International Women Stage Directors

Mexico

Mexico Ileana Azor translated by Emilia Ismael In Mexico, the history of theatre directing by women is a relatively recent phenomenon. Nonetheless, the work of women directors in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first exhibits the quality and diversity of their work throughout the country and, in many cases, internationally. Women directors have founded and directed independent theatre companies, and they have also engaged in the commercial sphere as well as in dramaturgy and acting. However, the most significant aspect about these artists is that their approaches vary widely, both in terms of style and themes, forming a rich and creative landscape. Women’s Rights: Historical Context In the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán, a group of women anarchist teachers in 1870 organized, around the teacher and writer Rita Cetina Gutierrez, a group known as La Siempreviva (Emanuelsson). One of their goals was to create a school for girls. Benito Juarez, as governor of Oaxaca, had stated that he was in favor of the issue of equal education in his proposals in the 1850s. In 1905 the Women’s Newspaper (Periódico de las Mujeres), a paper with a clear socialist tendency, first appeared along with other social manifestations such as the miners’ strikes of Cananea, in the northern state of Sonora. All of these events marked the start of the preparatory stage of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Two feminist congresses were held in Yucatán in 1916, and a year later President Venustiano Carranza, as part of the revolutionary movement, recognized the rights of married women, allowing them to have their own voices at court and to manage their own estates, decisions which until then had been solely in the hands of their husbands. That same year, during the preparations for the Revolutionary Constitution Convention , women demanded the right to vote and to be elected to public office. However, the members of the convention argued that women had no political experience, and so they rejected the proposal. In the next decades women workers were at first shunned from labor unions, then accepted as union members but with salaries that fell below their male counterparts’ for the same duties and hours. Unions did not become their advocates until almost midcentury. In 1936 women who supported President Lazaro Cardenas demanded suffrage, but the president did not comply. Women’s right to vote did not become a reality in Mexico until 1953. According to feminist historian Francesca Gargallo, it was not the result of organized feminist movements, but rather a concession from the state, which wanted to be seen as modern and similar to the European and United States models of democratic progress (Emanuelsson). Once voting rights were established, women ceased street demonstrations (Emanuelsson ), but, according to Francesa Gargallo, in the 1960s the second wave of feminism emerged and a series of demands by feminists coalesced, all of them political or economic in origin. For example, some women writers addressed themes in their own experiences, and many women enrolled in universities, challenging patriarchal patterns. The feminism of the 1960s, as a women’s liberation movement, was basically focused on the urban middle class. It consisted mainly of educated sectors—college students and other women who had experienced legal discrimination. A crucial shift for women in the poorer class occurred in the 1960s as well. Factories called maquila emerged as a means of cheap labor on the Mexican side of the United States border and employed many women. Maquila women also began working for transnational companies in appalling working conditions and received poor pay. The mass incorporation of women into the labor force meant that many women became the main source of family income, or at least the stable source. Mexican historian and women’s studies researcher Ana Lau declares the 1970s produced a “new feminist wave” in Mexico, when the middle class women increased their politicization (14). The magazine fem was founded, and middle-class women were demanding changes in the national constitution. At this stage, the first petitions to eliminate the laws that made abortion illegal were made to Mexico’s parliament and congress (20). This demand still remains a matter of ideological and legal debate in the country, except in Mexico City, where the local congress approved it. In the agricultural sector the women’s movement was just beginning in the 1970s. Spouses and partners of male union members and representatives of women farmers began to protest unequal working conditions, but the...