Giving Thanks to Voices of Women's Revolution - Up from Chiapas

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/moses11222006.html


With the storefront door opened to crisp air and curious people, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo is for now seated near friends who ask for an autograph of her 2001 book, 'Histories and Stories from Chiapas.' Turning back the cover, she points to a full-page photo of a white stelae, explaining how borders are marked the traditional way, not with walls.

"It's a symbolic border," she smiles, showing how the marker sits upon an island in the middle of a lake. From her position not quite in the center of a gathering crowd at MonkeyWrench Books in Austin, Texas, the legendary anthropologist is glowing with words, ideas, projects, and stories. It is time, says an organizer, to get the program started.

In her latest collaboration, 'Dissident Women,' published the week before Thanksgiving, Hernández is one of several editors and writers who offer fresh studies about the ongoing indigenous women's revolutions of Southern Mexico, including a first-time-in-English publication of the 1994 Mayan document, 'Women's Rights in our Traditions and Customs.'

As co-editor Shannon Speed explains to Monday nights's tightly-packed audience, the women of Southern Mexico are working out terms of struggle that allow them to organize within "cultural spaces" connected to indigenous traditions, even as they assert their rights to reform those traditions.
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and the article ends with:

"Health is the well-being of the people and the individual, who have the capacity and motivation for all types of activities whether social or political," declared the Zapatista community Moisés Gandhi in 1997. "Health is living without humiliation; being able to develop ourselves as women and men; it is being able to struggle for a new country where the poor and particularly the indigenous peoples can make decisions autonomously. Poverty, militarization and war destroy health."

Surely on Thanksgiving Day, these are words any true pilgrim would be thankful to digest.
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and the beat goes on

[Peace Patriot]

1. I want that book! k&r!