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May 03, 2007
A Woman is a Citizen Who Works for Mexico
A woman is a citizen who works for Mexico. We must not treat her differently from a man, except to honor her more.
–Adolpho Lopez Mateos, former President of Mexico
Our Antropologia Mexicana classes have nearly come to an end, yet we still continue to have interesting conversations about Mexican society—I’m learning things that I’ve never taken the time to think about before.
Our final unit in the class is discrimination and we’re specifically focusing on discrimination present here in the Yucatan. On Tuesday, we discussed the role of women in Yucatecan society and their marginalization; to start off the class, Eugenia presented us with a video directed and published by a student of the UADY, in which he interviewed numerous different women, questioning them about how they view the role of women in Mexican society. We saw testimony from a Mayan woman, a mestiza, women from other parts of Mexico, and from an American living in Mexico.
While Mexico might claim to be an equal-opportunity society, the women all affirmed that such a claim is not the case; most women are often confined to work in the home and are often stigmatized for expressing interest in leaving la casa.
The women that do leave their homes, however, weave different lives. We discussed in class which women in Mexico are most likely to leave the home and work—those that live in a more liberal, educated city (like Merida), where the chance to find employment is probable. Or on the flipside, do women that work come from conservative, culturally-macho, poor pueblos, where there is greater need for money?
Ultimately, we decided that working women don’t fit into one class—they transcend multiple classifications and extend through all parts of Mexico. But all of them still are presented with unbelievable challenges and great difficulty, regardless.
We listened in the film to one woman that left Mexico for the United States, for the sake of finding a job. She worked for many years in the United States and earned a high level of education. When she returned to Mexico, she was ridiculed for having such credentials and was declined opportunities. Eventually, she fell back into the same destitution in which she started.
Another woman left Mexico for the United States as well. She found a job and sent money back to her husband and her children on a monthly basis. After years, she returned, only to find that her husband had found and married another woman—one that was better suited to cooking and cleaning. The family—including the woman’s own parents and siblings, had been using her money and had decided not to accept her back into the family.
The conversation was an interesting one—interesting and at the same time, a little bit sad.
Posted by jlsumich at May 3, 2007 05:30 PM