Revolutions and rebellions are usually considered to be prime opportunities for evaluating potential changes in gender roles. The two books considered here offer almost polar opposite contexts for understanding the gendered implications of revolutionary change and for looking at key issues in the lives of Latin American women. Christine Eber’s Women and Alcohol in a Highland Town focuses on women in a Tzotzil township in Chiapas, Mexico that is now one of the strongholds of the Zapatista rebellion. Some of the women she worked with closely in the 1980s and went back to visit in the 1990s are now dedicated Zapatistas struggling to reconcile the revolutionary ideas of Zapatismo with local cultural conventions that restrict women’s mobility and political participation. Florence Babb’s forthcoming book, After Revolution, is based on a decade of research begun in 1989, the final year of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Babb follows the impact of the installation of a new conservative government on urban working class and poor women in the city of Managua.
The updated edition of Women and Alcohol in a Highland Town held the tantalizing prospect that the book, first published in 1996, might provide readers with a broad, historical understanding of how women in what is now Zapatista territory had lived their lives both before and after the 1994 rebellion. I opened the new volume with great anticipation and read through all of the chapters looking for updated information. What I had hoped for in much greater detail was contained in a single epilogue chapter. This chapter provides important clues to the mixed experiences of Tzotzil women in Zapatista territory, but left me wanting much more information and detail. While the epilogue brings up many important issues associated with women’s participation in revolutionary change, it does not deliver the kind of detailed analysis of women’s lives that the book as a whole offers on the topic of ritual drinking.
The book explores the role of alcohol in gender relations in the impoverished Tzotzil municipality of San Pedro Chenalho. Eber’s discussion of both the positive and negative aspects of “rum” is based on an analysis of the religious symbolic past in the highlands in which drinking in the service of the gods “empowers individual drinkers, unites the group, and carries on ancestral values and beliefs.” Drinking, however, also results in domestic violence and the inability of men to carry out their economic roles in their families—the results for women being repeated beatings, poverty, and a lack of support at home. Eber describes gender roles in highland Chenalho as complementary, with men and women each needing to fulfill their specific duties in order for the household to function, both economically and culturally.
The positive, communal values and links between the individual, the environment, and the universe that are manifested in traditional religious rituals are contrasted by Eber with a different set of values emphasized by the various sects of Protestants who have made significant inroads in the highland communities of Chiapas. Swearing off alcohol is often the first act of new Protestant converts. The individualism associated with Protestantism and the focus on one’s own life and the private accumulation of capital are posed as polar opposites to the values of the hybrid “traditionalists” who combine old Mayan beliefs and rituals with colonial Catholicism forcibly introduced by the Spaniards.
There is a third significant religious group in Chenalho: liberation theology Catholics who are now known most prominently as the victims of a horrible massacre that took place in the hamlet of Acteal in 1997, carried out by a local paramilitary group. In Eber’s original analysis the liberation theology Catholics appear to have a somewhat neutral role. Many are non-drinkers like the Protestants, but because of their link to the Catholic Church have values that more closely resemble those of the traditionalists. Through their classes and meetings they relate the life of Christ to their own struggles and feel empowered to push for change in this life, not in the hereafter—an experience that Eber argues has modestly empowered local women.
Her intimate portraits of a small group of people helps readers to gain a personalized understanding of the issues she write about. The complexity of the main characters in the book is one of its positive attributes. It is through one primary friendship, that of a woman named Antonia, that Eber learns about the impact of the Zapatista rebellion in Chenalho. Through Antonia’s experiences as a Zapatista base community member, Eber outlines some of the contradictions for women in the Zapatista movement.
In 1994, the EZLN published the “Revolutionary Law of Women” which stressed things such as women having the right to decide on the number of children they have and take care of, women’s right to choose their romantic/sexual partners, a call to severely punish rape and attempted rape and women’s right to participate in community affairs and politics as well as hold leadership positions. In Zapatista base communities, equal numbers of male and female leaders are elected and according to Eber, this has done much to promote women’s participation in political affairs.
Unfortunately, domestic gender relations have not caught up with the rules encouraging women’s political participation. Because married women continue to have such heavy domestic work loads that require their almost constant presence at home, women in one Zapatista base community where Eber has worked decided that only single women could serve as base representatives. Eber states that the response of many women to this contradiction has been to turn their energies to grassroots economic initiatives such as weaving, baking, and agricultural cooperatives. Indeed, another place women have learned new skills that allow them to be more assertive is through artisan cooperatives, and in some families, women’s income from weaving is the primary source of cash.
And in this complex mix of cooperative experience and competing religions, Eber documents a growing women’s temperance movement. Women, she says, are able to push for alcohol bans based on their positions as wives and mothers and the accusations they can make against men who fail to fulfill their traditional roles due to alcoholism.
Florence Babb’s forthcoming book, After Revolution, offers a contrasting view. While Zapatista political initiatives and ideology attempt to open up women’s political participation and to expand their cultural roles often against the grain of local communities, in Nicaragua, women have been increasingly marginalized by a government that favors the development of an economy that works to the disadvantage of working-class and poor women. Rapid introduction of harsh measures to adjust and stabilize the economy, integrate Nicaragua into global markets and downsize the state have eliminated what were wide protections for the most vulnerable social sectors in Sandinista Nicaragua.
In spite of growing social conservatism and the impoverishment of women and their families, Babb found that women are key new social subjects in the growth of a civil society. What is most appealing about the context in which Babb carries out her analysis is her refusal to draw a dichotomy between “socialist” Sandinista policies and “free market’ post-Sandinista structural adjustment policies. Instead she shows how the two are connected, and how political disenchantment with the consequences of both has led to a resurgence of independent social movements.
While the book follows the outcomes of structural adjustment policies from the vantage point of one neighborhood in Managua, Babb also worked with four women’s cooperatives and spoke with a wide range of policymakers, academics, bureaucrats, and activists in social movements. The result is a broad and richly textured account of the many different venues through which women have developed as social subjects in post-revolutionary Nicaragua. Her narrative emphasizes the importance of historical memory and the experience of recent social mobilization. While many feminist analysts have documented the devastating consequences of economic restructuring programs on women through higher prices and diminished social services, not many have considered in the detail that Babb has how the particular context in which structural adjustment occurs significantly influences women’s responses to it. In addition, Babb reminds us that the social location of women (poor, working class, middle class, indigenous, non-indigenous, straight, lesbian) is also important to consider in their multiple responses to neoliberal economic policy.
Through more than a decade of intense social mobilization in which a majority of the Nicaraguan population was organized into one or more collective entities, women and men have a variety of political and cultural experiences that now shape the ways they respond to economic restructuring policies. Like the Tzotzil women Eber analyzes who face contradictions between “traditional” and “revolutionary” political culture, the women Babb followed for a decade are also reconciling contradictions. In Nicaragua, they are negotiating differences between their now “traditional” revolutionary experience and culture and the more restricted kinds of cultural and political spaces being shaped for them by their socially conservative government.
On a return visit to Managua in June 2000, Babb found that several women’s organizations and NGOs were thriving despite the conservative social context. One NGO is promoting gay pride, safe sex education, and sending staff to global AIDs conferences. Another women’s NGO she describes has added a documentation center, more classes, research projects and is producing a progressive TV series. Thus in the midst of growing social conservatism, some oppositional movements and organizations fueled by women continue to exist and grow.
Eber’s and Babb’s contrasting studies of changing gender relations in the face of revolutionary and post-revolutionary change both serve to remind us that the particular local and historical gendered terrain over which any kind of change is laid is key to understanding reactions to it. While both Mexico and Nicaragua are certainly likely to continue as models for neoliberal economic policy, reactions to that policy are varied, creative, and have inspired many women to push for new ways of allocating resources, making decisions at home and in the community, and to think about issues of democracy and human rights.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynn Stephen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power From Below (University of Texas, 1997).
