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La otra palabra:
mujeres y violencia en Chiapas, antes y después de Acteal
National Period
La otra palabra: mujeres y violencia en Chiapas, antes y después de Acteal. Edited by Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo. Textos urgentes. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1998. Plates. Maps. Notes. Bibliographies. 175 pp. Paper. The anthology La otra palabra addresses how Maya women are affected by the increasing political violence in Chiapas that is directed at Maya peasants, especially members of the Zapatist guerrilleros. The immediate motivation for the volume was the massacre in Acteal in the Tzotzil municipality San Pedro Chenalhó, where 45 Maya political refugees, mainly women and children, were killed on December 22, 1997. Executed by paramilitary villagers with logistic support from both the police and the military, the massacre gained vast national and international attention and condemnation.
The volume's authors are eight women, the majority anthropologists, who all have personal experience of political work with Maya women. Written in frustration and anger during the first couple of months after the massacre, the volume is a combination of analysis and fierce denunciation of the political climate in which the massacre could happen. It should be of interest for a broad and diverse audience concerned about political developments in Mexico, especially in Chiapas.
The volume has also significant academic value, due to its clear focus and the in-depth research behind several of the texts. It is one of the few academic anthologies on indigenous women in Chiapas, and its historical perspective on gender, ethnic identity, and the relation between Mayas and the Mexican nation-state adds to the literature on indigenous peoples. [End Page 195]
The book's central concern is the process by which Maya women in Chiapas during the last decades have begun to organize politically in various associations, demanding political participation and economic and social change, both from the Mexican government and national society, as well as from their own indigenous communities. The book investigates the response from Maya men and, principally, the Mexican government and the dramatic escalation of repression and violence.
The book can be broadly divided into three categories of texts. One group presents background and historical analyses. Anna María Garza Caligaris and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo offer a nuanced and welcome description of the political development in Chenalhó during the last century up to the paramilitary terror that began in 1997. Mercedes Olivera gives an outline of what she describes as a politically planned low-intensity warfare to defend government hegemony, while Martha Figueroa Mier presents juridical arguments on why the massacre should be treated as a genocide.
The second category of texts presents emic perspectives on the same processes, based on interviews with villagers, mainly women. One chapter is written collectively by the book's authors, presenting testimonies collected shortly before and after the massacre. The other two, written by Christine Eber and Graciela Freyermuth Enciso, respectively, are based on extensive anthropological fieldwork in Chenalhó and combine women's voices with the authors' own investigations and analyses of women's involvement in the democratic movement (Eber) and the conditions of maternal health and mortality (Freyermuth Enciso). The three chapters offer a notion of how Pedrano women, and men, perceive and deal with their position as subjects vulnerable to neglect, discrimination, and organized violence from the mestizo society. This perspective is one of the book's greatest merits.
The third group of texts has a more reflexive character, addressing the context of struggle, persecution, and stress. The introduction, written by Hernández Castillo, and the two last chapters, by Hernández Castillo and Diana Damián Palencia, respectively, discuss the interrelations between their own political work, as part of a broad community of urban activists, and that of the Maya women whom they have assisted in different types of networks and associations.
This combination of academic and activist perspectives and interests is one of the...
La otra palabra: mujeres y violencia en Chiapas, antes y despues de Acteal (review)
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