In this chapter we will expose the criticisms raised by organized indigenous and peasant women who are making their own theorizations – based on their organic intellectuals – and who rethink not only economic policies towards Mexican agriculture but, in a broader sense, the relations of the human beings with nature and the norms of coexistence and social justice between women and men.
The voices of peasant women began to be heard in the eighties, as part of a wide range of mobilizations and struggles of urban and rural women who participated in popular movements (union, urban popular and peasant) from where they began to criticize gender inequalities and injustices. The women of the peasant movement were part of that pioneering process in the construction of a popular feminism in its rural version that had many points of tension with the so-called Mexican historical feminism – which emerged in the 1970s in urban spaces, universities, middle sectors and sometimes with a left-wing ideology – although there were also common interests that did not always converge in joint struggles. In this chapter we reconstruct the history of rural and indigenous feminisms in Mexico and reflect on their contributions to the anti-racist feminist critique.