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2021, November 2021

National Identity and the Mexican Revolution

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By Randy Jackson

One hundred years separated Mexico’s War of Independence and the Mexican Revolution. The War of Independence (1810 – 1821) may have severed Spanish European rule from New Spain, but it left this new country of Mexico to sort through the competing power structures left behind. These were the Catholic Church; the privileged economic structure of the encomiendas (estates owned by the descendants of the conquistadores); and the indigenous and mixed-race underclass majority that had been cemented in poverty since the time of the conquest. These grappling power structures, along with foreign invasions, beset Mexico with a century of wars, coup d’etats, uprisings, and assassinations.

These blood-soaked events of the 19th century led to the 20th-century Mexican Revolution (1910 – 1920), which hammered out a constitution and a process of governance in 1917. But only a sense of national identity could hold these new structures in place. For this we turn to the mightier pen, to the artists, the poets and philosophers. Around the time of the Mexican Revolution, there was a diverse group of artists, professors and students called Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana (Mexican academic youth group). This group stood for (among other reforms) the value of a Mexican identity against the “Ideals” of President Porfirio Díaz, who saw Europe and America as ideals for a future Mexico.

José Vasconcelos Calderón, a philosopher and writer (later politician) was a member of this group. One influence on Vasconcelos was the Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó. Rodó argued against what he called “Nordomanía,” the influence of Yankee materialism and the cultural megaphone of the United States. Rodó saw this influence as a threat that would drown out the regional identities of Latin America. For a century, Latin American philosophers were aware of the decline of the Catholic Spanish empire and the ascendency of the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant paradigm. Finding a foothold of identity amid this cultural erosion was something that Vasconcelos tried to establish for Mexico.

Beyond the support for unique Mexican and Latin American identities, Vasconcelos was philosophically opposed to Social Darwinism, which proposed the superiority of certain races. This concept was gaining ground in parts of the western world around the time of the Mexican Revolution. In 1925, in response to these ideas and influences, Vasconcelos wrote “La raza cósmica” (“The Cosmic Race”) an essay that became highly influential in Mexican political and sociocultural policies.

In “La raza cósmica,” Vasconcelos looks back to the ancient civilizations of the Americas and the mixing of people following the Spanish conquest, to produce el mestizaje (the mixed race). Vasconcelos writes, “Spanish colonization created mixed races [whereas] the English kept on mixing only with the whites and annihilated the natives.” Vasconcelos proposed that el mestizaje would be a “fifth race” that would hold the best aspects of their various forefathers, and in time would become the universal humanity. This was a message of hope for the people of Mexico at a time when national identity was beginning to be articulated.

Vasconcelos and his work are not without controversy. Modern scholars point out his own period’s racism, which Vasconcelos himself held and displayed in his work. Yet his influence lives on. Under President Álvaro Obregón (1920-24), Vasconcelos was made the head of the Secretariat of Public Education. Along with an expanded budget for education under the Obregón administration, Vasconcelos expanded the public education system, initiating a large number of texts for use in schools.

Vasconcelos’ work on modern Mexican identity influenced many artists and philosophers. His work is said to have direct influence on Octavio Paz’s most famous work, El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). Under his secretariat, Vasconcelos commissioned artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to paint the insides of Mexico’s most important public buildings. This gave rise to the Mexican muralist movement.

The Mexican Revolution was an unfortunate protracted civil war with tremendous loss of life. It does, however, mark a turning point in Mexican history and the birth of a unique national identity. Individuals like Vasconcelos contributed to defining the fascinating and tumultuous history of Mexico and initiating the formation of a Mexican national identity.

2021, November 2021

Mexico’s Northern Border c. 1890:Saints, Unrest, and Rebellions

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By Julie Etra

When you think about the Mexican Revolution, the larger-than-life characters typically come to mind: Emiliano Zapata in the south, Francisco (Pancho) Villa in the north. Before the Revolution, there was plenty of unrest and dissatisfaction with the centralized Mexican government led by José de la Cruz Díaz Mori. Near the border with the United States, pro-revolutionary, anti-Porfirio exiles living in El Paso and vicinity helped foment revolution through a variety of publications, also intended to gain support from the US Government. One of these Mexican expatriates was the inventive engineer and newspaper editor, Lauro Aguirre. (You can learn more about Aguirre in The Hummingbird’s Daughter, a wonderful book by Luis Alberto Urrea.)

The Rebellion of Tomóchic

After reading The Hummingbird’s Daughter, I became interested in the Rebellion of Tomóchic (1891-92) and the border unrest. This area, located in the state of Chihuahua, includes the Sierra Madre Occidental and the famous Copper Canyon (Barrancas de Cobre), home to the Tarahumara, or Rarámuri. It has always been geographically isolated, and essentially autonomous even after the Spanish conquest. Before the rebellion, the Tomochitecos resisted exploitation by the Spanish-descended hacienda owners (land barons) and mining companies. Constant unrest included land and property ownership conflicts as well as on-going threats by the Apache tribes from the north. Local skirmishes also resulted in violent conflicts with Mexican federal forces.

Around 1890, the community of Tomóchic became under increased scrutiny due to the rising fame of Teresita Urrea, the daughter of the Hummingbird (also the author’s great aunt), and the town’s adoption of her as their patron saint. Although she never set foot in the town, she was perceived as a Saint due to her purported healing abilities and posed an existential threat to the Porfirio regime solely due to her following, despite her claims to be apolitical.

The Catholic Church never had a strong presence in this remote region due to the lack of permanent priesthoods in isolated areas. This led to a vacuum of leadership and an atmosphere ripe for the cultivation of ‘saints’ to whom the locals attributed miracles due to their presumed direct communication with God and associated power. The only way for the Church to combat the dissemination of these alternatives to Catholicism was through the rare presence and ranting pontifications of priests in the Sierra Tarahumara. This situation became complicated since religious dissent was tied to notions of social justice and the “saints” provided guidance and comfort to the Tomochitecos suffering from exploitation and precarious socioeconomic conditions.

Since the early 1800s, the Porfiriato and the Church had both been trying to strengthen and centralize their control of remote regions. With the arrival of the railroad on the Chihuahuan border with the U.S., American exploitation of the area’s natural resources, particularly timber, took off. On December 1, 1891, Tomóchic staged an organized rebellion and declared its autonomy.

Although viewed by some historians as a precursor to the Revolution, other historians viewed the rebellion as a local affair, mestizos rebelling against their lighter-skinned, exploitative oppressors and the Church.

The story is told that the first time federal troops arrived in Tomóchic, they had talked themselves into a fright at the thought of facing the savage rebels. They were confused when they were met by a silent line of thirty women, all dressed in black, advancing slowly closer. The women dropped their black shawls, revealing themselves to be men, whipped out their Winchesters, and shot down the front line of troops. Nonetheless, after a year of confrontations with Porfirio’s troops, the rebellion ended with the annihilation of the entire town.

The Role of the Hummingbird’s Daughter

As noted above, the Tomochitecos were followers of Teresita Urrea, the Saint of Cabora. Before the uprising she had participated in other so-called insurgent movements, as defined by the federal government, that addressed social justice, particularly for the poor. She was demonized by an itinerant Catholic priest, offending the locals, and thereby planting the seeds of confrontation with the church. (Before the Mexican Revolution [1910-20] the church and the government were one state, intertwined and codependent.)

The true influence of la Santa de Cabora in the uprising has never been clear, as the entire town was destroyed during the conflict, along with most witnesses. Teresita Urrea and her father, perceived as a threat to the federal government, were exiled (or fled) to the United States. The Porfirio regime believed that if they had been executed in Mexico, it would have led to intolerable and counterproductive martyrdom. The Mexican Revolution had yet to be born, but this conflict undoubtedly fueled the flames of discontent.

If you are interested in reading more about the Rebellion of Tomóchic, check out these sources:

Frías, Heriberto. The Battle of Tomóchic: Memoirs of a Second Lieutenant, translated by Barbara Jamison. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. This is a historical novel by Frías, based on his experiences in the Rebellion of Tomóchic. The author sharply criticizes the actions of the federal government in crushing the Rebellion.
Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Hummingbird’s Daughter. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. Queen of America. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2011.
Vanderwood, Paul J. The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. This is a broader (academic) view of the Mexican Revolution and how the Rebellion is a key precursor to it.

If you are interested in Mexican music, the corrido, or heroic ballad, achieved its high point during the Mexican Revolution; “El Corrido de Tomóchic” is considered the first revolutionary corrido.

Lamadrid, Enrique R. “El Corrido de Tomóchic: Honor, Grace, Gender, and Power in the First Ballad of the Mexican Revolution.” Journal of the Southwest, 41:4 (Winter 1999): 441-60.

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2021, November 2021

One Family after the Revolution

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By Brooke Gazer

Anyone who has visited Mexico will have heard of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20); well over a million people perished in that struggle for land and freedom.

But what about the displaced estate owners? What became of them and their families? A friend recently told me how her great, great grandfather lost most of his property during the revolution and continued her saga to the present. Mariana’s story demonstrates how loss and resilience can bring about great things.

The Revolution and the Family
Ángel Zimbrón and his family lived a privileged life on a vast tract of land in the Mexico City area, which included several ranchos. Zimbrón controlled over thirty-three square kilometers of livestock, corn and produce. His holdings were known as Azcapotzalco, and after the Revolution, the estate was incorporated into the northwestern part of Mexico City. The area, which still bears the name Azcapotzalco, is one of sixteen municipalities that comprise Ciudad Mexico; there is a neighborhood called Ángel Zimbrón, where you can now rent an apartment on the park, near the Metro, for under $400 USD a month.

During the Revolution, they lost all their land, except a small triangle called El Pañuelo. A pañuelo is, among other things, a handkerchief that has been folded into quarters and folded again into a triangle. Señor Zimbrón built homes for reach of his six children on this property

Third Generation
Alejandro Velasco Zimbrón, one of Ángel’s many grandsons, was born in 1908, towards the end of the Revolution. Despite his mother’s being widowed at twenty-four, he had a happy childhood playing with his siblings and numerous cousins. He was a kind child who ministered to injured animals, putting splints on chicken’s broken legs.

As Mexico City grew, the municipality developed major streets through Azcapotzalco. One cut a swath through their property, causing the family’s landholdings to shrink even further. As families expanded, the El Pañuelo estate became insufficient for supporting the growing brood. Several young people left to seek their fortune elsewhere, including Alejandro Velasco Zimbrón.

Young Velasco became a noted orthopedic doctor, a visionary who developed procedures and treatments for victims of polio. He co-founded Mexico’s first Children’s Polio Hospital. In the late 1940s he also founded a “bone bank” and implanted bone in people with severe bone damage. One of his patients was the artist, Frida Kahlo, who, after being struck by a bus in 1925, suffered from these injuries her entire life. Despite his status, Dr. Velasco was a generous and caring physician. He treated all classes equally, commonly accepting a chicken or a sack of corn in payment for his services.

Many of the children he treated expressed fear of the radiology machine, so to reduce their stress, he held them during the procedure. As a result, Dr. Velasco died in 1960 of complications from overexposure to this radiation. He was only fifty-two.

Fourth Generation
Octavio Velasco was one of the doctor’s six children. While studying architecture, Octavio met a young Spanish man named Vicente Gandía. Growing up in Spain, Vicente developed polio at age three. His family had heard of Dr. Velasco’s success in treating the disease, but could not afford to travel to Mexico. Even though polio left Vicente needing a cane to walk, he matured into a handsome man with a charismatic manner.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Vicente’s communist-leaning uncle was forced to flee his homeland, and Mexico accepted many refugees from Spain. In 1951, Vicente’s widowed mother brought her family to live with her brother in Mexico. At age 16, Vicente helped support his family as an assistant to a newspaper illustrator, and he painted greeting cards. Later, he had some success printing his work but, believing that art provided a poor income, his mother encouraged him to study architecture. As classmates, Vicente and Octavio quickly developed a friendship.

Architecture did not inspire Vicente. When he dropped out to pursue a career as an artist, the two men lost touch. Vicente struggled as a painter, while Octavio became an accomplished architect. Ten years later, the two friends renewed their acquaintance and frequently met in coffee houses.

It was only by chance one day that Vicente caught a glimpse of Andrea Velasco, Octavio’s twenty-one-year-old sister. They were both visiting the same hospital maternity ward, each attending to members of their own family. Three days later, Vicente told Octavio that his sister’s beauty had captivated him to the point of obsession. He begged permission to court Andrea.

At the age of thirty, his work showed promise, but living a loose bohemian lifestyle, Vicente had insufficient income to support a family. He wanted not only to win Andrea’s affection, but also her hand. This was a turning point. Inspired by his new love, Vicente dedicated himself to becoming a well-established artist. Four years later, Andrea and Vicente were married.

By mid-1970, Vicente Gandía was beginning to be “discovered” and by the late 1980s, he had become a distinguished artist of international acclaim.

Fifth Generation
Vicente passed away in 2009, but his daughter, Mariana Gandía Velasco, carries on the artistic family tradition as a respected costume designer in Mexico City.

In five generations since the Revolution, this family has experienced remarkable twists and turns. Had the family stayed on the hacienda, their lives would have been far less interesting. Fewer Mexican children would have received treatment for polio. One of Mexico’s artists may never have reached his pinnacle. And I would not have met my friend Mariana.

Brooke Gazer operates Agua Azul la Villa, an ocean-view bed and breakfast in Huatulco http://www.bbaguaazul.com.

2021, January 2021

Goliad, Texas:From “Remember the Alamo” to The Ox Cart Wars

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk

Should your travels to Huatulco be by land, and should they take you through east Texas via the tiny town of Goliad, you will find some outsized Mex-Tex-Mex history.

Located a little over a hundred miles southeast of San Antonio on the San Antonio River as it flows to the Gulf of Mexico, Goliad (pop. 1,908 in 2010) is the site of Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía, a presidio, or fort, built to defend what was then the border between Mexico and the United States. Northerners don’t often think about this, but after the Mexican War of Independence (1810-21), Mexico included much of the southwest – nearly all of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

The Texas Revolution

In the governmental chaos that followed independence, Mexico started out with a short-lived empire, followed by a republic that set off a struggle between conservatives (“centralists”) and liberals (“federalists”). The centralist President Antonio López de Santa Anna enacted policies that ticked off the folks living in what is now Texas; the settlers in this area were both Mexican and Americans; the latter had settled there when Mexico opened up land to immigrant settlers shortly after the War of Independence. On October 2, 1835, the settlers declared their independence from Mexico, and the Texas Revolution was on.

The Texas Revolution was only one of several armed insurrections against Santa Anna’s conservative government, but it was the most dramatic, the most deadly, and the only one that worked. Santa Anna – not without evidence – saw a U.S. plot to annex Texas, and decided this was his war. Following several months of skirmishes along the San Antonio River between San Antonio (then called Villa de Béxar) and Goliad, on February 23, 1836, Santa Anna led his troops to rebel headquarters in the Misión San Antonio de Valero, known as “The Alamo.” Thirteen days later, Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and nearly 200 other Texas fighters lay dead.

About a month later, down the river in Goliad, Mexican General José de Urrea and about 1,400 soldiers approached the La Bahía presidio. Although the head of the Texas army, General Sam Houston, had retreated and warned Colonel James W. Fannin to evacuate his forces from Goliad, Fannin failed to do so in time. Despite fighting Urrea’s advanced forces fiercely over a day, and regrouping overnight, Fannin’s men woke up to find that Urrea’s main army had arrived. The Texans surrendered and were marched back to La Bahía, where they expected to be treated as prisoners of war. Santa Anna was having none of that. All the Texans who could walk were marched out in different directions from the presidio, where they were shot or had their throats cut. Wounded Texans were lined up against the wall or left in their beds to be executed. Over 350 Texans were killed in the Goliad Massacre.

Santa Anna was in serious error if he thought the fate of those who died at the Alamo and Goliad would bring the Texas rebellion to an end. Men flocked to sign up with Sam Houston’s army; he led them out of retreat and towards Santa Anna’s army, which had made it to present-day La Porte, on the Gulf southeast of Houston.

This time it was Santa Anna’s forces who weren’t ready. They had backed themselves into a corner to achieve high ground behind Buffalo Bayou on the San Jacinto River. At 3:30 on a clear afternoon on April 21, 1836, Houston massed his forces and gave the order to advance in silence. It’s been suggested that Santa Anna had no lookouts and that many of his soldiers were taking their afternoon siesta. For whatever reason, the 910 Texans who attacked, raging in revenge and screaming “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” met little resistance. They gave no quarter, slaughtering Mexicans who were crying “Me no Alamo, me no Goliad!” The Battle of San Jacinto lasted about 18 minutes. Houston’s army lost 9 men and had about 30 wounded. They killed 630 Mexicans, wounded 208, and took 730 prisoners.

The Mexican-American War

The independent Republic of Texas was born, the United States annexed it in 1845, Mexico declared that an act of war and started skirmishing along the border, and President Polk got the U.S. Congress to declare war on Mexico on May 13, 1846. The mostly volunteer army handily vanquished the Mexicans, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed on February 2, 1848.

When the treaty was ratified on May 26, 1848, Mexico ceded nearly half its territory to America, handing over all the lands that now make up the “lower 48” states. The U.S. compensated Mexico to the tune of a little more than $18 million.

The repercussions of the Texas Revolution did not end with the Mexican-American War, at least not in east Texas. As a tremendous influx of northerners and immigrants arrived, east Texas quickly became majority Anglo and began rapid development – creating complicated social, economic, and racial tensions that frequently ended in murdered Mexicans, a long and tangled tale for some other time.

The Mexican-American War also kick-started the regional transportation system. Because there was neither rail transportation nor navigable water routes, the war effort was a huge headache for the military quartermasters who built military outposts and sent supplies to the troops. What there was, was a wagon “trace” – a vague idea of a road marked out by wagon tracks and word of mouth.

The Chihuahua Road ran about 140 miles from Indianola on the Gulf of Mexico to San Antonio; from there, it ran westward to the rich silver, copper, zinc, and lead mines of Chihuahua; a northern section would soon reach what is now San Diego. Different sections of the 1100-mile road had different names; one of them was the Goliad Cart Road.

Cargo offloaded in Indianola and Lavaca a little up the river included millions of dollars worth of construction materials – lumber, shingles, and rails, ties, and equipment to build railroads. Barrels of retail goods headed for the growing number of stores along the route. There were loads of “mixed freight” – barrels of essential and then luxury goods for retail sale, and German, Swiss and French immigrants, not to mention two shipments of camels ordered up by the U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, a mere four years before he became President of the Confederate States of America. Coming back to Indianola from the interior were pecans, cattle, hides and horns, cotton, wool, salt, leather, sugar, molasses, and silver bullion bound for the U.S. Mint in New Orleans.

The Ox Cart Wars

And how did all that stuff get to and from San Antonio and points west? Overland freight drawn by horses, mules, and oxen. There were military wagons, commercial freight wagons, Wells Fargo wagons, stagecoaches, and the classic covered wagons called “prairie schooners,” drawn variously by horses, mules, and oxen. The Chihuahua Road made for a tough and dangerous trek. Wagons had to ford swollen streams and rivers during torrential rains, and were sometimes swept away. There were mountainous hills on the routes; teams and drivers sometimes died when carts slipped, overturned, and crashed over the side.

The star of them all in coping with the trip was the Mexican ox-cart driver, the carretero, whose teams of two, four, six, or eight oxen drew different-sized carretas. The smallest ox-carts were two-wheeled, drawn by a team of two oxen. The largest ox carts were about 6 feet wide and 15 feet long, with thick, 7-foot-high wooden wheels; these carts could carry up to three tons of freight.

Travelers at the time counted anywhere from 160 to 1,000 Mexican-driven ox carts during a day on Goliad Cart Road. The merchants of San Antonio were unsparing in their praise of Mexican carters, preferring them to Anglo teamsters. They were considered efficient, honest, and skilled at handling and caring for their oxen. America’s most famous landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, traveled widely – and wrote about it. In A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (1857), Olmsted’s impression that Mexicans “with oxen and two-wheeled carts” carried “almost all the transportation of the country.” He noted that they cut travel expenses by living off the land, had their families working as assistants, and passed their businesses on to family members, increasing skills and efficiency as time went by, enabling them to charge less than the Anglo teamsters.

Mexican carreteros provided about two-thirds of the cartage services and comprised the largest occupational group in Bexar county, of which San Antonio was the county seat. Most carters lived in San Antonio, where the folks with Spanish surnames made up half the population. Few people of Mexican heritage lived in the towns along the Chihuahua Road between San Antonio and Indianola; for the Anglos who did, the carreteros’ success was galling – they “remembered Goliad” all too well. They went to war again, this time against the Mexican ox-cart drivers. The “cart-cutters” from Goliad betook themselves to ambushing the carreteros, cutting the axles and destroying the wheels of the carts, stealing or destroying the cargo, and escalating into shooting the drivers down.

From July through November of 1857, there were five documented attacks. On July 3, men in disguise attacked a train of six carts, wounding all six drivers. On July 14, about 20 cart-cutters attacked another train, cutting up the wheels of the carts. On July 31, three carreteros were wounded and an Anglo named C.G. Edwards, whose freight was being carried, was shot as he lay sleeping under one of the carts; he later died of his wounds. On September 12, about 40 men, most in masks, opened fire on a cart train carrying military supplies. Antonio Delgado, a prominent Tejano from San Antonio, was shot dead by 14 bullets. Finally, on November 20, cart-cutters opened fire on a cart train as the carreteros were “getting up” their oxen to start the day’s trek, killing either two or five of them.

The documented attacks account for four to seven dead. Several sources, including two letters from Manuel Robles Pezuela, the Mexican Ambassador to the United States, to Lewis Cass, the U.S. Secretary of State, put the number of Mexicans killed in the Ox Cart Wars at 70 to 75.

On the north side of the Goliad County Courthouse stands a huge southern live oak tree called either the “Cart War Oak” or the “Hanging Tree.” The missing Mexicans in the Cart War body count? Apparently, they were lynched on this tree. A Texas Historical Marker for the tree points out that when the court handed out a death sentence, the defendant was marched outside and strung up immediately. However, in a masterpiece of euphemism for “lynching,” the marker also says, “Hangings not called for by regular courts occurred here during the 1857 ‘Cart War.’ … About 70 men were killed, some of them on this tree.”

The Ox Cart Wars came to an end when Secretary of State Cass called on Texas governor Elishu Pease – who had received several letters about the attacks – to take care of business. On November 30, 1857, ten days after the last major attack, Pease said, “It is now very evident that there is no security for the lives of citizens of Mexican origin engaged in the business of transportation along the road from San Antonio to the Gulf, unless they are escorted by a military force. … It will require an appropriation of about fourteen thousand and five hundred dollars.”

The legislature forked over the money, the Texas Rangers took over, and the Ox Cart Wars came to an end. The Cart War Oak wasn’t done with its hanging duties, however; local citizens were suddenly outraged, and turned the cart cutters in. They were speedily tried, condemned to death, and hung from the limbs of the tree.

Remember all that freight with steel and wood to build railroads? The railroad from Indianola to San Antonio did get started, continuing in fits, starts, and foreclosures until it was bought by Charles Morgan, a New York shipping magnate who had been landing his steamships at Indianola since 1848, and railroad entrepreneur Henry S. McComb. They consolidated six rail lines into one company by 1871; in 1875, Indianola was wiped out by a massive hurricane. Morgan and McComb moved their railyards upstream and soldiered on. Other railways connected with San Antonio. The turbulent days of the Chihuahua Road and its Mexican ox carts were over.

2020, March 2020

The Zapatista Women

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By Jan Chaiken and Marcia Chaiken

The Zapatistas are an organized activist group in the Mexican state of Chiapas, east of the state of Oaxaca and bordering on Guatemala. They perhaps are best remembered for their military occupation of numerous towns in Chiapas and hostile takeover of city squares in 1994 during their march to demand changes from the federal government in Mexico City. Currently, however, they are a peaceable, grassroots leftist movement that works in cooperation with the federal government of Mexico and the state of Chiapas.

The Zapatistas are recognized for developing successful local structures for political, economic, and cultural autonomy. Their adherents are mostly indigenous people (primarily Mayan), although the leader of the movement from the beginning (then known as Subcomandante Marcos) is not indigenous Maya. The Zapatistas went public and began taking control of territory in Chiapas on the day that NAFTA went into effect in 1994, as a symbolic way of emphasizing their opposition to globalization and their anticipation that NAFTA would have deleterious effects on rural and indigenous communities – an assessment which turned out to be basically correct.

From their founding in 1983 until they went public in 1994, the Zapatistas gradually built their membership, organizational structure, and laws that would govern their operations. In December 1993 they enacted their “Revolutionary Law of Women,” which was the foundation for the role of women in their movement. This 1993 law provided that women, without regard to their race, creed, or political affiliation, could hold positions in battle or leadership according to their desire and ability. The law stated that women would have equal pay, access to employment and land; could decide how many children to have; had first preference (along with their children) for medical attention; could select their partners; were not obligated to marry; and were protected by legal provisions against assault and maltreatment.

Although these idealistic assertions seem forward-looking even today, they were in marked contrast with the actual status of indigenous women elsewhere and represent continuing aspirations for activist Zapatista women in their own communities. Elsewhere in Chiapas and many other Mexican states, indigenous women are normally prevented from owning or inheriting land. They are typically forced into arranged marriages at young ages and often have 10 or more children.

Still, at the turn of the millennium, over half of indigenous women had no knowledge of contraception and a larger proportion had no access to contraceptives. Obtaining an abortion was very difficult and, if done, often fatal. As among many other indigenous groups in North America, domestic violence was widespread and the disappearance of many women without explanation was relatively commonplace.

According to historians, the participation of women as Zapatista guerrillas far exceeded their role in any other revolutionary or political movement in Latin America. Two women, Comandanta Ramona and Comandanta Susana, were top-ranking and well-known figures in communicating between the armed forces and the pueblos being run by the Zapatistas. By 2004, women constituted a third of the armed forces of the Zapatistas, and half of the support personnel. The influence of a handful of women in key leadership roles transformed the lives of women in the movement. Working within the Zapatista structure enabled the women to free themselves from the misery of their previous ways of living, to take on a wide range of responsible occupations, to select when and whom they marry, to have 2 to 4 children, and to fight for better conditions of health, literacy, education and justice for their communities, particularly women.

Initially the focus of women’s participation was to support the revolution, but gradually the Zapatistas took on a statewide and national mission of ending economic gender inequality, dismantling patriarchy, fighting violence against women, and investigating the disappearance of women. At the national level in Mexico, the Zapatistas have taken an unwavering anti-capitalist stance and are committed to local solutions to problems. For example, alcohol is prohibited in Zapatista-controlled villages — a measure that has reportedly substantially reduced domestic violence.

Beginning in 2018, the women Zapatistas have expanded their horizons by sponsoring international “gatherings of women who struggle.” Their invitation to participate in the 2019 gathering stated, “We fight against discrimination at home, in the street, at school, at work, on public transportation, against both those people we know and those who are strangers. . . . [Some] want to tell us we’re asking for it, that we are at fault for dying. No, we aren’t simply dying, we are being raped, murdered, cut up and disappeared. Anybody who faults us is sexist, and even women can demonstrate sexist thinking.” They are highlighting and addressing a problem that persists not only in Chiapas, not only in Mexico, but among indigenous women in numerous countries. Activists have established the social media hashtag #MMIW (missing and murdered indigenous women) to bring attention to this violence.

In the run up to the 2019 international gathering in Chiapas, the US president issued an executive order to establish a task force on missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives. It stated that there is an ongoing and serious problem of missing and murdered indigenous people in the US, especially women and girls. Federal studies in the US have shown that native women are killed at a rate 10 times the national average. Other studies have made clear that men who rape, assault and murder indigenous women in the US are more likely to be white than Indian. Simply convening a task force to talk about these statistics is unlikely to bring about any change.

Twenty years ago pioneering collaborations between US city police, county sheriffs, tribal police, tribal councils and victim service organizations were making progress toward establishing networks that endangered women could access and escape violence. The amount of federal funds needed to foster these local collaborations was minimal and served primarily to validate and bolster these services. When the US federal administration changed, the funds and focus were withdrawn. It is about time that, heeding the cry of the Zapatista and other indigenous women, federal, state and local governments collaborate to provide access to services so desperately needed to save lives.