance between the regional - global existence, and local recognition

becomes visible as Alvarez states: “… the Latin American feminist field of study, which had a

very broad reach in the nineties, started to be progressively diminished by unequal relationships

of power among women” (Alvarez 1998).

Feminist Magazines from the Nineties

From the nucleus that gave birth to Fem during those two decades, two publications

emerged which would mark the path of hegemonic Mexican feminism. When I call these
publications, and the critical mass from which they emerge, “hegemonic”, I am suggesting it is

the better known and recognized feminism inside and outside of Mexico,7 present in national

politics, at the international lobby, and in theoretical discussion, and not the same one developing

within the rural social movements and the popular sectors8.

In 1986, a group of feminist women summoned by Marta Lamas, presented a project to

the newspaper La Jornada, with the intention of creating a supplement that would be an organ

for debate within feminism, as well as for opening feminism to the rest of society. The

newspaper took in the project, but when they were structuring it, differences occurred between a

more journalistic sector, and a more intellectual one. The supplement stayed under the editorship

of Sara Lovera, and it kept an informative profile, while in March of 1990, Debate Feminista

appeared, under the direction of Marta Lamas.

Debate Feminista is, by far, the theoretical journal of Mexican feminism. Edited by

anthropologist and activist Marta Lamas, it continues with the collective work that its director

was practicing before: being the main translator of feminist theory produced in English, French

and Italian. Lamas had already published an important article9 in 1986 which came with the

translation presented by the journal Nueva Antropología of the influential text by Gayle Rubin,

“The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, published in English in the

compilation Towards an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter in 1975.

Debate Feminista, at 300 pages, and appearing twice a year, has the shape of a book,

presenting a state of the art featuring monographic essays on feminist topics. In the issues

published during these sixteen years, the journal magazine has consolidated a theoretical profile,

which intends to foster open reflections on certain local and transnational issues: democracy,

otherness, law, body and subject, cities, writing, politics, queerness and a continuous intent to
broaden the spectrum of the debate by, impacting social reflection through feminism, going

beyond it, and building bridges.

Debate Feminista has been the journal that introduced contemporary feminist authors in

academia and in the directives of the movement: Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, Adriana

Cavarero, Lia Cigarini, Nancy Fraser, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray. It presents an open structure

in the sense of constantly offering a space “from another place,” dedicated to views not openly

feminist, and publishing male authors in most of their issues.

It keeps a very organized yet flexible structure, allowing sections such as, “From the

Couch”, confirming the interest for a psychoanalytical perspective. Some texts that appear in

“From the Left”, “From the Everyday”, or “From another Place”, opens a space for interviews,

testimonials or denouncements. There is a space for photography, called “From the Glance”, and

the “Argüende” (Mexican expression for gossip and/or argument), and a space traditionally

dedicated to political satire in charge of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, directors of a very

important lesbian cultural critical space in the country. All this comes with the “hard nucleus” of

the journal, which organizes texts, around a certain subject matter in every issue.

We could characterize Debate Feminista as a journal of enlightened or “educated”

feminism, that is addresssing a strongly theoretical informed audience initiated and specialized;

and in political terms, a perspective from the liberal left with an institutional political project.

The feminist sector associated to the journal Debate Feminista is also an intellectual, political

one, with broad alliances.10 The activism of its editor, Marta Lamas, has centered on reproductive

rights and the legalization of abortion. She is also the director of GIRE, or Information Group on

Reproductive Choice.
 For its part, La Correa Feminista, created in 1991, brings together a radical and

autonomous feminism, around the journalists Ximena Bedregal and Rosa Rojas. It is published

by the CICAM, or Center for Research and Training of Women. The orginal objective of

CICAM was to constitute a kind of chain or belt, or correa, like its name implies, of feminisms

existing in the different states of the country, trying to systematize feminism and go against the

centralization of information in the nation’s capital.

Correa Feminista’s 19th issue, in the fall and winter of 1998, was a self-assessment. In

this issue, they revisited their original desire, and the contradictions of positing an autonomous

and radical kind of feminism, in recognition of “social needs” to broaden democracy, opposing

the needs of the State to make functional its neo-liberal project, by “incorporating aspects of the

demands that feminism had developed” (“7 years of La Correa Feminista”). The first seven

issues of the magazine were dedicated to building bridges between feminist organizations in the

states and the center of the country, something like the metropolis and its peripheries, given the

central and centralized character which shapes and penetrates the Mexican political and cultural

structures.

La Correa reestablished its project after asserting that a collective of women is not a

homogeneous one, and moreover, that it contains irreconcilable positions, by stating that “[…]

the voice of the majority sectors with more material and economic power, tended to the practice

of silencing the discrepant voices.”

From issue number 7, in 1994, it “becomes a magazine of critical reflection, looking for

elements of a radical, rebellious, autonomous and anti-systemic feminism”.

In its 19th issue CICAM announced the advent of Creatividad Feminista (Feminist

Creativity) published electronically on the Internet. The themes in the following issues centered
on feminism and politics, democracy, war, autonomy, and development. The electronic magazine

joined itself to a sector of Chilean feminism represented by the writer Margarita Pisano. This site

gave life to a new project, Mamametal, driven more towards artist expression, mainly through

photographs and videos.

Fem continued to appear promptly during this decade, representing what Lamas called

“mujerismo” (or “womanism”), committed to feminist writing, interviews, and to documenting

women’s movements, and publishing women’s literature and poetry.

To complete this panorama of forces and feminisms, we also have to trace the trajectory

of La Doble Jornada. From 1986 untill 1998, La Doble Jornada, (or Double Workday), was led

by Sara Lovera. During this time, it circulated its information widely carrying out its mission as a

space for women’s networks. From 1998, the supplement became Triple Jornada (or Triple

Workday), under the editorship of Ximena Bedregal and Rosa Rojas, both from La Correa’s

team. The objective of Triple Jornada was to “strengthening the debate regarding the role of

women in the world, which isn’t necessarily taking over half the power” locates the supplement

within feminism, and closes the circle of debate.

The transition from the seventies to the nineties is marked by social movements and civil

society; the proliferation of NGO’s which started their work with peasant, working class and

indigenous women; the de-structuring of the classic leftist paradigm; the end of socialism, of the

cold war, of guerrilla warfare as a means to confront state power. The preoccupation with

democracy grew after the electoral process of 1988.11 The relationship with the institutional

apparatus is one of the most politicized vectors within the social movements, including

feminism. Paradoxically, the ever-growing presence of the organized civil society and its
connections with transnational organisms provided the conditons for feminism to become a field

of study, a profession, and a “stable” voice in the political arena.

De-centering Feminism: Neo-Zapatismo and the Difficulty of Mexican Feminisms to Deal with

Indigenousness

In the political scenario of the early nineties in Mexico, Salinismo had seeped through broad

layers of leftist intellectualism with a certain harmony in direct opposition to neoliberal

globalization as a political inexorability and as a desirable future. The crisis started by the armed

uprisings, which forced a reconsideration of definitions that were commonly thought of as settled

within national culture: violence as a political recourse, the preeminence of the constitutional law

above the rights of the people. The derivations from the movement questioned the whole notion

of an independent and Mestizo nation, which nourished the critical and leftist discourses.

The Zapatista movement opened a controversial space for Mexican feminism: the

articulation of indigenous women’s voices was questioned by the feminist movement, especially

because of the central male figure of the Subcomandante and the discourse around the

indigenous women, while other political trends were endorsing and recognizing it. The Zapatista

style of fighting provoked different reactions and opinions. Mexican feminism, through its own

publications, articulated general standpoints on the conflict, although they could not avoid

recognizing the importance of the emblematic actions of the indigenous Zapatismo, like the

Women’s Revolutionary Law, the presence of women commanders (comandantas), and the

words of the insurgents. The difficult relationship between feminism and Zapatismo brought to

light issues that had not been seen as problematic within western critical feminist discourse.

The reception/discussion that Neozapatismo generated in the different fields of Mexican

feminism is another horizon of visibility for indigenous women, as they inform national
feminism. I will only consider La Correa Feminista, and Debate Feminista, becuase these two

publications generated the most work about feminism and its relationship to and with

Neozapatism.

La Correa Feminista published a compilation of materials and positions in their first

volume,“Chiapas: ¿and what about the women?” in December 1994. The composition of the

first volume already posed the agenda for an autonomous feminism: violence against women,

decriminalization of abortion, and the absence of indigenous women in the debate around

autonomies. However, it is in the Introduction by Rosa Rojas, and in Ximena Bedregal’s article

entitled “Chiapas, reflections from our feminism”, that the editorial group assumes a critical

position towards the insurgent raising.

One can summarize the central points as follows:

1. Feminism is essentially pacifist. War is part of the patriarchal order. Because of that,

critical feminism has to take its distance from a project that “liberates” through a the military

option, given that such structures are in themselves patriarchal, vertical and authoritarian. “For

us, feminism is fundamentally pacifist and antiwar (…) War, in all its forms and expression has

been a vertebral instrument of power, of (dis)order and the domain of the patriarchal system…”

Bedregal, 1994, op cit, pp.,43-44. Feminism must question the war machine and its patriarchal

logic, as illustrated by the guerrilla in Central and South America. Women becoming soldiers

must not be seen as an achievement.

There is a differentiation between feminism’s criticism of war, and the one that made by

patriarchal liberalism. This last one makes a hypocritical criticism because it recognizes the

violence in the other but not in its own logic (the violence of the rule of law, the nonexistent

peace, social inequality and extermination). Opposite to this liberal positioning, feminist
criticism would be “the profound and radical criticism of the foundations of these deliriums that,

with promises and speeches about regained identities, avenged offenses and definite salvations,

only present us, from the perspective of the powerful ones first, and then, from the dispossessed

ones…the eternal postponement of happiness; and in the name of an assumed superior good,

freedom and life itself are always left out” (op cit, p. 46). The discourse and practice of the

EZLN, “strengthens the idea that violence can only be fought with violence and that it is valid if

it comes from the forsaken, the dispossessed, the oppressed” (47). It acts within the laws of the

system it criticizes by assuming itself as an army, declare war and appeal to the recognition of

the Geneva Convention

2. Reservations about the Women’s Revolutionary Law, considering that: “it gives no

guarantee of the subversion of the patriarchal order which prevails in the communities of the

Zapatista territory, in Chiapas and the rest of the country, it will not be more than a partial

declaration of good intentions, as long as women remain as second class humans, precluded by

the masculine authoritarianism—which women also help reproduce—from being owners of their

bodies, through a free and secondary maternity, as long as their wishes for a good life remain a

secondary issue for some future, as long as they are not the real owners, materially, politically,

socially and symbolically, of their lives, as long as their voice is not a vertebral element in the

construction of daily life” (xi).

And further ahead in the text: “(…) in general terms it is evident that it is not feminist in as

much as it only proposes a few claims for women and not a proposal of community from the

experience of the feminine, critical and conscious, criticized and reconstructed… From our

occidental and enlightened urban perspective, if indigenous women are generally invisible, and

with the barrier of war they are directly inaccessible, it is practically impossible to know if such
law is a real product of a women’s process opposite to the patriarchal and violent customs, or if it

is a product of the leaders facing the need to incorporate women into traditionally male tasks

and/or to give the idea of a larger democracy (…)” (ibid, pp. 54-55).

This proposal does not see indigenous women as a subject. The invisibility obscures even

their capacity as agency. Are women the ones who stated the Law or is it a strategy of the male

and patriarchal leadership? Women are left trapped in this non-visibility that causes them to be

represented as victims.

3. Acknowledging certain aspects of Neozapatism:

However, there would be certain analogies that bring together the “critical feminism” to

the rebellious movement. The first one is the analogy between “natives” (“indios”) and

“women”, both made invisible, marginal, sharing the “not being news”. The second convergence

appears in the “particular” aspects of the Neozapatista discourse, when undressing the fallacy of

the neoliberal model and its promises, and above all, by claiming the validity of rebellion, “and

more than that, it has installed hope for difference, for diversity. Elements that should be, for

feminists, nourishment for their imaginations”, p.49.

Other attitudes of the EZLN are valued, like the fact that they recognize that they are

talking from a specific locality, without pretending to impose one “truth” for all. The

communicative wisdom present in the communiqués by both, the CCRI (Indigenous

Revolutionary Clandestine Committee) and Marcos, saying even in relation to this that: “From

another logic, and from a symbolic order which is not the order of feminism, it has given us a

lesson we must recognize. Communication like this has been one of feminist utopias for

communication, lost in the erroneous belief that we can only be listened to if we speak the

other’s language (…)”, p.51.

 The second volume of “Chiapas ¿and what about the women?” published in December

1995, offered an account of the political climate and of the great civil society mobilization

following February’s incursion of the Mexican army into the Zapatista zone, searching for the

Subcomandante, destroying a series of communities and cutting off communication with the area

for a month. People had sought refuge in the mountains. This had been the second great

offensive after the first twelve days of open war following the onset of the rebellion. The

women’s movement was very active. In February 1995, the First National Women’s Convention

was held. The State Women’s Convention in Chiapas had already happened in July of 1994. The

intention around a ”new national pact” is the context for the petition of the sixth question12 at the

National Consultation for Peace and Democracy by the EZLN (which happened on August 27,

1995).

The second volume published, poses an answer to the postures of La Correa’s autonomous

feminism, written by Mercedes Olivera in, “Feminist practice in the national liberation Zapatista

movement,” and in an essay by Bedregal, “A dialogue with Mercedes Olivera: Memory and

Utopia in the feminist practice.” The first is a vision from Chiapas, through which we can see the

organizational environment around the Zapatismo, and the progress achieved within Zapatismo

itself in relation to indigenous women’s participation and the recognition of their voice and

labor; the advancement represented by the mobilization in front of the colonial model imposed

on both male and female indigenous people. For Olivera Bustamante (1995), inside Zapatismo

and its context ”the possibility of turning feminism into a larger social practice” (176) is at stake,

and further ahead, “In brief, we feminists from the fields, who have worked in Chiapas, value the

progress obtained by women in deconstructing and reconstructing their identities as indigenous

women and poor peasants” (177).

 The differentiated shades of feminism began to emerge. On the one side, urban and radical yet

sectarian and dogmatic, paradoxically interested in the feminism of the difference, yet

uninterested on the differences themselves among women, a sisterhood of patriarchy’s radical

criticism. On the other hand, the feminism “from the fields,” mixed with the denied culture of the

forbidden diversity, that of the ethnic groups, worried with identities. The latter, even though it

recognized the patriarchal structures, prioritizes “the practice of a broader feminism”, making

indigenous women visible as subjects with a social agency. “In any case, they themselves (the

Indigenous women) will be the ones to decide if to promote or not the feminist character of their

organizations and their movement. We the feminists, from our own role as advisors or members

of the NGO’s, let us help women look at themselves…” (Olivera Bustamante 1995, 184).

Bedregal’s answer reaffirms the criticism towards belligerence, even coming from the

poor, the idea that, in dialogue with Olivera’s text, the refusal to be subordinate to the feminist

imaginary, to rank priorities. “My feminism…tries to be an invitation to give free rein to the

imagination, to self-validation, to criticism, to being bad and to know we can be worst, to not be

afraid, to have memory and herstory, to feel, to take risks, to name what we want, to invent

freedom and other worlds above the norm(s). To “de-generate,” means to live outside of gender”

(Bedregal 1995, 189). In ranking priorities, what becomes exposed is the priority for a radical

and radicalizing subject, over other ways of building agency and self-validation.

Debate Feminista as an editorial group declared its position to the Zapatista movement in

their editorial section for issue number 9, March 1994. “When the war exploded in Chiapas,

many of us asked ourselves what was the feminist perspective on the conflict,” starts, and opens

various positions. There were those who felt sympathy for the movement but felt conflicted by

their pacifist inclinations; those who were more concerned about the situation of the women in
Chiapas who were being displaced by the conflict; those who were more worried about the risk

to the democratic project; those who were enthusiastic about the Women’s Law, and those who

were worried by the political strength of the Catholic Church. They also mention that those who

traveled to Chiapas were able to check, after talking to the local feminists, that “one thing was

the idealizing chilanga (meaning, from Mexico City) look, and another one, the harsh social

reality.” The existence of internal divisions, the rejection of many communities towards the

armed path, messianic, patriarchal and authoritarian attitudes by the Catholic Church and by

some members of the Zapatista army, this all speaks of a messianism opposite to “that other path

(that) is the work of the masses…”

In this issue, Debate Feminista publishes the Women’s Revolutionary Law with a

fragment of Marcos’ letter where he refers to the way the Law was elaborated in March 1993;

they also publish a document sent by the San Cristóbal Women’s group (or COLEM) on

reproductive rights. The editorial in Debate Feminista exposes here one of the main points of

their feminist political agenda: the criticism of a religious conception of maternity, where a

woman’s body is considered a “divine instrument”, and where “from the moment of fecundation,

the human being in formation has complete autonomy from the mother (…) In front of this, they

propose: “As Juárez already pointed out, laws can’t be based on religious beliefs” (p.ix).

The magazine published, the whole text “Pastoral document on abortion”, written by Don

Samuel Ruiz, and Bovero’s article on secular thought, emphasizing this way their secular

affiliation, pointing to a critical tension towards Zapatismo.

In their issue number 24, from October 2001, seven years after the 94’s editorial, we find

the result of the reflection provoked on a sector of feminism by the indigenous uprising. “Racism

and Mestizaje” is the title for various articles that question racism in Mexico, and its role in the
construction of the nation. Articles like Ruiz’s, “La india bonita: nación, raza y género en el

México revolucionario” (“The pretty India: nation, race and gender in revolutionary Mexico”)

and Belausteguigoitia’s, “Descaradas y deslenguadas: el cuerpo y la lengua en los umbrales de

la nación”(“Without face and without tongue: body and language in the thresholds of the

nation”), wish to explore nationalism and the construction of the indigenous feminine. The

volume gathers various articles on Neozapatismo, includes poetry in the Tseltal and Tzotzil

languages, Comandanta Esther’s intervention at the Mexican parliament, and a good

photographic testimonial.

But it is in Hernández Castillo’s article, “Between feminist ethnocentrism and the ethnic

essentialism on Indigenous women and their gender related demands,” that we find a very

critical stance towards Mexican feminism for its ethnocentrism. Hernández asserts that

indigenous women would find themselves in the middle of “an indigenous movement that

refuses to recognize its sexism and a feminist movement which refuses to recognize its

ethnocentrism” (Hernández Castillo 2001, 217).

For Hernández Castillo the main point is the articulation of indigenous women on gender

related demands, together with the autonomic demands of their pueblos, “as a struggle with

many fronts”, in which “hegemonic feminism” does not build bridges. She defines “hegemonic

feminism” as one that “emerged in the center of the country, and was theorized from academia

where the struggle in pro of abortion and women’s reproductive rights has been central” (207,

footnote 4). Truly, the “centering” of this hegemonic feminism impedes it from building bridges

with religious sectors that have been reflecting on women’s issues and organizing them

considering their social conditions. The result is a feminist hegemonic excluding agenda which

privileges the demands of the educated urban experience, and ascribed to a notion of individual
rights which doesn’t attend the idea –maybe forever lost – of communality.

Marta Lamas and the Subcomandante Marcos had exchanged letters in relation to the

legalization of abortion, published in La Jornada, on April 29 and May 11, 1994. The discussion

occured because of an alleged demand by the EZLN that in the reform of the Penal Code in

Chiapas abortion would be decriminalized. Lamas points out that decriminalizing abortion is a

central question in a truly democratic project, in the sense of “the respect towards plurality and

individual guarantees” (Lamas 1994, 141). But she also clarified that in our countries, women

with economic means can have sanitary abortions, while poor women have to resort to

interrupting their pregnancy in ways that put them in high risk of death. Which means that the

“individual guarantees” are delimited by your belonging to a certain social class. On May 11,

1994, Marcos denied that the EZLN was asking for the criminalization of abortion, nor the

reformulation of the penal code, and transcribed the 27th item in the EZLN demands, where what

is being asked is “To remove the Penal Code from the State of Chiapas because it doesn’t allow

us to organize ourselves, except with weapons (…)”.

In his response, Marcos stated a figure of speech that he repeats in various communiqués.

The idea that the Women’s Law was imposed by the Zapatista women within the EZLN, the idea

that the changes that women are making are happening “in spite of the newspapers, churches,

penal codes and, is fair to recognize, our own resistance as males to be thrown to the comfortable

space of domination that we’ve inherited” (Rojas, 1994, 145). Finally, in postscript style, there

are two strong affirmations: that indigenous women have abortions and not by their own choice,

but because of chronic malnutrition, and that they are not asking for abortion clinics because they

don’t even have childbirth clinics, and that “carrying firewood up the hills is something that no

penal code considers (…)” (ibid).

 This polemic took shape again years later, from December 2002 to January 2003, from

issue number 1362 to 1367 of the weekly Proceso. The discussion began with Javier Sicilia

responding to an article by Carlos Monsiváis entitled “On Bishops and social geology”,

(Proceso, 1362), caused by the bishops’ “recommendation”, motivated by the First Summit of

Indigenous Women from the Americas, in December 2002. Gustavo Esteva and Sylvia Marcos,

among others, participated in the polemic. They all shared a theoretical closeness to Ivan Illich

and his important work on vernacular gender and modern sexism.

What can one sort out in this polemic? The discussion revolved around reproductive

rights and decriminalization of abortion. For Lamas, “(…) in this debate about gender, which is

also about essentialism, it would be interesting to enter and define the contours of this fair and

free world we think possible, which for me it is not the world from the past nor the one from the

present. A world that recognizes sexual differences without imposing false complementarities

and that favors the development of human potentialities…in a utopia of a world without

economic exploitation sexual and reproductive rights are a fundamental axis” (2003, 59). Sicilia

responds: “As you can see, I don’t believe in sexual nor reproductive rights in any type of

society. I believe in the proportion, in the person, in the difference, in the duty and the place for

mystery” (Sicilia 2003, 59).

From a Christian critical viewpoint of modernity, Sicilia approached gender as a

vernacular ordinance, versus the modern ordinance, where “the Roman right is the only measure

of it all.” The vernacular, orders the human universe in a proportional manner, through a guide

who moderates man’s actions in front of physical and human nature. “This proportion implies,

among many other things, the understanding of maternity as a gift, not as a right (…)” (ibid). For

Sicilia, the loss of such proportionality occurs in the societal development centered in the
economic as the absolute value, “where the human being has evicted sacred order from their

life”, and it is right there where modern debate on reproductive rights is generated.

Esteva, from another place, responded to Lamas with the distinction Illich proposed

between patriarchy, “to speak of domination of men over women in the vernacular conditions”

and sexism, “to speak of the consequences of the disadvantage that only an ideologically

equalitarian society can impose on their human subjects that are diagnosed as belonging to the

feminine sex (…) without which a society based on merchandise couldn’t exist…”(Esteva 2003,

60).

Proportionality and difference, equality and capitalism would be the pairs sustaining this

location. "Sylvia Marcos intervened in Proceso No: 1367 to point out the importance of listening

to what the indigenous women are saying, from their spiritual and practical location, quoting

María Estela Jocón, Mayan, from Guatemala, who states: "What is understood [or 'what we

understand'] from the practice of a gender[ed] approach is a respectful relationship…of balance,

equilibrium –what in the West would be called equality" (81). Lamas’ position is characterized

as colonialist from those three perspectives, and for different reasons. For Sylvia Marcos: “The

preoccupation is that the feminist discourse, placed in the urban elite, acts as a colonizing and

“involuntarily” hegemonic element…” Proceso 1367, p. 80. For Sicilia, (women) “have all the

right to defend… their reproductive rights and apply them in their bodies, what they have no

right is to erect them as a supreme value for women (that is why I’ve said that her discourse

(Lamas’) is colonialist, pretends to make the indigenous women say what they never said…”

(Sicilia 2003, 59). And for Esteva, “there is not any notion floating above all of cultures and eras,

like those who share the economic mentality of modernity try to make us believe, against whose

colonialist breath we need to fight” (Esteva 2003, 61).

 What is at stake in these three views are diverse essentialisms: Lamas’, by establishing as

central and universal the demands of urban women for sexual and reproductive rights; Sicilia’s

and Esteva’s, by denying modernity any kind of quality, seeing it as totally dominated by

economic centrality, without any crevices or nor resistances In the middle of the discussion are

the statements of the indigenous women during the Summit, that Sylvia Marcos pointed out: we

have to listen to them carefully, translate them.

The reviewed discussions refer us to a present need among the diverse feminisms in

Mexico: to develop a position dealing with indigenous women outside “indigenismo”, a

paternalist and colonialist discourse towards the indigenous, which also implies a series of

theoretical destabilizations of feminism as a critical apparatus. As a condition of openness to the

diversity of the feminine and feminist subject, part of the process is to decolonize its own

assumptions given the absence of indigenous women’s voices. This observation is not a value

judgment, but rather an appeal to recognize that classist and ethnic segregation by Mexican

nationalism/indigenismo has created great divisions among women. These divisions are

redefining themselves. The indigenous women’s voices are already in other contexts, the ones

that the local and international movement has been opening—fields of enunciation for a word of

their own. And by “own” I do not mean untouched by various discourses. Precisely the opposite,

a word that appropriates itself of a multiplicity of discourses so as to “be in the world”, and “be

born in the world”, yet not necessarily coinciding with feminism’s political agenda, but rather,

generating its own agenda, anchored in their own life experience and cultural and cosmogonic

horizons.

The referred discussion around Neozapatismo calls to locally elucidate the specific

meanings of “emancipation” for the indigenous women, destabilizing univocal and universalist
notions of concepts like “feminine liberation”. Not to abdicate these concepts, but fill them with

diverse, localized and useful content for a concrete subject. As a whole, indigenous

Neozapatismo showed Mexican hegemonic feminism a vision of indigenous women, less

attached to silence and shadow, as more political players, whole and differential subjects,

conscious of identity politics and their distance from the enlightened feminism of western

modernity. Indigenous women’s discourse is everyday more audible, and in it they combine the

claims for social and gender related justice and cultural recognition.

The discussion around Neozapatismo also provoked in hegemonic feminism a larger self-

reflection in the nation’s classist and racist mirror. The nation appears as object of feminist

elucidation, not yet exhausted in its characterization as “patriarchal”, but in reconstructing the

complex dialogism which constitutes it, and of which we, women, white and colored, are part of.

And most important, it might be that in this intercultural dialogue, hegemonic feminism will turn

to look at itself, expanding, in some cases, the borders that its own location imposes on it, starts

to see more, and by doing so, advances towards a more inclusive conviviality and a more plural

voice.
1

NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN

We specially have to mention four women’s organizations: Mujeres en Acción Solidaria, or MAS, (1970), Movimiento

Nacional de Mujeres, or MNM, (1973), and Colectivo La Revuelta (1975), and Cihuat (1977), called the “seed groups”, as

they were irradiating the feminist seed within the social movements.

2
Mexico was at the end of the political crisis after the 1968 Student Movement, towards which the

state’s reaction had been brutal. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional had been fifty years in

power. The institutionalization of the Mexican revolution made it possible for a nationalist and

revolutionary rhetoric to work, as well as a repressive and authoritarian practice. Echeverría’s six-year

period tried to reconfigure the political scene through a “democratic aperture” which practiced the

politics of cooptation-repression of the opposition.

3
Translations in Social Science and Humanities, from English or another European language into Spanish, in publishing

houses that have distribution in Mexico, take anywhere between 5 to 10 years. For example, the fundamental text by Gayle

Rubin, “Women’s traffic: notes on the political economy of sex”, appears in English in 1975, and it’s not until 1986 that the

magazine Nueva Antropología publishes the Spanish version.

4
Salinism refers to Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s six-year presidency. Salinas won the 1988 elections opposite to Cuauhtémoc

Cárdenas, through an electoral fraud. This government applies a strong neoliberal policy, but with a social expense, called

“social neoliberalism”. An important part of these social politics were operated through PRONASOL, and in the

countryside, PROCAMPO and PROGRESA, where specific politics are developed for peasant women.
5
Antecedent of the first feminist political party, México Posible, and the current Alternativa party, led by Patricia Mercado.
6
Sonia Álvarez poses for the nineties a Latin American feminism “that used to be a relatively isolated and restricted

movement…and now can be more appropriately characterized as an expansive, polycentric and heterogeneous field of

action, which has greatly extended its cultural and political influence” (1998, 93).

7
However, there are a wide variety of feminist expressions that have their own publications, sporadic

most of the times, as well as diverse manifestations, as part of the social movements or organization of

the society as groups.

8
Esperanza Tuñón (1997) refers to feminist women as part of the Women’s Wider Movement, describing them as follows:

“As far as feminist women is concerned, it’s worth remembering that they are generally placed among the sectors of the
enlightened middle layers, and usually they are intellectuals developing their activity and postulates in different areas… like

the media, the academia, the organizational political work… ONG, and the political parties…” (107). Hernández Castillo

(2001) characterizes Mexican hegemonic feminism as follows: “…feminism which emerged in the center of the country,

and is theorized from the academia, where the struggle in favor of abortion and reproductive rights has been central…”

(207, footnote 4).

9
Lamas (1986).
10
Alliances among the different ideologies and political parties that consider the challenge of feminism

in Mexico in the nineties, as pointed out by Lamas, Martínez, Tarrés and Tuñón (1995).
11
Elections won by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, where the “system falls” during the electoral computation as a way to make the

fraud operative in favor of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

12
Originally, the National Consultation for Peace and Democracy consisted of five questions. After a

proposal by Daniel Cazés and Marcela Lagarde an explicit question is included about the need for

equality in women’s participation.