As indigenous women, talking about our identity has become essential to name ourselves through our feelings and concerns. Seemingly, the question of an indigenous woman’s identity is one that has already been resolved and accepted, even in our territories, but to claim that our past identity is the same as our present one, would be a lie—identities are not static.1
The main problem about the issue of identity is its essentialism, or that constant search for purity that is required, in order to belong to a specific ethnic group or community. In a way, the idea of identity takes place through difference; it is through contact with “the other” that we can know who we are.
Stuart Hall (1996) asked the question, “Who needs identity?” From his position it looks as if Westerners have always known who they are and where they came from, shaping their identity of supremacy from the dispossession of the identity of the so-called others, that otherness dispossessed of its being through colonialism.
Those of us who were dispossessed lost not only a significant part of the history of our beings, but they also took away our territories, our clothing, our cultural practices, our mother tongues, and an endless number of traits that made up our identity, in a strategic attempt at cultural unification, to make us part of a nation-state that excluded the diversity of our peoples.
From colonialism to the creation of a nation-state, attempts have been made to erase what is different, and it seems as though diversity, in all its characteristics, is a threat to the construction of a single universal locus that responds to the needs of a dominant ideology.
These universalizing practices are reproduced within our communities as a response to neocolonialist and capitalist discourses that seek to turn ethnicity into a brand, within the framework of folklore and tourism.
The dispossession of identity has been a scar, visible in how land is farmed, in the discrimination against our bodies and skin, in a damaged collectivity that allows disunity among people, who are forced to cede all decision-making control to a government that functions under capitalist and neocolonialist norms, that do not correspond to the needs of each community’s context.
Going back to Hall’s initial question about who needs identity? Identity is more for the excluded, for sexual dissidences, for women, for children, for migrants, for those of us who do not belong within the construct of categories that give validity to a type of identity based on the exclusion of others, on the exclusion of what is different, associating it to what “is not.”
Therefore, the constant search for who we are and where we come from becomes a “who do I have to be” or “who do you want me to become.” For identity also turns us into a universal representation of what the dominant narratives have fabricated about our selves.
The issue with the identity of indigenous women is that it intersects with both ethnic and gender issues, because as women, we are constantly evaluating our femininity through gender roles that, although different in each context, do function as a form of indoctrination and domination.
Feminine identity is bound by the characteristics of a woman’s body, what the vagina represents and what it supposedly restricts us from doing; thus, having a vagina hinders women’s personal lives as opposed to men’s. We are denied the right to live as individuals.
Binnizá women,2 the community I belong to, have built our identity from the idea of the matriarchy, an imaginary community where women control the economy and have a strong participation, socially and politically. That is, as opposed to what was believed an indigenous woman in Mexico should be: submissive.
This idea of matriarchy took shape when artists and academics saw the cultural practices of women in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and began referring to them as “Amazons,” “strong and empowered.” To quote writer Elena Poniatowska in Binford (1996) when describing Binnizá women:
Women enjoy walking arm-in-arm and here they come to the marches, dominating with their iron calves. Men are kittens between their legs, puppies they must admonish and say, “stay there.” They walk around playfully touching each other. They exchange roles: they grab men and watch them in front of the fence, pulling them, caressing them while cursing the government and sometimes the men themselves. They are the ones who participate in demonstrations and beat up policemen (p. 244).
But it was not only the perception of academia and artists, members of an intellectual elite in Mexico, there is also a recognition that women act as keepers of our culture and identity.
This responsibility of being an identity keeper is seen, first, in the role of the mother, possibly the first to teach the native language to her children. Mothers bear the responsibility of keeping a culture alive through orality, by singing ancestral lullabies from the time we are born, followed by scolding in our own language, or with stories and legends that contribute to the narratives of our childhood.
In spaces such as markets or the kitchen, which are usually inhabited by women as well, we can find these practices that help to reproduce culture and reaffirm the identity of the entire community as a whole: through sound, how meals are prepared, how clay plates and cups are used, the socialization of food. All of these allow for the creation of bonds through identity, channeled by women and their relation to other members of the community.
For this reason, ethnic identity and gender identity are intertwined because, unlike other women who do not belong to indigenous communities, gender roles play a reproductive function of culture here.
Likewise, women’s femininity also influences the reproduction of representations of indigenous women, for example, what they wear, which becomes not only a mark of women’s ethnicity but also of their own femininity.
Baring the responsibility of reproduction and of culture keepers, empowers women in a way, but it also reaffirms gender roles and the division of labor within the community. These characteristics also place them in a situation, in a sense, of having to reproduce exclusionary practices towards other women who they consider, prejudicially, to be “harming” both ethnic and gender “authenticity.”
Taking this into consideration, what follows are some reflections made by some women from the Binnizá community of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, whose narratives challenge the ideas and representations about them.
The women I interviewed belong to the Binnizá community and have not had any problems ascribing themselves to it, however, because of their differences—which seem to be outside the norm of what a Binnizá woman should be—raise important questions about identity.
Baring the responsibility of reproduction and of culture keepers, empowers women in a way, but it also reaffirms gender roles and the division of labor within the community. These characteristics also place them in a situation, in a sense, of having to reproduce exclusionary practices towards other women.
What Happens When You Are an Indigenous Woman and You Do Not Know Your Mother Tongue?
I previously mentioned that women are identity keepers and how it is inscribed in their gender roles, beginning with motherhood and the transmission of our mother tongues. However, many women in the community have little or no knowledge of their mother tongue, as a consequence of the burden they carry of colonial dispossession. Because of this ethnic identity harm, they seek other identity mechanisms such as, for example, family ancestry.
It turns out that our mothers, who did not deny their identities, rejected their first keeper’s responsibility of protecting the language, for fear of reprisals against their daughters and sons. This generation of children have grown up away from the first form of communication with our mother, and we are at the mercy of either having a wounded ethnic identity or unable to appropriate it well.
That is, there is a considerable number of women who do not speak their native language and who have been questioned by other women for not knowing how to speak it. This type of questioning arises when they present themselves as being different from others who can fulfill the role of identity keepers.
After that first encounter, these women then start questioning their own sense of self. Moreover, by being in contact with other cultures, a transformation occurs, not only socially but also the sense of being and feeling as a woman who belongs to an indigenous community. In an interview with Xóchitl, she states:
I consider myself Zapotec because my grandmother is from Juchitán, all my aunts, my mother, my family, my grandmother speak Zapotec . . . So, when I told my grandmother that I wanted to learn Zapotec, she told me that it was not going to help me because she has this idea that Zapotec is useless. She herself looked down on it, and I did not have the opportunity to learn Zapotec naturally. But even though I don’t speak it, I consider myself Zapotec.
This type of questioning of the self creates a vacuum about what we should call ourselves; in fact, we can even say that many girls and adolescents have a late acceptance of their identity. Since childhood, we acquire a series of categories of who we are, to be able to name ourselves, in interaction with others.
That is, since many girls lack this first identity device—language—they suffer a dispossession of their being. Wanting to find the part of their being that is missing, which was plundered, they look for other devices to feel they belong. As Candy mentions:
I do consider myself Zapotec, although the language is something very distinctive of all Zapotecs; it is not the only thing, but I believe that there are many gradients and many splinter groups that can be assembled within the same culture, but I believe that culture permeates you in many ways. It is not just that I consider myself, but the fact that Zapotec people who speak the language and so on, do consider me Zapotec.
Many times, I asked myself the same question. If I don’t know how to speak my grandmothers’ and my mother’s language, and it is precisely what makes me different from them, what links me to them? What kind of Zapotec woman am I?
What Happens When the Representation of the Binnizá Woman Does Not Represent You?
We have an imaginary referent, a Binnizá woman that dresses, walks, and speaks in an imposing manner, that is fixed as universal. That Binnizá woman represents all that we have wanted to be and what we wish to be, on the exterior.
This desire to be an image constructed by others, blinds the community to a certain extent, when they look at other women who step out of that representation that only exists during the town’s festivities.
The community’s artists themselves have been responsible for reaffirming that representation, by encapsulating in their narrative, in their photographs, in their lyrics the same woman-matriarch who dresses up in expensive attire and jewelry. They have thus reaffirmed not only an ethnic identity as “powerful empowered women,” but also a single feminine identity, a static idea of how a woman should be and behave in society. Xóchitl explains that sentiment this way:
I believe that I break with many stereotypes of how a woman in the region should be. I do not agree with traditions that I consider to be sexist and misogynist, so by not going along with these customs, being from a place where customs and traditions still exist, my being clashes with the harmony of living in this society.
When a dominant image prevails over others, and is constructed through mechanisms that exclude and categorize, it ends up making differences visible. “And difference is constructed as an affirmation of diversity” (Aura Cumes, 2009, p. 43). Certain challenging characteristics—such as the way you love, the way you dress, the tattoos on your body—become a threat to the accepted narrative of identity in the community; your difference becomes the way to question the dominant narrative. Karina defines it this way:
There is a certain projection of the Zapotec woman, which you see from the point of view of the festivities, that is, the beautiful woman with her clothes, very high-class. But actually, the real Zapotec woman is not like that. When you see the women who go to the Guelaguetza,3 it kind of distances you from reality or distances people from reality. They see the videos and they say, “Oh, look how beautiful the Zapotec women are!” But we are not like that.
What Binnizá women are required to comply with to be valued as such, ranges from an inspection of authenticity by elite groups that dominate the town’s festivities, to an ethnic evaluation of the good pronunciation of our mother tongue.
It would seem then that the image that exists of the strong Binnizá woman ceases to be a representation and becomes a stereotype of the women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which permeates in the way they dress, speak, and their being. These requirements take shape in practices that must necessarily and urgently be labeled as classist and exclusionary.
What Happens When a Woman Does Not Have the Economic Means to Wear a Regional Dress?
Clothing, especially for indigenous women, is possibly an immediate device of ethnic identity but also of feminine identity. Through it, women not only feel their ethnicity reaffirmed, but it also creates a judgment of what a Zapotec woman should be. The dress has an ethnic and cultural load that transcends spaces like festivities and outdoors, carrying a weight of femininity that seems to encapsulate women.
The way women wear flowers on their heads can signal whether a woman is single or married, thus manufacturing feminine symbolism. This is in contrast with men, whose clothing is seen as simple and easy to procure and also does not have the symbolism of their marital status, as it does for women, who seem to need to constantly reaffirm their gender roles.
It is necessary to stress that, in the Zapotec community, the Tehuana traditional dress has a European influence, the fabrics and ruffles were brought from abroad, as well as how they are constructed and designed.
The use of large jewels wrapped around the women’s necks and adorning their ears, have shaped the most reproduced representation of what a Zapotec woman is, or as it is known in other texts, a “a Tehuana woman”, “an Isthmian woman” or “the Zandunga.”4
These garments have the characteristic of being very expensive and, depending on the embroidery, can be used to emphasize a social class distinction among women. The jewelry, on the other hand, carries references within the narratives of our grandmothers and mothers as a method of saving profits obtained in the market. As it is well known, Binnizá women are economically active, therefore, they convert their savings into gold jewelry so that they can later pawn it or pass it on to their daughters. Candy mentions the economic barriers for some women:
I don’t have a traditional dress, but my economy as a single mom doesn’t allow me to afford one, and it’s not a priority anymore. But I do want one, when I see them, I love them, but I just can’t afford them.
We can also point out that although traditional dress, like language, are devices that shape ethnic identity and are also part of the cultural reproduction under women’s care, there are issues that have been normalized within the community and have been overlooked, such as how some women, due to their economic situation, are unable to acquire this attire. Therefore, they do not have access to this device to construct their ethnicity and femininity before society and before the community.
From a patriarchal construction and a discourse of preserving traditions, much more emphasis has been placed on women’s responsibility to safeguard identity and culture, giving women many more reproductive responsibilities than they already have been assigned.
Many women during my interviews expressed these feelings, about not having the economic solvency to purchase a Tehuana dress and, therefore, must find cheaper versions, but as a consequence are criticized by other women for not looking like an “authentic” Zapotec. Karina expresses this feeling thus:
Sometimes you don’t have the economic solvency, but you do it anyway to wear that dress, because you want the uniqueness, and find yourself going into debt for that outfit. I think they do give a lot of value to the real traditional dress, the genuine one. And I think that they are not being authentic sisters. No, we are not sisters because, maybe we greet face-to-face and everything is fine, but then they criticize you behind your back just because of your attire. So, I do think so. There are also many other deep, deep issues there.
Since indigenous women, or in this case Binnizá women, play the role of being responsible for the reproduction of these ethnic devices of femininity, they can fall into a circle of control towards other women and have exclusionary practices towards them.
In contrast, some women appropriate the traditional dress as a form of political posture toward other uses, for example, by using it as a disguise or as a way to exclude other women. They thus wear the traditional dress to give a sense of struggle, that is, against the essentialisms created for women, not as a requirement to belong, but to hold an identity without taking into account economic or class issues, as it happens in other spaces, such as community festivals. To quote Xóchilt:
My mom wears it to go out, she doesn’t wear an enagua [pleated skirt] all the time. I noticed that we are losing the custom of wearing these clothes; they are only a worn during celebrations. I am against that idea, so I also wanted to appropriate it. As a posture.
We could say, then, that the meaning of the use of traditional clothing that constitutes the ethnicity and femininity of women from indigenous communities, can change its meaning according to the use it is given in specific situations. That is to say, it is possibly creating a resignification of why we use it and how we cover our bodies, and what we mean by it. Clearly this positioning arises from questioning our identity, given the existence of exclusionary practices towards those who are different.
What Happens When You Cannot Fulfill the Role of a Keeper? Where Will My Blood Go?
We, the women of the community, feel obliged to comply with the “duty to be” a woman and an indigenous woman, what roles correspond to us as women and as indigenous women. Therefore, from a patriarchal construction and a discourse of preserving traditions, much more emphasis has been placed on women’s responsibility to safeguard identity and culture, giving women many more reproductive responsibilities than they already have been assigned.
These responsibilities often encapsulate women and place them in a debate between collective and individual interests; there is often talk of rescuing our identity without taking into account the social, emotional, and economic context of the individuals. Thus, much of the burden of “rescuing identity” falls on the indigenous woman, who ends up becoming a generic image. Norma puts it this way:
I have not been discriminated against for being a Zapotec woman, nor have I suffered any type of discrimination, but I have been excluded by society because I do not attend festivities because of my religion, also because sometimes I do not or wear very little jewelry.
It is much easier to detect exclusionary practices towards women in the community than towards men, since they are the ones in charge of representing the total cultural identity of a community.
This also leads to the invisibility of other women who “do not meet” the requirements or who do not have these identity devices. The exclusionary and violent practices towards them are seen as traditions within the community, making it difficult to see the consequences at a glance. For example, Candy expresses it this way:
I have met people who judge me for not being able to speak Zapotec, especially people from Juchitán, because I don’t speak Zapotec and because I don’t dress in an enagua and huipil [embroidered blouse] every day, but I do feel I am from here because this is my identity.
Even the creation of “culture keepers ” could err in the idea of creating a collective knowledge and end up creating a dominant elite within the community, one that has the last say. For example, “authenticity committees” that evaluate attire and the correct diction of the language, in order to get a pass to a state festival that encapsulates difference, while trying to build an image rather than an “identity.”
As another example, we could point out the surveillance towards the diction of the mother tongue, about how there is a dominant way of pronouncing it, leaving aside other expressions that can help to keep it alive, refraining from knowing other variants of saying and writing the language, because of centralism, believing that there are rules and ways of doing it, pretending that there is a dictionary endorsed by a single variant that excludes the narratives of other peoples who share the culture and the language. This practice is seen as violent.
These exclusionary practices are part of the daily life of women in the Binnizá community, which I belong to, since many of them share spaces such as markets, where there are power relations between Binnizá women who live in the center of the territory and who do not recognize other women from the same community living in the “peripheral” parts of the territory.
The surveillance that exists towards our selves is an exercise of dominant power towards our forms of expression, our bodies, the division of territory, and our way of speaking. These practices make other women who exist in the community invisible, and who, because of their way of life and expressions, are seen as harming a universal sense of ethnic and feminine identity.
An example of this is with women who belong to the LGBTIQ+ community. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is known as a muxhe paradise, but women who belong to sexual dissidences are rarely mentioned, because they stand in contrast to the construction of a Binnizá women identity, and their gender expression and ways of dressing are incredibly disruptive to the perception of what an indigenous woman “should be.” Xóchitl shared this feeling with me:
I have not felt discrimination among my peers, but I have felt it from adults, even within the same family. They make comments about how we are not following the stereotype of how we should be. I am a lesbian, I have not felt discrimination from my family, but I have felt it in the street. But also because of my ideas, things like clothing and tattoos, even the way I behave.
These questions expressed in this text would not be possible if these women, including myself, who belong to an indigenous community that has even been expropriated by a pop and essentialized culture, inside and outside the community, did not name and question ourselves as we are.
The existence of women who do not speak Zapotec, do not dress in expensive traditional dress, do not fulfill a preset female role, or live in “peripheral” parts of the territory, challenges any hint of essentialism within the community. Coming from such an essentialist indigenous community I ask myself: where will my blood go? Where will it go if I don’t have all the requirements to be an identity and cultural keeper?
Even the creation of “culture keepers ” could err in the idea of creating a collective knowledge and end up creating a dominant elite within the community, one that has the last say.
I personally believe that the networks and links created between women who recognize similar and different characteristics in other women make it possible to think of a diversity that sweeps away the idea of one matriarchy and expands the panorama of being and experiences. To quote the author Aura Cumes, “Building from the plurality of positionings, diverse perspectives and proposals, will allow us, as has been done in other unequal contexts, to reconstruct the concepts, analytical frameworks, and policies that guide our struggles” (2009, p. 43).
Where will my blood go? It will go towards the struggle for a kinder and more inclusive context for the diversity of women, where context and experience are recognized, toward the recognition of shifting identities, shaped within the spaces of contentment and consent. I could say that the more we recognize the diversity of experiences, contexts, and aptitudes, while leaving aside purity and essentialism, we will be able to build territories that are more suitable for the ways of living as women.
Thus, we will be able to detect what is harmful, what is harsh, what is destructible in our context, even if it casts doubt and questions our identity, because if we recognize each other, it will be difficult—even impossible—to be stripped of our being again.
Bibliography
Binford, Leigh. (1996). “Graciela Iturbide: Normalizing Juchitán.” History of Photography, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 244-248.
Cumes, Aura. (2009). “Multiculturalismo, género y feminismos: Mujeres diversas, luchas complejas.” En Participación y políticas de mujeres indígenas en contextos latinoamericanos recientes, comp., Andrea Pequeño, pp. 29-52. Quito: FLACSO, Sede Ecuador.
Hall, Stuart. (1996). “Introducción: ¿quién necesita ‘identidad’?” En Cuestiones de identidad Cultural, comps., Stuart Hall y Paul du Gay, pp. 13-39. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores.
Salazar, J. (2021). La Guelaguetza: una construcción social que vende racismo y estereotipos indígenas. San Francisco, California. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/9w032826n.
Footnotes:
- I want to extend my total gratitude to the collaboration of all the women who bravely told me about their experiences and allowed me to publish and reflect on them in this text. ↩︎
- The inhabitants of the Zapotec community of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, call themselves Binnizá, which in English translates to “People who come from the clouds.” ↩︎
- Every summer, thousands of people visit the city of Oaxaca to witness a famous cultural event called the Guelaguetza. The Guelaguetza is a term that comes from the Benizaa, Penihualache, or Zapotec language. In pre-colonial times, the Guelaguetza consisted of giving gifts, tributes, and offerings among community members during religious events. This event established a debt or social contract between the people who were part of an indigenous locality. Currently, it is the most popular celebration in the state of Oaxaca (Salazar, 2021). ↩︎
- The filmmaker Sergei Einstein recreated the image of a woman celebrating her wedding and dancing to the rhythm of a song called “Zandunga.” Consequently, the filmmaker called the Binnizá women Zandungas, which is an example of some of the names given to Binnizá women throughout history. ↩︎
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