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8 From Urban Elite to Peasant Organizing agendas, accomplishments, and challenges of thirty-plus years of guatemalan feminism, 1975–2007 ana lorena carrillo norma stoltz chinchilla First Phase, 1975–1985 The First United Nations World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City in 1975, served as a catalyst for and accelerated the second wave of feminism in a number of Latin American countries. In Guatemala, however, it took more than a decade before women’s groups—particularly those with an explicitly feminist perspective—began to play an important and visible role in civic and political life. The fact that feminism and a gender perspective are relatively new in Guatemala does not mean that women only recently became actors in Guatemalan history. Throughout the decade following the United Nations conference, for example, women of all ages and social classes, ethnic groups and religious perspectives , mobilized in unprecedented numbers around issues of democracy, human rights, social justice, greater economic equality, and peace. The majority did not join union, peasant, or student movements; Christian-based communities; or Communities of Population in Resistance and exile organizations as a result of an explicit gender consciousness or elaborated critique of women’s subordination in general. However, the very act of violating traditional rules proscribing public sphere participation for “good women” stimulated many women activists to reflect on their identities and abilities as women. The sense of personal power that many women felt on becoming active protagonists, capable of influencing history instead of being merely recipients of it, caused profound personal transformations. Cristina Calel, an indigenous Quiche woman and activist with the Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC; Committee of Peasant Unity) tells how CUC organized the whole family, including the women: At first there were problems because, [people would say] how is it possible for a woman to talk about politics with men? Little by little they saw that women also had the ability and the men wanted their wives to do the same type of 140 [activist] work that we did. Many women felt happy when they saw us. The ladies brought their petites [woven mats] to the classes and they sat and asked us about this and that. Catholic Action helped them a lot to come out of their homes and to start getting organized. (Stoltz Chinchilla 1998, 322) Elena Tecún, a young indigenous woman from the altiplano (highlands) who joined the guerrilla movement, showed her pride at being able to do what the male combatants did in the mountains: My life in the guerrilla movement was totally different from when I was at home. At home I couldn’t run, or walk long distances, but in the guerilla you get used to it as a result of the training. When we had to carry things on our backs, the women were able to carry as much as the men. We all carried our part of the load. Some of our leaders were women. . . . When people [plantation workers] saw that some of us were women, they were very happy and they approached us. The women workers especially were happy to see other women in the guerrilla forces, because this proved that women are capable, and that it wasn’t true that women were good for nothing. (Stoltz Chinchilla 1998, 395–396) The participation of hundreds of women—rural as well as urban—in revolutionary and in mixed-gender civil organizations from 1975 to 1985 lead to a transcendent break in Guatemalan women’s history. Women partaking in public life, exercising their citizenship, is widely recognized as having fertilized the ground for the present period. But the fierce response from the government’s counterinsurgency army and its economically and politically powerful allies was a heavy price to pay. An estimated two hundred thousand Guatemalans were killed or disappeared as a result of the conflict and approximately one hundred thousand Guatemalan peasants (84 percent of them indigenous) were forced to flee to Mexico between the early and mid-1980s. Taking into consideration the context of governmental repression and revolutionary insurgency that characterized Guatemala during this period, it is not difficult to unravel the reasons for the delay in the development of explicitly feminist and gender-conscious organizations. The first, and probably most important, reason was the repressive atmosphere that restricted the free circulation of ideas, silenced debate, and kept cultural revolutions within certain limits. In the mid- and late 1960s, for example, when there were cultural and political revolutions in different parts of the world, the...

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