Con voz propia. Mujeres rurales en los noventa (review)

This collection of original essays applies gender analysis to Mexican rural society. The essays seek to demonstrate the ways that women negotiate and create new spaces in society, and represents them always as active agents. Con voz propia is composed of six articles that explore aspects of ethnic oppression, economic exploitation, and varied forms of subordination through relations of class, gender, and kinship. In such circumstances, primacy is given to the individual and collective forms of resistance, through which rural women seek out equality, and greater control over material and symbolic resources generally controlled by men.

The Introduction is provided by Mary Kay Vaughan. Maria da Gloria Marroni reveals an interesting tension between social science-inspired understandings of poverty and rural communities' appropriation of the term. María Eugenia Aubeterre focuses her research through a cultural understanding of domestic space in which women negotiate power relations from a position of relative autonomy. Leticia Rivermar Pérez analyses power stuggles played out along the social hierarchy of the family, in which competing gender identities come into conflict around the responsibilities of a young nahua woman living with her in-laws while her husband emigrates to the United States to work. Martha Patricia Castañeda follows three generations of women in her analysis of inheritance strategies meant to provide greater opportunities both within and beyond the marriage relationship. Domitila Ávila López explains the problems women of rural origins confront in terms of basic health services when they emigrate to the city of Puebla. In the final chapter, Beatriz Martínez Corona tells the story of Maseualsiuamej Mosenyolchicauanij, a nahua women's organization in northern Puebla that focuses its efforts on women's empowerment and sustainable development.

The collection is a little uneven, but a strong point that emerges from these essays is the general interpretive framework in which issues of politics and economy are interpreted through a cultural lens, thus problematized in potentially innovative ways while avoiding the common pitfalls of economic reductionism. This collection of essays should be of interest to those teaching or conducting research in the areas of policy, poverty, migration, and gender studies.