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Abstract
Women's narratives of protest in three indigenous communities of Michoacán, Mexico, after the massive electoral protest of 1988–1989 indicate that the jurisdictional positioning of these communities created paths and spaces of protest that shaped the formation of gendered political identities and, over time, the politicization of ethnicity in the region. The women of Cherán played a dominant and consistent role in opposition electoral mobilizations in ways that allowed them to confront traditional gendered hierarchies that had cast them as apolitical. In contrast, although women in the communities of Pichátaro and Tacuro also actively engaged the electoral opposition, they did not experience profound gendered transformation. Due largely to the jurisdictional positions of their communities, they instead politicized their ethnicity much more forcefully in the wake of electoral mobilization. Thus, race and gender as nonessential categories intersect differently through space in ways that are often crucial to inquiry within political geography. Exploring local and regional patterns of political identity formation through a feminist lens elucidates the interconnected geographies of state power and protest, as well as the geographical constraints on indigenous rights and democracy in contemporary Mexico.
Acknowledgments
I appreciate the people of the Meseta Purhépecha who shared their experience, knowledge, and friendship. Research that formed the basis of this article was funded through an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant and an Inter-American Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship. During my fieldwork crucial institutional support was provided by El Colegio de Michoacán (Zamora), with particular support and inspiration coming from Sergio Zendejas and Marcos Calderón. The maps used in this article were created by Maylian Pak. Valuable comments on the manuscript were provided by Anna Secor, Neil Smith, Alec Murphy, Audrey Kobayashi (in her capacity as editor), Shaul Cohen, Peter Walker, Susan Hardwork, and several anonymous reviewers. Any errors or unconvincing interpretations are my own.
Notes
1. The FDN began to fall apart several months after the presidential elections in 1988. Cárdenas issued a call for the founding of a new party in October 1988, which became the PRD. The PRD remains Mexico's largest leftist party.
2. My claim that women participated heavily in the protests is based on interviews with men and women, including those both supportive of the PRD and those who identified with the PRI. Additional documentation verifying women's participation is scant. My review of two regional and statewide newspapers from June 1988 to December 1989, El Guía (a small regional newspaper published in Zamora) and La Voz de Michoacán (a statewide newspaper published in Morelia), revealed very few references to women's participation in the Cardenista mobilizations in the Meseta Purhépecha (of fifty-three articles on the Cardenista municipal takeovers). The 5 March 1989 edition of El Guía includes a photograph of the protests in the Meseta Purhépecha with the caption “Purhépechan women enthusiastically participating in the Cardenista mobilizations.” Another article in El Guía discusses a confrontation between the Cardenistas and the PRI in the town of Acachuén, municipality of Chilchota, describing “around 200 Priístas assaulted a group of Cardenistas in this community, a group largely comprised of women, including an elderly woman of ninety years of age” ( 89 Sierra Reyes 1989 ). The handful of articles speaking directly to municipal protests in Cherán do not mention women's role in the protests. Rather than indicating that women's narratives of their participation are greatly exaggerated, I believe this reflects gender bias on the part of journalists. Carmen 101 Ventura Patiño (2003) examined women's participation in the Cardenista mobilizations in the Purhépechan community of Tarecuato, confirming that this was a fairly widespread phenomenon in the Purhépecha region.
3. I discuss these traditional gender hierarchies in more detail in the following section. For discussion of the history of gender in the Purhépecha region, see Marjorie 9 Becker (1995) ; for a gendered analysis of Mexican nationalism, see Jean 37 Franco (1989) and 98 Julia Tuñón Pablos (1999) .
4. My analysis of gendered political identity formation is partial in that I am not systematically contrasting women's shifting political identifications with those of men. Later in the article I touch on the degree to which women's political identites during and after 1988 in the Meseta Purhépecha disrupted traditional distinctions between public and private, distinctions that largely marked women as apolitical. However, “patterns gendered political identity formation” refers primarily to the different degrees of politicization among women from these three communities. Women's narratives, even when treated largely in isolation from men's narratives and masculinity, provide crucial insight into gendered political dynamics. The reference to “politicization of ethnicity” seeks to emphasize the process through which indigeneity became highly politicized (which accelerated in Mexico during the 1970s and even more strongly in the early 1990s) as compared to day-to-day enactments of indigeneity.
5. As importantly, the jefe de tenencia represents the municipal council to the residents of the tenencia, not vice versa (see 78 Pérez Jiménez 1997 ).
6. Moisés 38 Franco Mendoza (1997) identifies twenty municipalities that comprise the Purhépecha region. Of these, two have an indigenous-identified cabecera municipal (Cherán and Nuevo Parangaricutiro).
7. Seeing municipal boundaries as key factors shaping geographies of resistance does not preclude recognizing these boundaries as effects of long histories of colonial subordination. They are material residues of Spanish colonialization processes, which included the reorganization of often-scattered indigenous populations into more easily administered villages or towns ( reducciones /reductions) and the designation of cabeceras according to colonial needs and priorities ( 40 Gerhard 1972 ).
8. Another event that helped precipitate public opposition to the PRI was the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. The government responded ineptly to the disaster, mishandling relief funds and forcing groups in civil society to undertake rescue and recovery operations ( 1 Aguilar Zinser, Morales, and Peña 1986 ).
9. As a package of policies, neoliberal reforms sought to privatize state companies and services, slash public deficits and subsidies, enforce fiscal austerity, lower trade barriers, promote export production, remove foreign investment regulation, and suppress wages. Although framed in terms of efficiency and modernization, the direct effect of these policies was a severe economic recession that deepened the poverty of the poorest sectors of society and significantly eroded the buying power of the middle classes that had expanded over several decades following World War II ( 26 b14 Davis 1993; Bulmer-Thomas, Craske, and Serrano 1994 ). The largest direct domestic beneficiaries of restructuring were wealthy Mexicans, who purchased state-owned companies at rock bottom prices and benefited from new export markets: between 1984 and 1989 the top income decile increased its share of national wealth by more than 15 percent ( 46 INEGI 1998 ). Rural areas, particularly indigenous regions, were hit the hardest due to the removal of minimal supports for basic food production ( 3 Alarcón-González and McKinley 1999 , 106).
10. All the informant names are pseudonyms save for official representatives of state agencies and deceased public officials; every effort has been taken to protect respondents' anonymity. Among the three communities I completed 110 formal interviews and extensive participant observation of formal political processes (during a year of municipal elections), meetings of the Nación Purhépecha, as well as women's artisanal groups and projects. Most interviews were conducted in Spanish; translations are mine. Seventeen interviews were conducted in Purhépecha through the use of a translator. Additionally, I analyzed primary and secondary documents that shed light on local political transformations (municipal documents, regional newspaper accounts, personal photo collections). In my citations of interview data I provide the ages of the respondents in order to more deeply situate the quotations for the reader.
11. Additional historical antecedents to these emerging political identities include the struggles of the Mexican Revolution, which in the Meseta Purhépecha included popular and organized resistance to foreign timber companies and their forest concessions ( 33 b17 Espín Díaz 1985; Calderón Mólgora 1999 ), and movements of the 1970s that sought to “reappropriate” communal forests from commercial interests, in part through the deployment of new discourses of indigenous, Purhépecha identity ( 100 Vázquez León 1992 ).
12. Some women said “we decided ourselves to go ahead of the men,” while others mentioned that FDN organizers from Morelia suggested this as a tactic. The Secretary of Women of the PRD confirmed that this gender strategy was one that women leaders in Morelia promoted because they were aware of the effectiveness of this strategy in other Mexican and Latin American social struggles (Vargas, Guadalupe, Secretaria de la Jujer PRD Estatal Michoacán [Secretary of Women PRD State of Michoacán], interview 1 September 2000). Men that I interviewed in Cherán sometimes acknowledged that women “went in front” but nearly always said it was their own choice (I think because they were hesitant to admit that any man would tell a woman to protect him).
13. This “place in politics” is still highly gendered: men are considered the central actors and political leaders in the community, and most women conceive of leadership as the general purview of men. Moreover, despite their heavy participation in FDN mobilizations, women do not articulate these experiences in terms of participating as individual women, or in terms of “women's rights.” This qualitatively new status for women in the community, as defenders of el pueblo, nevertheless has given many a new sense of legitimacy as political actors.
14. My broader project, on which this analysis is based, examines in depth how these emerging discourses and identities became translated into daily life and political practice over the ten years following 1988. Although such a discussion lies beyond the parameters of this paper, I will note that the exercise of political authority and gendered citizenship ten years after the mobilizations is much more complicated than is implied in the enthusiastic story told above. Many PRD leaders have returned to a set of governing practices reminiscent of their PRI predecessors. Moreover, the visible participation of women in politics has declined significantly. Nevertheless, at the margins of political practice “new” identities and citizenship discourses have not disappeared but continue to challenge traditional political cultures ( 73 Nelson 2003 ).
15. Tending the ovens for olla production is an extremely time-consuming and delicate process in which leaving the oven for more than a couple of hours during a burn can cause one to lose the entire batch. In ceramics production it is women who are responsible for production, and men who are largely responsible for commercialization. I point out this important difference between women in Tacuro and in Pichátaro—differences that shape each group's ability to actively participate in the mobilization—in order to make clear that I do not assume that women's political identities are the same in Tacuro and Pichátaro. Far from it. The language barrier for the majority of women in Tacuro (who frequently do not speak Spanish with ease) represents a much more marginalized position from which to act politically than is the case for women in Cherán and Pichátaro, who are largely fluent in Spanish. I explore later the implications of this language barrier for women of Tacuro.
16. Although an extensive discussion of the gendering of public and private spaces is outside the parameters of this paper, it helps to make a few comments on this topic. Based on women's life stories, the traditionally quite strong prohibitions on women's movements outside of the home, and even more importantly outside of el pueblo, began to be transformed by the late 1970s. Economic necessities and processes of capitalist integration of these communities into broader markets shaped the way women increasingly became involved in commercializing their own artisanal products, leaving the community to sell in cities both near and far away. Women recounted that after leaving the community for days or weeks at a time to commercialize their goods, they underwent difficult struggles to maintain their reputation in the community as a “good woman.” Although “ andando afuera ” or traveling outside [of the community] is increasingly acceptable for women today, there are still many instances when leaving the community impinges on a woman's reputation as a “good” woman, which contributes to the idea that places outside of el pueblo can be dangerous for women ( 74 Nelson 2006 ).
17. In both communities the cargo system shapes social relations and the construction of political respect, but unlike most indigenous communities in Southern Mexico the cargo system is formally separate from the selection of civil authorities. As Luis 43 Hernández Navarro (1999 , 160) writes, “the cargo system developed during the colonial era, as a result of the merging of Spanish political restructuring policies and preexisting indigenous forms of organization. The cargo system is based on positions of civic and religious importance in the community, which are filled on a rotating basis by the men of the town or village.… The system operates everywhere as a mechanism providing political representation on a rotating basis.… Under the cargo system, authority becomes synonymous with both experience and service.” The person accepting a cargo undertakes the organization and financing of large communal festivals linked to the celebration of different Catholic Saints or other religious events. This costly undertaking provides the carguero with the opportunity to improve his social and political standing in the community.
18. The different degree of educational opportunities in Cherán is due in part to its comparatively larger size than Pichátaro.
19. Sympathizers of the Nación Purhépecha in Cherán largely came from the small professional class, in contrast to Pichátaro and Tacuro where a wider base of the population was actively involved or supportive of the indigenous movement. The full story of the emergence of the Nación Purhépecha is beyond the scope of this paper. Clearly the roots of a highly politicized regional ethnic identity, including the Nación Purhépecha, are not solely the result of the Cardenista mobilizations. However, the strengthening of a politicized ethnic identity, leading to the formation of an indigenous movement in the early 1990s, was shaped by the Cardenista mobilizations and subsequent alienation from the promises of 1988.
20. Informe de Gobierno, Ayuntamiento Constitucional Cherán, Michoacán [Government Report, Consitutional Municipality Cherán, Michoacán] ( 47 b48 b49 Informe de Gobierno 1992, 1995, 1998 ).
21. The flow of resources for roads, schools, and other infrastructure stemmed not only from new organization and assertiveness “from below” (by municipal authorities), but from the new availability of state monies “from above” designed to restore support for the PRI in opposition regions ( 32 b23 Dresser 1991; Cornelius, Craig, and Fox 1994 ).
22. Interview with a founder of the Nación Purhépecha, Ricardo López (pseud.), 19 March 1999.
23. Margarita Plaza, Enlace Civil newsletter, 14 January 1999; see: http://zonamaya.net/enlacecivil/numero32/comunid2.htm .
24. It is important to distinguish between grassroots, indigenous organizing as a basis for remunicipalization, and “official” top-down approaches designed largely to pacify and politically weaken indigenous groups. For example, in 1999, the governor of Chiapas, Roberto Albores Guillén, created seven new municipalities in Chiapas, a form of “remunicipalization,” but one designed to divide and pacify indigenous movements in the region. Research on these new municipalities of Chiapas demonstrates that many of the communities chosen by Guillén as new municipalities had no historic demands for such a redrawing of municipal boundaries (see 15 Burguete and Leyva 2001 ).