Zones of Autonomy: Gendered Cultural Citizenship and Indigenous Women’s Organizing in Mexico

Abstract

Ignited by the 1994 Zapatista uprising, local indigenous organizations, both existing and new, coalesced into a national indigenous movement that spread throughout Mexico. While centering their demands on indigenous autonomy, a claim that was forged in the formal political sphere, the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and the national indigenous movement have been at the forefront of recovering indigenous cultural, juridical, and social forms of being and demanding the right to be different. Women have played a vital role in the construction and mobilization of a national indigenous movement in Mexico throughout the 1990s. Indigenous women have not only become important new actors in the indigenous movement, they have effectively expanded indigenous political demands for autonomy by adding their own analyses of how Mexican politics and culture have been organized by gender, indigeneity, and class as vectors of power.KeywordsIndigenous PeopleSocial MovementPolitical RepresentationIndigenous WomanIndigenous CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.