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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Women's co-ops in Chiapas(A young woman from Chiapas,
Manuela Diaz, spoke to News & Letters recently about the cooperative she had
helped organize there, the Jolom Mayetik Weavers' Cooperative. We have
translated her remarks from Spanish.) I'm from Chiapas, here as the
president of my cooperative to tell others about what we are doing. We organized
our cooperative because the women have many needs and problems. We have no money
or food or medicine for our families. The only large town nearby is San
Cristobal, where we had to sell everything we made for cheap prices. We
created the cooperative so we could look for markets besides San Cristobal. It is important to understand
the difference between co-ops run by the government and what we are doing. We
demanded that we be in control of our own money and have social and political
participation, so we formed our own independent co-ops. After the 1994 uprising
in Chiapas, women began to participate more directly in political matters,
specifically meetings and roadblocks. That was a significant change from before,
when women primarily stayed at home. The governmental co-ops were run by men who
made all the decisions, while the women did all the work. Now women have taken
responsibility for decision making and the direction that things are going. We make cotton and woolen woven
bags, also wall hangings, napkins, decorative covers, pillow cases, change
purses, bracelets, dolls, stuffed animals and even Zapatista dolls. We use back
strap looms and weave colored threads into the actual fabric, which looks like
embroidery. It takes a lot of work to do
the weaving, but we also need to care for our homes and families. Sometimes I
might wake up at 2:00 a.m. in order to get my weaving done, but then I have all
the other chores I must do and so I get to bed by 11:00 at night. That's the way
it is for a lot of women, especially when you have young children to take care
of. It's difficult because there are so many needs. Often we have no housing, or
there is no corn, or there are families that have no fields to work. For the
families, even if there is a fair trade, they don't get the minimum salary for
their weavings. They take classes in accounting and calculate the price, for
example, of one pillow case and if they'd get the minimum it would be 300 pesos
per pillow case. They sell it at 135 and 50% stays in the community to pay rent
for the store, electricity, transportation costs for the women to bring in the
products and administrative costs for the coop representatives. In the U.S. they can make a
little bit more but it's still not a fair price. Even though economically it's
not a viable system, the co-ops are important because the women get the ability
to get out of their homes, to come together and talk. Women have developed a training
center to help develop skills they never had before. There is a pedal loom there
that allows you to work broader fabrics and we also have a sewing machine that
women can learn about. Women also learn how to spread information to other areas
concerning our cooperative. We're building a new training center which is not in
San Cristobal but closer to the communities where we live. At the new center
there will be young women who haven't been involved before so that is very
exciting to us. We have some girls that are
involved who are 9-10 years old, and we have a broad span of ages, going up past
50 years old. Some of the younger women speak Spanish so they can go to various
fairs and sell the goods. Some young women don't want to marry. They want to
continue with their education and/or move to the city. They often get these
skills through the co-op as well. In this way they are challenging racism
against the rural Indian women within the broader Spanish speaking culture. Before 1994 women didn't
participate in much, but after, many more things were opened up for us. What the
Zapatista women said was "we have a right to participate in this."
Some things have changed, but some have not. Things have gotten a little
better regarding domestic violence, but there are still some men who rape and
beat women. In some cases when women leave the house, if they don't come back on
time, they'll get beaten. Or, in other cases, men won't give women enough money
to get things they need for the household, especially if it's for the children.
Or, if women are sick, they won't take them to the clinic or for medicine. When I return, I want to tell the other women, in addition to ideas, what life is like here. There are many women who just don't know what life is like anywhere else. |
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