At the Market
I was first in Chiapas in 1989 as a 15 year-old moody adolescent. My mother, an anthropologist, had taken the family with her so that we could experience a different culture. I was in shock; I felt I’d travelled to a different planet and era. The indigenous would avert their eyes and step off the pavement for us. The women moved like ghosts, only visible through their colourful attire.
The indigenous were looked down upon by westerners and Mexicans alike; they were considered the lowest level in Mexican society. Within their own indigenous groups, the women were treated as no more than slaves; they were sold into marriage as young as 13; abused by their own families and tossed aside when they were no longer useful. When I returned in 2003, after the Zapatista uprising and I heard about the women’s participation in it, I developed a fixation of my own: how could the subservient, laden-with-kids and overworked indigenous women succeed in gaining equality in this male dominated country?
This is how I got the idea for After Zapatismo. In 2005 I went back to start exploring, I met Zapatista women dissidents who had abandoned the movement disillusioned by the lack of freedom and power they had inside it, but I also met others who would sacrifice themselves for the Zapatista organization.
I knew I had to make this documentary.
I wanted to explore whether the hefty ideals of equality, freedom, and the recovering of the Mayan identity could be put into practice in the women’s lives. These women were not only fighting the establishment but also their own communities, customs and upbringing. Could revolution survive everyday life?
helping out
Being a middle class European woman, brought up to believe I could achieve anything I set my mind to, I haven’t exactly struggled with male oppression; as a child of the transition in Spain, born around the time of Franco’s death onto an emerging democracy, it was all behind me. For new generations, equality and feminism may sound like bad fashion trends from the seventies, but it concerns me to see many Western women taking for granted what the indigenous women of Mexico struggle so hard to attain.
In Chiapas I’m seeing the struggle for women’s rights brought back to basics: to do away with harmful traditions while trying to hang on to the good ones. In our fast changing and globalized society, exploring this process in a culture that’s struggling with it from scratch, may show us our past and teach us something for our future.
