Week Seven: Redefining Women's Roles through the Zapatista Movement

By Sarah Mueller

Maria de Socorro Vargas, my host mom, seated on her couch in her home


The 8th week of the Crossing Borders program left my mind imprinted with two prominent themes: moving into our 6-week host family’s homes, and the Zapatista movement of Chiapas. On Saturday, Oct. 4th, we packed up our belongings and moved out of our previous dorm-like home in Casa Verde and into the houses in which we would be living with a family from Cuernavaca for the next six weeks. Everyone was nervous and excited as we said our good-byes and accompanied our families to our different destinations. Upon arriving at our individual houses, as we discussed in a class conversation later that week, we encountered numerous complications and questions in our first few days in the new homes. Questions of “How much should I eat?” “How much time can I spend in my room alone?” “When can I use the shower?” and “Am I taking up too much room in the house?” floated through our discussions, as well as a few more difficult occurrences, such as the unexpected presence of a new family member, an inability to sleep, or even severe difficulties in language barriers. We are all learning about the different ways of life of different families in Cuernavaca and the importance of communication and flexibility. Though it takes some stretching of individual comfort zones, the experience is enriching and, in my opinion, will be one of the most valuable during our journey through the Crossing Borders program.



Another very important, personally striking, and relevant topic from the week was the uprising of the Zapatista movement in the Mexican state of Chiapas. January 1, 1994, the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, marked the beginning of the Zapatista uprising. The term Zapatistas refers to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, (the EZLN), which declared war on the Mexican State and put forth 12 demands: freedom, democracy, justice, peace, land, education, health, housing, food, development, cultural rights and women’s rights.[1]



We were so lucky to have guest speakers Christy Vargas-Bustos and her mother Laura Bustos Hernández, who are voices from the grassroots to speak to us about their knowledge of women’s involvement in the Zapatista movement. Laura shared with us that through her Bishop, she connected with people who were leaving the bloody dictatorships from Guatemala and El Salvador-people that had to flee to defend their lives. “This helped us to understand what side we need to be standing on,” she noted. She had the chance to talk to these women about their struggles as women and the things they were fighting for. Through her interactions with these women, she met women who had to withstand double shift workdays and discrimination on the job. She stressed the importance of understanding the double shift work day for women which can mean working two part-time or full-time shifts in one day or spending part of the day working in the home and the other part of the day working outside the home. This puts a major strain on the family and the woman because the family is without their mother for most or all of the day, and a double shift is difficult and exhausting for anyone. Laura also told us that although she had 8 children she still made the time to organize for the rights of women. One of the most striking quotes from her talk were her words about the women’s movement and involvement in the EZLN, “We can’t have isolated cries-we need to yell out together!”



Her daughter Christy Vargas-Bustos chimed in and also touched on the strength women gained from the Zapatista movement. She made clear that machismo/sexism was a very prominent issue and that the women’s participation in the EZLN began to change the belief that women were only made for the home. This gave women strength as they fought for health and educational rights in their communities. “Unity is what makes us strong,” she stated.


These parts of the women’s talks impacted me the most because they really stressed the importance of women’s strength in numbers and the significance of their involvement in the Zapatista uprising. These actions and happenings really gave women in Chiapas the strength to fight for their dignity and rights in the society and were a giant step for women and their rights in all of Mexico.


[1] Gill, Jerry. Borderland Theology p. 83.

Christy Vargas-Bustos and her mother, Laura Bustos Hernández, our guest speakers for the week

Week Six: The Feminist struggle within revolutionary movements

By Anna Loizeaux

This week we have continued to learn about not only the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) in El Salvador but more importantly the role of women in the struggle. Their political and military lucha for a more just distribution of resources is especially important through the lens of feminist struggle. Although the majority of Salvadorans suffered from injustice, discrimination, and being altogether forgotten by their government, women suffered in a particular way. Not only did they have to endure the conditions of war, they had to fight stereotypes about women and endure various forms of sexual harassment and control.

On Thursday, we had the pleasure of hearing from Lucía Rayas, a Mexican woman who worked in solidarity with Salvadorans during the civil war. Her talk, titled “A Gender Analysis of Women in Guerilla Movements in El Salvador” looked at the specific experience of female soldiers in the FMLN. Because the lucha of the FMLN was so important, women’s identity as women came after their identity as soldiers. Although the FMLN’s struggle was not gendered focused at all on gender, it became clear to women in the struggle that this was a major flaw. If they were fighting for justice and fairness, how could they leave women’s struggles out? They decided that goals like better land distribution, health care, education, access to decent wages and work can (and must) be feminized. Because of the different ways that men and women are treated and experience life (due to social constructions and not differences in anatomy), social inequalities often harm women more. Generally women must not only care for themselves but also take on the burden of the entire family’s welfare. Similarly, when women do raise their voices against oppression, their voices are not always received as well as men’s (or at all). This all became even more complicated when women were fighting alongside men as soldiers and commanders in the guerilla army., as 60 Sixty percent of all collaborators and 30 percent of combatants were women and 30% of combatants.

Women, as we all know and as Rayas explained more in depth, have typically been excluded from warfare. Time and time again it has been proven that this is not because of women’s incompetence or unwillingness to fight. Instead, Not only does the historical view of women as nurturing contributes to thistheir exclusion, as do the but women’s bodies themselves as well. I agree with Rayas when she says that the fact that women’s bodies physically give life has been seen as a direct contrast and consequently a hindrance to women’s entrance into warfare where life is often taken away. In this wayBy participating alongside men, women in the FMLN were able to break stereotypes, not only in the social structure but also in relation to their sexuality. The previously held notion of women as virginal wives was obviously broken when women were expected to fight alongside menjoined the movement.

Although not all of us identify as feminists as I do, I think it’s encouraging and invigorating for us to hear about such women and their struggle to break stereotypes (though this was not their primary goal which was the social and economic liberation of the El Salvadoran people). Unfortunately, stories such as theirs are not highlighted in our history books so we haven’t grown up with them as examples. Hopefully, however, we will be able to share their stories and ours in order to shed light on facets of women that are often overlooked or consciously ignored.

Week Five: Independence, Base Christian Group, and Rain! Rain! Rain!

By Katie Byrne

Members of the Base Christian Community (BCC)

The week began with plans and excitement surrounding el dia de independencia, or Mexico’s Declaration of Independence which took place on September 16, 1810. We were excited to head to the town center where most of the town gathers to hear the grito, which is the reenactment of the declaration of independence that is accompanied by the ringing of a bell shortly before midnight on Sept. 15th. In most major cities in Mexico, a person in political power delivers the grito. In Mexico City, the president gives the grito, while in Cuernavaca the governor was expected to deliver the grito.

Early the evening of the 15th, however, we learned that the grito had been moved from Cuernavaca to another city about an hour away. The grito was moved because the zocalo, or town center, has been taken over by a teachers strike for the past month or so. The public school teachers have set up tents and are living in the center of town in shifts in order to protest unfair wages, difficult teaching environments (i.e. large class sizes, poor government funding, etc.) and a variety of other issues.

The grito was moved because of fear of interference by the teachers strike. The scene of tents and makeshift homes clogging the main streets and the smell of food cooking has become my normal expectation for the zocalo, and I had not even thought of the possibility of it interfering with the grito. We headed down to the zocalo anyway, and enjoyed a night of festivities and revelry nonetheless.

After the festive start to the week, we experienced another form of community gathering. In our religion class, we have been studying Latin American Liberation Theology which I could cover pages writing about. Simply put, it is the movement to peacefully overcome social injustices through religious meetings that also focus on current events and the use the bible to interpret these events. We had the distinct pleasure of attending one of these group meetings, called Base Christian Communities. The laity generally runs these BCC, and our meeting was conducted by Alicia Arines at the home of one of the members of the group.

At the meeting, we began with songs and prayers from the gospel, and we then discussed some of the specific projects and initiatives that the group was working on. The current project we witnessed was the construction of tangible symbols to distribute as keepsakes at an upcoming conference. These objects consisted of small pieces of volcanic rock glued to wood as a symbol of the cornerstone upon which the church is built. The physical cornerstone and also the people, the rocks upon which ideas and community are built. The prevailing theme of the meeting was that We are the rocks, We are the church. The emphasis on the people and the struggle of the people was evident through the discussion of current events and the struggles of the poor everyday.

The inclusion that our group felt by the BCC was overwhelming, and the image that sticks with me is that of us all sitting in a tight circle under a tin roof as rain beat down so hard that we could hardly hear one another talk. The connection to basic elements was undeniable as water was bunching and shaping our group just as water shapes and carves rocks, and with us as the rocks, it seemed a fitting end to the evening.

Courtnie and Christy huddled together during the rainstorm at the BCC meeting