The diverse ways in which indigenous women inhabit a space, allow us to recognize identity and gender issues and enable us to analyze territorial problems by interweaving the gaze of thousands of people who share the same space. Every place we inhabit ends up being a biographical slice of our life histories, full of traces that create each universe.
Among the many spaces that Binnizá women inhabit, there are two that seem essential to talk about in this text, since the home and the market have been identified as scenarios dominated by women. At least that is what many authors have said on paper… This view, however, does not allow us to see the diversity of women’s thoughts and feelings who live in these communities.
This text explores the ideas of some Binnizá women who narrate, from their own experiences, events that have marked their lives in the home and the market. Their experiences help us reflect on the following questions.
The Home: Our Roots
In the Zapotec community we have rituals that establish a connection between “being” and our home. The best known, which is practiced since birth, is to bury the umbilical cord of a newborn baby in the maternal grandmother’s house. The umbilical cord and the placenta are wrapped in sheets and kept in a small clay jar, to be later buried under a tree in the courtyard.
This custom has several meanings. One is to protect the newborn and their home. The other is for the children to return to their village and their mother’s house. Norma Cabrera recalls that:
My mother buried my children’s navels [umbilical cord] in her backyard, that is why since she was young, my daughter asks to spend more time at her maternal grandmother’s house than at her paternal grandmother’s house, because according to belief, that is where her roots are (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
A home is built through inheritances, especially among women; a home is built through the inheritance of our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. A photograph adorning a wall, a refurbished wooden bench that has survived for generations, a cooking pot for special occasions, a tortilla press, a branch to transplant that fragrant flowering tree like the one our mother has in her backyard, a trunk of clothes, and other objects that end up occupying spaces in our home.
How women practice passing on their inheritance to other women, builds stronger meanings about their relationship to the house. Zapotec women prioritize buying land for their next house construction project because they are always thinking about what they will inherit to their daughters, to guarantee their future and comfort; some women leave behind gold coins as inheritance so that their descendants can pawn them and build their own house.
The Zapotec language was born at home, a safe place to speak it, since in schools, considered an educational space, speaking it was punished by teachers and administrators. Spanish was spoken outside the house, while our language was spoken inside the house. Araceli, a Binnizá merchant, recalls that:
The teacher would make us get up to the blackboard and if we uttered a word in Zapotec, he would make fun of the girls and hit the boys’ hands. We would tell our parents, and they would answer: Don’t speak it out there anymore, just speak Zapotec at home, with us (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
The Home: A Place of Work
The “rooms” in my house are divided by giant pieces of furniture that are used as walls. My brother’s room is painted sky blue, with a strip of wallpaper with race cars that he chose, while my room is orange with a strip of wallpaper with yellow flowers that I did not choose.
My parents’ room has furniture and mirrors, it is decorated in the same way as mine, it seems as if those colors have to do with the degree of responsibility inside the house because, since I was 10 years old, I share the household activities with my mother, unlike my brother, whose inclusion in the household duties came later.
It would not be difficult to recognize my house as a place of work because, like many other Binnizá girls, the mother’s living space is incorporated into their lives from childhood. Anthropologist Marinella Miano Borruso (2002) states that in Zapotec culture, girls maintain a closeness with their mother, helping them with household chores, learning the knowledge and social behaviors assigned to women.
Zapotec girls are integrated into household work at a young age, performing activities such as cleaning, cooking, or selling, which take up space and time in their childhood. These activities are what set girls apart from their male siblings; at an early age, girls begin to complain about the few hours they have to play as opposed to boys. Our home becomes our workspace from a very young age.
The house is historically recognized as a space of privacy and intimacy that is linked to women, while public spaces like the market or the mayor’s office, are linked to men.
However, within the community, this idea of privacy and intimacy is often broken by women’s labor. For example, many Binnizá women convert spaces in their homes into dance floors for the thousands of parties they throw or open their doors when they improvise a small food stand and put up a sign to sell their product. Thus, they are abandoning the idea of privacy to create a space for comings and goings, of strangers entering and exiting their homes. This gives a new meaning to the house, turning it into a public space whenever necessary for the women’s activities.
On the other hand, observing the domestic path that my mother makes inside the home, we could say that she inhabits all spaces in different ways: I can count more than fifty activities related to the home that she has to take care of every day, with some variations.
I began to observe the floor at home and realized that there are some worn tiles at the entrance of the kitchen that, if you follow it, form a path of faded tiles that represent the domestic journey that my mother makes. Norma comments as follows:
It’s because I drag my foot, it’s where I walk the most. The kitchen is small, your dad wants to make it bigger, but I already get tired inside that little square. It’s the coming and going, many times, and since I’m the one who walks, I’ve been erasing the color (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
It is important to recognize the appropriation of spaces and the meanings that women give them, even the domestic journey they make shows their history. “The house itself is constituted by daily crossings, crossings where gender unequivocally marks the rhythm,” writes sociologist Leonor Arfuch (2013, p. 4).
Zapotec women move through their home as something that belongs to them, however, they are always seeking freedom. Houses can take on different meanings based on the characteristics of their inhabitants; in many homes they live under the constant threat of violence and the concept of home seems to change. But women are always seeking to take ownership by leaving those traces that seem invisible to other eyes, except their own, because they recognize their journey and their work.
The Market: A Second Place of Work

For the women in my community, the house and the market are spaces that have been inhabited by generations of women before them, even the ways of selling a product or the product they sell are inherited by the women in the family. Most of us are descendants of women who have inhabited their homes as a market and the markets as their home. Both are a reflection of the long working hours of Binnizá women.
Authors like Miano (2002) describe the market as a space dominated by Binnizá women. In this place they make purchases, sales and exchanges, it is a symbol of economic power and in the imagination of many, a space where a Binnizá woman can best function. Miano mentions that work, the handling of money, and an economic space of their own are all conceptualized by them (p. 79).
After the earthquake of September 7, 2017, [1] the community’s emblematic buildings, among them, markets, were destroyed. Thus, temporary markets were built almost everywhere in the region. Women merchants took over unpaved spaces, parking lots, and parks, therefore, we could say that spaces are subject to change and subjects provide them with new meanings of their own. This can be understood in the words of geographer and social scientist Doreen Massey, quoted by Arfuch, who calls a space as “a product of relations and interactions that is always open, in the process of formation, becoming, never finished” (2013, p.10).
Although it may seem that the market is a natural space for Binnizá women, as other researchers have fantasized, the reality is that many women have to cope with their husbands and long working hours.
Griselda, a Binnizá merchant at the public market, mentions that:
I was motivated by our needs at home, my children were growing up, I sold tamales, cheese, and cream on the streets, house to house, whatever my husband would allow me to do. Although there was a need, he didn’t see the point of me going to sell to another town, but people here don’t pay [well]. I was following the advice of some elderly women who told me: leave the house clean, your husband’s and children’s food ready, leave and go sell so they don’t scold you. So I did, one day I took courage and went to sell in the Ixtepec market […] I have been selling in the market for almost 15 years now (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
Many women have to go on the sly to sell and show their husbands the advantages of earning a double salary, and with this reasoning, the men give in. Even if this implies working long hours, because to be considered a “good Binnizá woman” one cannot leave the home, child rearing, and also the long hours in the market unattended.
It could be said that the market not only offers them extra income, but also provides them with new skills as providers, which breaks with the traditional female representation inside a household. The limited control of their earnings and ways of negotiating with other women and men positively influences their decision-making, which may be seen by some men as a threat to their manhood.
Griselda says that her husband continues to complain about her going to the market, the triple shifts are exhausting, but her husband has labeled her as a “lazy woman” because sleeps whenever she can:
My husband always says that I don’t work, that only he works. I work more hours than he does and I get tired, sometimes when he comes home, I’m already sleepy, and he says I’m lazy. When we buy something for the house he says that he bought it himself, he doesn’t value the money I earn, although many times I have gotten him out of trouble (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
Most women spend more than eight hours at the market, which in Mexico is a workday, plus the hours spent on housework and childcare, which is often carried from the home to the market.
The work of Binnizá women, although praised by many researchers and men in the community who have referred to them as “naturally hard-working women,” has led to minimizing conversations about fatigue and long workdays. It is even considered a source of pride for the community itself that a woman is so hardworking, and it has become unacceptable for her to complain and/or get tired.
By naturalizing Binnizá women as women who do not get tired and who work hard, we render invisible issues that may arise, such as illnesses, physical and mental fatigue, to the point of considering their work as worthless because it is “something natural.”
The Market: The Trench
The smells, tastes, narrow aisles that take us to a different place, for these women become memories that mean the market’s harshness, a place where they must stand for long periods of time, their hands and heads holding baskets and bags, their throats parched from trying to win over customers, thousands of them.
The noise is not subtle at all, music, laughter, and screams intertwine to build this space, perhaps it is the place where women scream the loudest. Women throughout history have been silenced, we are not allowed to scream, society expects a woman to use a low tone of voice and without a strong presence.
Griselda recalls that her first fear at the market was raising her voice to sell her products; she had never done so before. She felt that her family would make fun of her if they heard her shouting to attract customers, but through the solidarity and advice from other saleswomen, she was able to not feel shame for making her voice heard. Griselda tells us the following:
I have friends, I live with them daily, most of them are already old. When I don’t go [to the market] I miss them because you make friends, you find out when they get sick, when they have debts, and when you don’t show up, they ask, Why didn’t you come, your client came. They remember you (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
Friendships are made from one booth to the next, debts are forgiven, they listen to each other, take care of each other’s stalls when one has to go to the bathroom and sell your products so that you do not lose a customer because they share the same needs.
These acts of solidarity among women are what sustain community relations. The support networks that are being consolidated in the market allows us to understand this space in a different context: not as a place where women rule and govern, but as a space where women support each other because they share similar needs.
Griselda remembers:
Once they came to buy bread from a colleague and took several bags, these people gave her a counterfeit 500 peso bill and she gave them all her change. They took her bread and her earnings. This is how swindlers act. The compañera began to cry and other women began to raise funds to collect those 500 pesos. That’s nice because we are united (personal communication, August 14, 2024).
Among the conversations one can hear the desperation of not being able to sell and about the moneylenders who haunt the markets, chasing them to take away their few daily earnings. One can also hear advice about marriage, children, and illnesses such as knee pain, which is what afflicts them the most.
They celebrate when the rains are good and embrace the natural harvests, the Binnizá women have a particular way of calling their products harvested in their own lands: “tomato from here,” “lemons from here,” “stew from Ixtaltepec,” “tamales from Juchitán,” “breads from Espinal,” “epazote from La Sierra,” “cilantro from up there,” “natural papayas.” These are some of the phrases one can hear and that make reference to the product’s origin, which many times are free of pesticides. It is a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors, the supermarkets that have surrounded the public market.
The market is also a place where children are raised, especially their daughters. The women Binnizá have their daughters by their side, some of them already manage their mother’s stalls, they go back and forth between the different stalls with their school uniforms.
Women see in this space a free place and sometimes they indulge, hidden from their husbands, by buying a pair of filigree earrings in small payments; with their earnings they choose to fulfill a whim and these decisions are supported by the advice of other women who approve their actions without judgment.
The market is not only the building with a designated name, it is also the streets that the Binnizá women walk from house to house selling their products. “To walk is to take ownership of a place” (Arfuch, 2013, p. 5). Even their own house is a market, which as I already mentioned, is defined by its privacy and intimacy, but the Binnizá women also use their house as local markets, where they sell their products and even the activity of selling breaks with the domestic routine of housework.
Outsiders have described this space as a women’s kingdom, but I think that as far as I am concerned, it is a space that responds to the needs of Binnizá women. The market responds to the irresponsibility of their husbands, to the forced marriage that still exists in the community, and to their search for economic freedom. It is not a kingdom, but a trench that isolates temporarily from a world controlled by men, which is what happens sometimes at home. This is the reason for the exclusion of the masculine in this space and the acceptance of the feminine in the muxes.[2]
Inhabiting Ourselves
Related to all of the above, the home and the market, or yoo ne luguiaa in didxazá, are spaces that have marked the lives and narratives of Binnizá women, both in an intimate and public sense. The way in which many exist and coexist has contributed to the multiple views that can be given to these spaces, while always identifying various ways of appropriation.
The practice of inhabiting ourselves has been one of constant struggle in wanting to build a space where we can speak, move and live with dignity. Today many of these spaces have been taken over by violent narratives that make us feel strange and tired. We women are trying hard to recover our own spaces based on what they mean to us.
Every space we decide to inhabit must be done with dignity and the belief that it belongs to us, even if to get there we often have to tear down walls that stand in the way of our freedom.
To inhabit ourselves is also a communal act. How women practice solidarity to help other women to inhabit spaces has been the main way to fight against the dispossession of our ways of life.
Binnizá women’s journeys through these spaces have written the stories of their own identity, the comings and goings dictate the difficulties of being, but also the way in which they have built their own territories. The fatigue of their bodies, the tracks they make on the floor of their homes, show how they have always struggled to exist but resist to move away from what has always belonged to them.
Inhabiting ourselves implies recognizing ourselves within a world built by men and which only responds to their needs. The way in which we women have inhabited these spaces has been so strong that it seems to respond to a woman’s world, but in reality, it a way to resist abandoning ourselves. A resistance that allows us to fight against everything that wants to force us to be strangers in our own territory. To inhabit us is to live with dignity.
- On the night of September 7, 2017, an earthquake of magnitude 8.2 shook Mexico and severely impacted several towns on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Families lost their homes and common spaces were destroyed. ↩︎
- To quote Amaranta Gómez (2004), “The muxe from Juchiteca tries to cover the term feminine male, and it is what all of us who are born male and grow up with female gender identities are called, it is an identity similar to gay and transgender, but with sui generis characteristics.” ↩︎
Bibliography
Arfuch, Leonor. (2013). “La ciudad como autobiografía.” Bifurcaciones. No. 12. Universidad Católica de Chile. https://www.bifurcaciones.cl/la-ciudad-como-autobiografia/.
Gómez, Amaranta. (2004). “Trascendiendo.” Desacatos. No. 15-16. CIESAS, pp. 199-208. https://desacatos.ciesas.edu.mx/index.php/Desacatos/article/view/1078/926.
Miano Borruso, Marinella. (2002) Hombre, mujer y muxe’ en el Istmo de Tehuantepec. Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.