Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca (review)

This revised and updated edition of Lynn Stephen’s Zapotec Women (1992) is an entirely different book than the original. Stephen’s superb analysis of the interaction between local and global market forces, and the role of women and family textile production and marketing is still here. As is her engaging storytelling about the lives of her informants, punctuated by the successes and failures they experience in the competitive world of the international textile market. But the second edition offers two important additions that distinguish it from the first. The first is that more than ten years have passed between the two: the pace of globalization became more rapid and Stephen records significant changes in the lives of Zapotec women and men in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. In that sense, Stephen becomes something of an historian, attentive to recent changes over time and sensitive to the cultural, economic, and political dynamics that shape life in this Mexican town. Weaving earlier narratives from over a decade ago with new interviews, Stephen invites the people of Teotitlán to re-write this story with her.

The other major difference, which is perhaps more significant than the first, is that Stephen herself is much more present in the second edition. She rightfully acknowledges her presence as a scholar, responding at times to both positive and challenging criticism aimed at the first book. And she more confidently colors her analysis with new theoretical insights that she was reluctant to include in the first edition. Comfortable with and aware of her own status within the broad field of Latin American Studies, Stephen’s life has changed along with that of the people she originally wrote about. The second edition becomes, in effect, a model for the dynamic interaction between scholar and subject, an honest account of how scholars become connected to the lives of the people they write about, of how research questions change, and of how new ideas about narrative and analysis change as well.

Specifically, more than seventy pages have been added to the new edition, including new narrative, new analysis, new photographs, new tables, and new reference matter. Most of the chapters have been re-titled, taking into account Stephen’s own sense of the greater complexity of this version after more than ten years of reflection. For example, chapter titles and subtitles include words and phrases like “Changing Lives,” “Globalization,” “Commercialization,” “Gendered Dynamics,” and “Changing Political Participation.” These were concepts that Stephen understood before, but after a decade of cutting edge research in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and other places in Latin America, she understands how they work even better now.

Fortunately, as Stephen tells us, she is “always in the field,” always thinking like an anthropologist trying to understand the world she inhabits. But she also shows herself to be a fine historian, someone attentive to recording changes over time. Ultimately, this new book is richer because it too has a history. In fact, Zapotec Women, is now positioned as an unfolding story, a serial account of the world created by Zapotec women and North American anthropologists that will change, grow, shrink, and expand as long as people are involved in an exchange of political, economic, and cultural goods and ideas. Given the violent summer of 2006 and the unresolved political conflicts in Oaxaca, there is a renewed urgency to read this volume. And, as the new subtitle suggests, the lessons of Teotitlán de Valle, the Zapotec women at the center of this town, and the work of Lynn Stephen are all more properly understood in a larger context.