Fires on the Border: The Passionate Politics of Labor Organizing on the Mexican Frontera

7. The North–South Encuentros

« 177 »« 7 » The North–South Encuentros Changing the Way to Change In grupos de base (small grassroots communities) across Mexico’s north and south, women are taking leadership positions, and both men and women are recasting the culture of daily life.1 Out of struggles that vary in their short-term goals but share a long-term vision of alternative possibilities, new political subjects are emerging.2 Woven into these efforts to build sustainable alternatives for supporting life are adjustments to gender norms. They are a measure of the accomplishments of autonomous community organizing and a component of the cross-­ regional network building that is reimagining the fundamental basis of the modern nation. In this chapter I use the phrase “subversive gender adjustment” to refer to this erosion of patriarchal gender norms. Gender norms are learned and ideologi­ cally organized , and they channel affect-culture into ways of ­ being-in-relation that are felt and transmitted in daily activities of labor and pleasure. Adjustments to these norms are transgressive but not necessarily transformative. The measures of equality they enact are not being won through state or World Bank–sponsored campaigns focused on the gender perspective or women’s rights. Rather, they are being accomplished as members of autonomous grassroots communities modify the gendered dimensions of their cooperation with one another and strive for lives with dignity. Mobilizing to end the violence enabled by the patriarchal organization of gender—for example, in campaigns for women’s reproductive health or against rape and domestic abuse—is, of course, valuable and necessary given the widespread violations of women’s well-being, and inroads into these and other issues by Mexican feminists have had important impacts on « 178 » The North–South Encuentros many lives.3 The less visible spaces where the patriarchal organization of gender is interrupted when women step up to be active community leaders or men do the work of care are also significant arenas shaping social change, and feminism’s future lives here, too. With a governing political party that is center-right and a politi­ cal economy that has been increasingly militarized and driven by foreign investments and the drug business, Mexico seems remote from socialist hopes, even though it has been an international reference point for progressive social movement ever since the Zapatistas’ uprising in 1994. During the last decades of the twentieth century, widespread debate about the meaning of democracy, women’s organizing around rights, coalition building among women’s organizations , and the spread of women’s NGOs in Mexico were parts of the political conjuncture that framed the irruption of the Zapatistas into the national and international spotlight. Since then and against the rising tide of neoliberal structural reform and the cartels’ reign of terror , grassroots urban and rural communities across the country have confronted the state’s neglect and impunity, among them the Popu­ lar Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO) and the mobilizing around women murdered in Juárez. In many of these confrontations, women have been key leaders. A less examined example of Mexican grassroots organizing efforts is a series of meetings between maquiladora workers and the Zapatistas. Carved out of a fight for basic survival needs and political education that builds on the lived awareness of the violence of capitalism, the meetings eventually developed into a sequence of formalized exchanges that English speakers referred to bilingually as the North– South Encuentros. These encuentros began with a historic meeting on the occasion of the Zapatistas’ March for Dignity to the Mexican capital in 2001, at which maquiladora workers from the northern border first met with representatives from the EZLN’s autonomous communities in Mexico City. The following year, CJM invited Zapatista representatives to visit maquiladora workers’ organizations in several towns on the northern border. Out of these initial meetings, slowly over time, a series of encounters between maquiladora workers and indigenous communities began building a political network that would link Mexico’s “most forgotten ones” in the north and the The North–South Encuentros « 179 » south.4 In the process they painstakingly and persistently fostered critical knowledge and developed communal practices for sustaining life. Though they would not call themselves either socialist or feminist , the women and men in these small Mexican communities have become a creative political force, challenging the neoliberal model, enacting new forms of leadership and gender identification, and forging democratic processes that both preserve and reinvent traditional...