Lajan lajan ’ayatik or “Walking in Complementary Pairs” in the Zapatista Women’s Struggle

• Published date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211012645
• Author: Lia Pinheiro Barbosa
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211012645

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 240, Vol. 48 No. 5, September 2021, 4–24

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211012645

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

4

Lajan lajan ’ayatik or “Walking in Complementary Pairs”

in the Zapatista Women’s Struggle

by

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa

Translated by

Patricia Fierro

The women’s struggle as articulated by women of the Zapatista movement in their

Women’s Revolutionary Law is an insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous

feminism—a feminism in dialogue with popular feminisms in Latin America such as

peasant and popular feminism and communitarian feminism.

La lucha articulada por las mujeres del movimiento zapatista en su Ley Revolucionaria

de la Mujer constituye un feminismo insurgente, revolucionario, rebelde y autónomo. Es

también un feminismo en diálogo con otros feminismos populares en América Latina, tales

como el feminismo campesino y popular y el feminismo comunitario.

Keywords: Zapatistas, Women’s Revolutionary Law, Popular feminisms

In this essay I describe the women’s struggle as articulated by the women of

the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. My argument has four parts. In

the first, I review the historical development of indigenous and peasant resis-

tance in Latin America in order to situate the configuration of the “peoples’

bloc”1 and its political agenda at the turn of the century. In this context I high-

light the political role of women, noting the gender perspective at the heart of

the collective struggle of their organizations while contributing conceptually to

the debate on popular feminisms, and then describe the political emergence of

the Zapatistas with the cry of ¡Basta! (Enough!) and the armed insurgency of

their Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National

Liberation—EZLN). In the second section I present peasant and popular femi-

nism and communitarian feminism as peers and interlocutors of the Zapatista

women’s struggle. In the third section I examine the centrality of the Women’s

Revolutionary Law to the shaping of the Zapatistas’ political subjectivity.

Finally, I delve deeper into the theoretical-epistemic and political elements that

constitute what I call an insurgent, revolutionary, rebel, and autonomous femi-

nism, a theoretical concept and political project based on the life experiences

and the political struggle of Zapatista women.

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is a professor in the Graduate Program in Sociology, the Intercampus

Academic Master’s program in education and teaching, and the Crateús Faculty of Education at

the State University of Ceará. She is a member of the Educators of the Agrarian Reform Group and

a researcher of the CLACSO Feminist Emancipatory Economy and Marxist Heritage and

Perspectives Working Groups and coordinator of the Research Group on Social Thought and

Epistemologies of Knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean. Patricia Fierro is a translator

living in Quito, Ecuador.

1012645LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211012645Latin American PerspectivesBarbosa / LAJAN LAJAN ’AYATIK IN THE ZAPATISTA WOMEN’S STRUGGLE

research-article2021

Barbosa / LAJAN LAJAN ’AYATIK IN THE ZAPATISTA WOMEN’S STRUGGLE 5

AbyA yAlA And 500 yeArs of resistAnce collectively And

in complementAry pAirs

In the First Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, the EZLN, alluding to the con-

quest of the Americas, said, “We are the product of 500 years of struggle.”

Indigenous peoples and peasants question the paradigm of Western capitalist

modernity while advancing an alternative societal project based on an “other”

paradigm, an epistemic paradigm of the countryside (Barbosa, 2015; 2016),2

that arises from the link with the epistemic, identitary, and political dimensions

of their territories within Abya Yala (the Americas before the conquest). Within

this framework, at the end of the twentieth century a regional connection

emerged from the Continental Campaign of 500 Years of Indigenous, Black,

and Popular Resistance (1989–1992), which expressed the popular movements’

critique of the official celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the

Conquest. During this period, the Via Campesina Internacional and its

Coordinadora Latinamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (Latin American

Coordinator of Rural Organizations—CLOC)3 were founded to confront the

offensive of transnational capital on a global, continental, and national scale

and participate in the debate over agrarian models for the countryside (Rosset,

2016). Other popular resistances occurred during this period, such as the armed

Zapatista insurgency, the coca-growers’ marches in Bolivia, and the peasant

mobilizations for agrarian reform in Brazil, Paraguay, and Guatemala.

In this historical context, women played a vital role in the defense of their

land, their territories, and their communities, which were threatened by the

new pattern of accumulation (Federici, 2014). For indigenous women, this

struggle included the challenge of transforming themselves into political sub-

jects in an endogenous-exogenous, critically reflective movement that ques-

tioned the historical dimensions of patriarchy and the oppressions derived

from it both in the institutional sphere of the state and in the intersubjective

relationships of the social fabric of communities. Their struggle implies forging

their own historical consciousness collectively and in complementary pairs

(women and men) to meet the challenge of decolonizing the collective self—

“thinking from the center of our being to create a theoretical-epistemic reflec-

tion on our place in the world” (Méndez-Torres, 2013: 33). For indigenous

women, decolonizing means considering (1) who occupies the material space

of reflection concerning the subjects and bodies of feminism (Chirix, 2013;

Espinosa-Miñoso, 2014), (2) the discursive colonization and epistemic privilege

of the academic practice of Western feminism (Mohanty, 2008), and (3) the les-

sons learned in the decolonization of feminism (Hernández-Castillo, 2014;

Mendéz-Torres, 2013).

In developing a critique of Western feminism, indigenous women open the

door to other concepts and practices of feminism developed in terms of episte-

mological frameworks specific to their own worldviews, cultural contexts, and

political action that reveal tensions between their self-assertion as indigenous

people building their own conception of struggle as women and other strands

of feminism. To this end, they consider it essential to view the three aspects

mentioned above in perspective and above all to problematize the exercise of

power over other women that is implicit in many texts by mestiza and Western