A documentary by Gabriela Martínez (RT 37 minutes)

Illuminating Important Questions in 21st-Century Mexico

Silent March

This documentary by Gabriela Martínez, University of Oregon assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, tells the story of a media takeover that changed the nature of politics, and how we understand media, social movements, and in particular the role of women in both media and social movements.

Following a teacher’s strike in Oaxaca, Mexico, in August 2006, about a thousand women marched to the installations of COR-TV, taking over the stations to voice their political, social, economic, and cultural concerns while also calling for the resignation of the State’s governor, Ulises Ruíz Ortíz. The film opens with the 2007 celebration of the first anniversary of the takeover, and quickly moves to narrate how and why women got to this point.

Martínez lets the women and all other actors involved in the events speak for themselves. Issues of justice, globalization, women’s rights, and human rights violations converge at the core of a social uprising, in which media becomes an important site for the struggle.

Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca is excellent for scholars, students, and general audiences interested in women studies, social movements, media in developing countries, empowerment, indigenous peoples, and international communications.

See more about CSWS-related research in Oaxaca

See the related website: “Making Rights a Reality”

Professor Lynn Stephen spoke at the unveiling of a new human rights website.

In 2006, a group of women in Oaxaca, Mexico took over television and radio stations in support of striking teachers who were being brutalized by state police forces and paramilitary groups. These women and their stories compose one of six chapters on a new website, “Making Rights a Reality.”

University of Oregon faculty and graduate students developed the website to provide direct access to the story as told by those who participated in and observed it. With more than 35 video-testimonials supplemented with text, photographs and documents, the website is intended to inform students, teachers, researchers and activists about human rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights, media activism, participatory democracy and Latin American social movements.

“The heart of this project is a set of inter-linked testimonials by teachers and others who were illegally detained, tortured and imprisoned for their political activities. The testimonials are urgent oral accounts of bearing witness to wrongs committed against the speakers, as well as descriptions and analysis of events of the social movement,” said Lynn Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.

Stephen is also the associate director for program development at the UO Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS). CSWS funded the website and sponsored a launch event on May 28. The event was co-sponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) and the Latin American Studies Program.

UO Faculty and Students Unveil a Human Rights Website about the Oaxaca Social Movement 2006-Present

In 2006, a group of Mexican women self-described as “short, fat, and brown and the face of Oaxaca” took over television and radio stations in support of striking teachers who were being brutalized by state police forces and paramilitary groups.  They took action by seizing control of broadcast communication.

These women and their stories compose one of six chapters featured in “Making Rights a Reality: The Oaxaca Social  Movement,” a new multimedia website (http://www.mraroaxaca.uoregon.edu/) built by University of Oregon faculty and students and funded by the Center for the Study of Women in Society.  CSWS will sponsor a launch event for the website May 28 from 3:30–5:30 p.m. in Room 110 at the Knight Law Center on the UO campus. The event is co-sponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) and the Latin American Studies Program.

Ruth Guzmán and Ramiro Aragón, two of the people featured on the human rights portion of the website, will speak at the event.  Guzmán and Aragón have filed for political asylum in the state of Oregon.

The Making Rights a Reality website offers students, teachers, researchers and activists interested in media activism, human rights, indigenous rights, women’s rights, participatory democracy and Latin American social movements direct access to the story of the Oaxaca social movement.

The site includes 35 video-testimonials supplemented with text, photographs, and documents as told by those who participated directly in the movement and observed it up close.  Making Rights a Reality features video-testimonials in Spanish with English subtitles that are about seven minutes long and linked to YouTube.  The testimonials are urgent oral accounts of bearing witness to wrongs committed against the speakers as well as descriptions and analysis of events of the social movement.  These are supplemented with background information about the histories of different social movements in Oaxaca during the past three decades as well as a video-timeline of key events of the Oaxaca social movement from June through October 2006.

The website team includes:  Lynn Stephen, distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies; Alina Padilla Miller, Journalism and Communication Ph.D. student; Jesse Nichols, International Studies and Spanish B.A.; Magali Morales, independent translator; and Josue Gómez, a M.A. student in Anthropology.

From the Field: Americas Research Interest Group

by Gabriela Martínez, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Stephanie Wood, Senior Research Associate, CSWS

Bety Cruz takes a close look at pre-Columbian pottery bits.

Today we went to some Zapotec communities not far from Oaxaca city, accompanied by Beatriz (“Bety”) Cruz, a graduate student from the same region who is studying to be an ethnohistorian. Her thesis, under the guidance of María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi, will have as its focus several manuscripts, including an 18th-century mapa that we are digitizing at WHP for our Mapas Project. Bety arranged with the local town council of Guelacé for us to take a copy of the mapa and walk around the boundaries and sites that appear on the manuscript, marking various coordinates using a GPS instrument. Four town council members accompanied us, helping us locate various boundary points that mark the limits of the community-held lands. They also showed us various ex-haciendas (private estates) that were broken up after the Mexican Revolution and distributed to the families who had worked the lands. Bety carried the manuscript-map, Stephanie shot stills photos, and Gaby took video footage. Stephanie taught Bety to use the GPS tool.

A young man harvests alfalfa with his oxen.

The countryside was filled with blossoming trees and lush fields. Many people were out harvesting alfalfa. One place that we located from the manuscript was a group of “negrito” (little black) trees that bear a small round fruit that looks something like a very dark cherry. We tasted the fruit, and it was rather sweet. These trees are the site of a former annual fiesta after harvest time. We asked why this site was chosen, and the council members pointed out a nearby ruin of a small prehispanic settlement, which they called “Santo Domingo.” Originally it would have had a name with no Christian associations, of course. We climbed onto the mound and noticed some pre-Columbian pottery bits scattered about.  Apparently this site continued to have a ritual significance until very recent times, but no longer. The men with us spoke Zapotec among themselves as we walked around, but their children and grandchildren do not speak this language. Cultural change is coming very rapidly to this region.

From the Field: Americas Research Interest Group

by Stephanie Wood, Senior Research Associate, CSWS

Zoila Bautista Hernández

Oaxaca, Mexico—On March 22nd Gabriela Martínez and I went deep into the Mixteca Alta to visit an archive in search of early manuscripts (kind of a bust) and then to go to a pueblo where one of the young women comes from who is on scholarship at our sister-institution, the Casa de la Mujer. Reyna Bautista invited us for lunch and to meet her family. Her mother, Zoila Bautista Hernández, is a monolingual Mixtec speaker. Zoila sat for the video camera and told us a legend about the monolith that towers over the community. In ancient times, it had two parts, a male and a female part. The female part got angry at the male, broke off, and went to the coast, opening up a path between the mountains. For me, this legend echoes a recurring element in prehispanic Mesoamerican gender ideology, which finds expression in manuscripts, of a “founding couple,” male and female, both parts necessary for human origins and town foundings.

Ramona López Bautista

After lunch, we went to say hello to the grandmother, Ramona López Bautista, who raises silkworms. Silk was an industry introduced by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century. Only small numbers of people still practice the cultivation today. Ramona has a small house that is filled with boxes of white worms, each one about 1.25 inches in length. When we arrived, she fed them mulberry leaves so we could watch the worms eat. We also got to see the boiled fiber from the cocoons and the spun thread that Ramona makes and sells.

One of the delightful moments of the day was when Gaby showed Ramona the footage she had shot, and Ramona, who is 74, laughed heartily at seeing herself moving around on the little screen. She got a kick out of the fact that she still had some black hair at the back of her head, because her hair is quite white around her face and she had never seen the back of her own head!

Gabriela Martínez shows video images to Reyna Bautista (r) and her mother.

P.S. Reyna leaves for Mexico City on Wednesday for a meeting with Hillary Clinton! She’s very excited. This meeting with Hillary is for “CASS” scholarship recipients. Reyna not only had a scholarship from the Casa de la Mujer, but also from the Cooperative Association for States Scholarships (CASS), with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Reyna had two years of study at Mt. Hood Community College near Portland, Oregon, thanks to her CASS funding. That’s Reyna smiling on the right, in the Oregon women’s basketball t-shirt I gave her.

Filmmaker Gabriela Martínez with Juana Vásquez Vásquez

From the Field: Americas Research Interest Group

by Gabriela Martínez, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Stephanie Wood, Senior Research Associate, CSWS

Oaxaca, Mexico—Yesterday, we began work on a pilot film for a larger documentary on the “triple rescue” of colonial Mexican manuscripts. We are speaking of 16th- through 18th-century indigenous-authored manuscripts that have been decaying on dirt floors in municipal and provincial archives. Besides being subjected to worrisome conditions of humidity, insects, rodents, and grime, these documents have also been ignored and neglected over the centuries in favor of a Eurocentric history. And, the information they contain about the history of Mesoamerican women has suffered even further disparagement. These are manuscripts primarily authored by elite indigenous men about their own activities over the centuries. But, sometimes, almost in spite of their own self-interest, such male authors did mention or paint women into these manuscripts. To extract the women’s stories and patch them together is a labor of determination, as well as a huge collaborative, interdisciplinary enterprise that unites ethnohistorians, archaeologists, linguists, restoration scientists, digital humanities experts, and now a filmmaker, too!

Juana Vásquez Vásquez

Our first interview, which we filmed yesterday, March 20th, was with Juana Vásquez Vásquez, a Zapotec woman from the community of Yalálag, Oaxaca, Mexico. Juana periodically makes the trek from her indigenous community to Oaxaca city to collaborate with various ethnohistorians, such as Nancy Farriss and Angeles Romero Frizzi. She is not an “informant,” but is very involved in the decipherment and translation of manuscripts written in Zapotec, as well as their analysis. This impressive group has been working most recently on documents such as primordial town histories, Inquisition records of supposed “idolatry” (continuing beliefs and practices from prehispanic religions), and testaments from the colonial period that show how women owned, worked, and transferred land. From such sources, these ethnohistorians are reconstructing the lives of Zapotec women as they responded to Spanish conquest and colonialism, watching for evolution in native gender ideologies that came with the introduction, for instance, of Christianity.

From the filmmaking perspective, this is a great opportunity to record ancient and contemporary knowledge about Mesoamerica. We envision a documentary that would bring to life archival documents as well as feature the villages and their peoples in contemporary days. In addition, we plan to create other digital formats, such as searchable images and webstream audiovisual materials—with the appropriate metadata—for sharing with colleagues, teachers, and students around the globe.