When members of the CSWS Americas research interest group (RIG) traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, they knew they would be witnessing social protest. But they did not know it would erupt into violence—or flower into a media takeover by women. As scholars of various academic disciplines—including anthropology, history and journalism—they experienced the social uprising through different professional filters. But for each of them, the Oaxaca social movement of 2006 inspired their research and motivated a response.
Their experiences in Oaxaca led to the making of a documentary film, a digital ethnography website, and other scholarly publications.
Lynn Stephen, distinguished professor of anthropology and director of the new Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, focused her response on producing the digital ethnography website Making Rights a Reality. The website documents the 2006 social movement of Oaxaca and its relationship to the global discourse on human, women’s, and indigenous rights. It contains more than thirty-five video testimonials supplemented with text, photographs, and the reproduction of documents, offering the public direct access to the story and history of this social movement as told by those who took part in it and those who observed it first hand.
Gabriela Martínez, assistant professor of journalism and communication, served as a technical adviser to the website. This year, she completed a thirty-seven minute documentary film, Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca, which also tells the story of this media takeover by Oaxacan women. The takeover, she said, dramatically changed the way women are perceived in Mexico as well as the dynamics of political power and the role and use of media in times of social struggle. The documentary was premiered in Eugene at the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts and at CSWS in an open research presentation for faculty and students. The documentary is downloadable through the CSWS website (csws.uoregon.edu).
In March 2009, RIG leaders Stephanie Wood and Gabriela Martínez were again in Oaxaca, in the initial stages of research and production of a documentary focusing on historic Mesoamerican manuscripts. They are working to capture the dramatic and multidimensional rescue of the history of indigenous women. The film will be partly an observation of the activities of others and partly an exploration of their own research activities. It will highlight obstacles and methodologies for overcoming challenges as they strive to recuperate the experiences and perspectives of women from various cultural groups within Mesoamerica, including Nahuas, Zapotecas, Mixtecas, and others.
Casa de la Mujer
Members of the RIG also continue to work with the Casa de la Mujer, a sister research center in Oaxaca. In March, Stephanie Wood led a workshop in Spanish for indigenous young women, holders of scholarships at the Casa, on the theme of “Power and Women in Indigenous Communities of Mesoamerica, 1500–1800.” Stephanie also met with the leadership at the Casa this year to check on the success of RIG-sponsored interns Elke Richers and Katie Hulse, to brainstorm potential summer workshops, and to participate in the annual fundraising campaign for the scholarship program that helps indigenous girls complete high school. The interns were received very well as a result of their serious commitment and their strong Spanish-language skills. The fundraising campaign was successful in meeting its goals thanks in part to contributions from colleagues at the UO and friends in Portland. Oregon donations amounted to nearly $2,000.
Stephanie Wood’s research on Mesoamerican women, particularly the importance of women as members of town-founding couples, was published as an essay in the book Símbolos de poder en Mesoamérica, coordinated by Guilhem Olivier (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008). She also gave several lectures on this topic and on significant female figures in Mexican history at the NEH Summer Institute she and Judith Musick hosted in July and August 2008 at the University of Oregon, which had as its focus Mesoamerican cultures and their histories.
Making Rights a Reality
This website explores the 2006 Oaxaca social movement and its links to global discourses of human, women’s, and indigenous rights. Through the use of more than thirty-five video testimonials supplemented with text, photographs, and documents, this site 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 this movement as told by those who participated directly in it and observed it up close. The website features video testimonials in Spanish with English subtitles that are urgent oral accounts of bearing witness to wrongs committed against the speakers as well as descriptions and analysis of events. 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 testimonials include statements by teachers and others who were illegally detained, tortured, and imprisoned for their political activities as well as testimonials from their family members. Women who participated in the takeover and reprogramming of the state’s public television and radio station, COR-TV, recorded testimonials as well. Mixtec and Zapotec participants in the Asamblea Popular del Pueblo de Oaxaca movement in Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca City, and Los Angeles also provided testimonials. Finally, the site includes testimonials from the “unorganized”—a young entrepreneur, a craft producer and merchant, and a student—whose experiences of the social movement changed their understandings of local political culture, citizenship, and forms of participatory democracy.
Conceived of as a digital ethnography, the site lets viewers hear the voices of those who participated in and observed the movement. Ethnography is a form of documentation that strives to produce understanding through richness, texture, and detail focused through the perspectives of locals who directly experienced and witnessed events. The embedding of video testimonials allows students and other interested viewers to interact directly with people in the Oaxaca social movement and to reflect on their perspectives in relation to wider questions of 1) contemporary processes of ethnic, racial, and gendered identity formation and rights claiming; 2) definitions of participatory democracy, political society, and citizenship; and 3) models for achieving cultural dialogue among different groups.
The flexibility of digital media permits viewers to experience the interconnectedness of the different dimensions of the Oaxaca movement, facilitates the juxtaposition of different oral testimonies, and highlights the links between individual experiences in the claiming of rights through testimony with the larger political, economic, and cultural context within which such claiming operates.
Production of this website was funded by CSWS.
Fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico
March 21, 2009—We began work on a pilot film for a larger documentary on the “triple rescue” of colonial Mexican manuscripts. They are sixteenth- through eighteenth-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. 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.
Our first interview 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 to collaborate with various ethnohistorians. She is very involved in the deciphering and translation of manuscripts written in Zapotec, as well as their analysis. See more field entries from Oaxaca on the CSWS website.
—Gabriela Martínez, Assistant Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, and Stephanie Wood, Director, Wired Humanities Projects