Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca
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Overview
In this extensively revised and updated second edition of her classic ethnography, Lynn Stephen explores the intersection of gender, class, and indigenous ethnicity in southern Mexico. She provides a detailed study of how the lives of women weavers and merchants in the Zapotec-speaking town of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, have changed in response to the international demand for Oaxacan textiles. Based on Stephen’s research in Teotitlán during the mid-1980s, in 1990, and between 2001 and 2004, this volume provides a unique view of a Zapotec community balancing a rapidly advancing future in export production with an entrenched past anchored in indigenous culture.
Stephen presents new information about the weaving cooperatives women have formed over the last two decades in an attempt to gain political and cultural rights within their community and standing as independent artisans within the global market. She also addresses the place of Zapotec weaving within Mexican folk art and the significance of increased migration out of Teotitlán. The women weavers and merchants collaborated with Stephen on the research for this book, and their perspectives are key to her analysis of how gender relations have changed within rituals, weaving production and marketing, local politics, and family life. Drawing on the experiences of women in Teotitlán, Stephen considers the prospects for the political, economic, and cultural participation of other indigenous women in Mexico under the policies of economic neoliberalism which have prevailed since the 1990s.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“After it first appeared, Zapotec Women quickly became a must-read in the fields of gender and Latin American studies, and today it can fairly be regarded as a classic. This thoroughly revised edition is a tour de force. Not content merely to add a few pages at the beginning or end of chapters, Lynn Stephen has rethought several key conceptual frameworks and reconsidered the changes experienced in Teotitlán del Valle over the past twenty years.”— Matthew C. Gutmann, editor of Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America“How wonderful that this second edition of Zapotec Women is available! So well written and blessedly lacking in jargon, it comprehensively explains the evolution of women’s cooperatives in Teotitlán, including their interactions with the Mexican state and NGOs, and the effects of transnational forces like NAFTA and increased migration to the United States.”—Jean Jackson, coeditor of Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America
“In Zapotec Women, Lynn Stephen presents a complex analysis of stereotypically strong women. She situates women’s independence, forged in daily life, in Zapotec tradition that is framed by state-sponsored images of ‘Mexican Indians’ and market transformations that have regional, national, and international dimensions. Stephen’s compelling analysis illuminates class, ethnic, and gender relations that are unexpected and contingent. She renders these social processes beautifully, leaving the reader with an appreciation of individual lives in the context of global transformation.”—Patricia Zavella, coeditor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader
“This book is a light in the darkness. The author is a brilliant weaver who, with great expertise, intertwines the fine threads of gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, age, and art, rendering a magnificent tapestry. A rigorous anthropology of Zapotec women in a socio-historical context, the work also surprises by contemplating the aesthetic component of the sarapes created by the artisans of Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca.”—Eli Bartra, editor of Crafting Gender: Women and Folk Art in Latin America and the Caribbean