This chapter is part of a broad project pioneered by Chandra Mohanty and Linda Carty to recover the political genealogies of feminists from the global south in an effort to decolonize feminism with the inclusion of multiple voices and experiences. The chapter presents a dialogue with Aída Hernández about her experiences in the political struggle for gender justice inside and outside the academy.
In this chapter, the author shares a series of reflections based on the Mexican experience on how to rethink women’s rights by taking into account the cultural context of our feminist struggles and thereby developing a gendered perspective that promotes cultural rights. These reflections emerge from several years of research on the organizing processes of indigenous women, as well as on my own experiences as a feminist activist seeking to build political alliances with the indigenous movement in Latin America.
The purpose of this chapter is to build a bridge between various theoretical and political debates around indigenous identities, and this involves crossing national and conceptual borders. It is hoped that these theoretical reflections contribute to a critical re-thinking of some constructions of “being indigenous” that may be leading to new exclusions. I will first discuss the origin and the concepts “indigeneity/indigenous” historizing the transnational processes of the last five decades through which the concepts have been appropriated to create spaces of political organization in anti-colonial struggles. Then I will locate these processes in the context of the political debates on multicultural reforms and indigenous rights in Latin America. In the third section I will approach the debates on Neoliberal Multiculturalism, emphasizing the way in which organized indigenous peoples have confronted this new form of governance of the Latin American Nation-States.
It is impossible to understand the growth of indigenous and peasant women’s participation in contemporary social movements nor the rise in their gender specific demands, without recognizing their history of struggle and resistance since colonial times (Gall and Hernández 2004) as well as the multiple dialogues of the last several decades that have influenced their political identities. Campesino (peasant) movements, guerilla movements, theology liberation movements, rural feminisms, international organizations as well as government programs, have all contributed to creating political spaces for peasant and indigenous women. Each of these contributed various elements to help construct a culturally specific gender based agenda for change, that rearticulates or rejects various elements of discourses about the rights of women.
The voices of these women began to be heard in the beginning of the 1980s, as part of a broader series of social mobilizations and struggles of urban and rural women participating in popular movements (labor, urban popular, peasant). They began to develop a criticism towards the inequalities and injustices they suffered as women. The women’s campesina movement was part of this pioneering process where a popular feminism in its rural form was constructed.