Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Hilary Klein’s Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories is an essential addition to the extensive literature about the EZLN’s autonomous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Although it is well known that the Zapatistas have advocated for equality and leadership roles for women and girls—starting long before the uprising on New Year’s Day 1994 and continuing through the present—little has been written about the specifics of their practices and resulting social relations, and, signifi-cantly, what lessons are to be had here for other social movements.
There is no better person to do this work than Klein, who lived in Chiapas for several years, working with women’s cooperatives in Zapatista communities. Her previous experience as a community organizer in the United States—tackling issues such as affordable housing, immigrants’ rights, and violence against women—prepared her to be a keen observer and trusted participant in the Zapatista communities.
Compañeras is not only the story of these women but also the story of the Zapatista movement itself—from its inception in 1983—told from the perspective of women. Women and girls experienced dramatic changes in their lives, and transformed the movement into something profoundly distinct from previous social movements of the post-feminist era. Klein describes how the EZLN actively opened new spaces for women’s participation and how this, in turn, radically impacted the structure, content, and aspirations of their movement. She captures the dynamic relationship between the early leadership of the EZLN pushing from above and women at the grassroots level pushing from below. And Klein makes it clear that the Zapatistas themselves still consider their movement a work in progress, acknowledging the unfinished business ofentrenched male chauvinism and traditional limitations on women’s social and political lives.
Thanks to more than forty years of women’s studies that emerged from the women’s liberation movement, we are more aware than ever that women have always played key, decisive roles in social move- ments—their contributions being timeless and universal. However, in our histories of social movements in the United States, we have often featured individual women, placing less emphasis on the resilience and effectiveness of movements and organizations that women have transformed through their demands for new kinds of actions and rela-tions. The powerful Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) of the early 1960s civil rights movement comes to mind as an example. Klein’s work presents an analytical model for reappraising movements through the lens oftheir female participants.
Compañeras, then, is brilliant and informative for its history of the Zapatista struggle, but is also relevant and useful in developing current movements and organizations everywhere, perhaps especially in the United States. Compañeras suggests an array of potential lessons for those of us who are fighting for social justice in this country and beyond. This book is a timely invitation to readers to reflect on those lessons for themselves.
ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ is one of the founders of the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s. She has been involved in union organizing, in movements against the Vietnam War and imperialism, and since 1973 has worked with indigenous communities for sovereignty and land rights. A historian, writer, and professor emeritus in Native American Studies at California State University, she is author of Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico and The Great Sioux Nation, as well as a memoir trilogy: Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie; Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975; and Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War. Her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States was released in September 2014.
Zapatista women from the village of Amador Hernandez prepare to stand off with Mexican soldiers. (Photograph by Tim Russo.)