A “Revolution within a Revolution”

Abstract

In his reflections on the early days of the 1994 Zapatista (EZLN) uprising that garnered global attention, Subcomandante Marcos acknowledges the real impetus for change behind this Mayan political and cultural movement that was hidden from the headlines: the women. As Vinding (1998, 12) notes, Indigenous women have been “underrepresented in Indigenous organizations and are seldom heard in international fora.” Although women’s rights and Indigenous rights are now officially codified as human rights,¹ both women’s rights and Indigenous rights movements have been problematic spaces for Indigenous women’s participation in treaty making and standard setting in domestic and international legal fora. Due to colonization and ongoing imperial influences, both rights movements often require Indigenous women to make trade-offs (either as women or as Indigenous peoples) rather than make space for the more fully intersectional frameworks that Indigenous women have been demanding through strategies that go beyond political lobbying.

Tomorrow … if there is to be one, it will be made with the women, and above all, by them.

—Subcomandante Marcos, “Twelve Women in the Twelfth Year: The Moment of War, March 11, 1996”