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5. Indigenous Women, Law, and Custom: Gender Ideologies in the Practice of Justice
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109 5 In this chapter, I show how gender ideologies constitute disciplinary mechanisms in the form of rules and customs guiding social practices, limiting the possibilities for the emergence of new discourses about rights. The practice of justice and conflict resolution in indigenous regions offers us a space in which to analyze these processes, since it reveals how norms derived from different judicial systems—the state system and the indigenous system—shape social behavior and legitimate the subordination of women. What happens in the courts also enables us to reconstruct the strategies women have developed to challenge these models and ideologies and to redefine the relationship between them. I focus on the practice of justice in local and regional spaces of the Nahua communities of the Sierra Norte de Puebla. I seek to demonstrate, on the basis of legal interactions, how gender ideologies influence the alternatives available to indigenous women for settling controversies and containing violence. I briefly describe the indigenous organizations that exist in the region of Cuetzalan and the discourse of rights that these organizations are promoting, in order to document the changes, however small, that can contribute to the building of a plural justice embracing the principle of gender equity.1 The court is a place where a society’s gender norms, values, and ideologies are revealed, for, in airing disputes before local authorities or mediators, people appeal to gender norms and thus shed light on the conflicts permeating the relationship between the sexes. As well as being spaces par excellence of legal discourse, courts are also spaces of performance (Turner 1986) and spaces of cultural production, where cultural meanings are activated and negotiated (Merry 1995). They are therefore privileged sites for the analysis of social practices and their representations. Comparative research in different regions of Mexico reveals the high incidence of disputes brought to the indigenous authorities that involve women, as Indigenous Women, Law, and Custom Gender Ideologies in the Practice of Justice MARÍA TERESA SIERRA Chap-05.qxd 4/7/07 10:56 AM Page 109 well as the strategies employed to resolve such conflicts.2 A significant proportion of the cases initiated by women concern conflicts within the household, many involving physical and verbal violence. Women clearly see local judicial institutions as important spaces in which to settle their disputes and negotiate gender relations.3 In most of the regions studied, the indigenous justice system and its authorities continue to be the principal forum for dispute resolution, but women are resorting more and more frequently to the state’s judicial institutions when the local ones do not provide a solution to their problems.4 Indigenous Justice in Practice In the Nahua region of Cuetzalan, the system of justice with which indigenous women and men engage involves three main levels of judicial institutions: the Court of the Justice of the Peace (Juzgado de Paz) in indigenous communities, the municipal court in the town of Cuetzalan (Juzgado Menor Municipal), and, to a lesser extent, the Court of First Instance (Juzgado de Primera Instancia) of the state judicial district, located in the town of Zacapoaxtla. All these bodies are part of the state judicial system. A recent addition is the Indigenous Court (Juzgado Indígena) set up at municipal level in the town of Cuetzalan. This court was established by the State of Puebla’s Superior Court of Justice (Tribunal Superior de Justicia) in March 2002, in response to new federal policies modernizing the legal system and recognizing cultural diversity. Set up as a new instrument of mediation between the state and indigenous communities, the court is run by indigenous authorities in accordance with the practice of indigenous law but under the aegis of the state’s legal authorities. In Cuetzalan, the Indigenous Court started to function in May 2002.5 At the time of this research (until 2001), the authority most frequently used by the Nahua people, both women and men, was the justice of the peace. Next in importance was the Auxiliary Public Prosecution Agency (Agencia Subalterna del Ministerio Público) in the town of Cuetzalan, which, like the municipal court, was an intermediate body between the community and district courts. A significant number of cases that have not been resolved locally are brought to these institutions, which serve as spaces of mediation between law and custom, although the logic of positive law prevails. On the other hand, the district court is ruled by a discourse of legality and there is no space for...