‘The Demon’s Nuns’: Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Mexico)

Abstract

Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa, who founded FOMMA, the Mayan Indian women’s centre in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, have transformed their personal experiences of gender violence and humiliation into an astonishing model of success, both personally and for their communities. They are the first indigenous women playwrights in the Mexico, and the first to publish their work in both Spanish and bilingual versions. Isabel Juárez Espinosa is the author of Cuentos y teatro tzeltales (1994), and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz published her play Una mujer desesperada in Spanish and English (1991, 2003). Cruz Cruz was the first indigenous artist to win the prestigious Rosario Castellanos prize in 1992 for that same play. FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya or, the Empowerment of Mayan Women), received a national award from the Mexican Institute of Research on the Family and Population (IMIFAP) in 1999. They are, no doubt, also among the first native women playwrights to have inspired a fair amount of scholarship.¹ Cruz Cruz, a Tzotzil speaker from Zinacantán, and Juárez, a Tzeltal speaker from Ahuacatenango, have known each other since 1988, when they began working together in the Sna Jtz’ibajom (Writers’ Workshop), a Mayan theatre collective in San Cristóbal. How they started to participate in that group, why they finally left it, and how they founded their own theatre and cultural collective (another first), are lessons not only in their strength and tenacity, but also about the harsh gender and race realities of Mexico, particularly within native communities.