La Vocera and the Struggle for Liberation: Indigenous Women Heard in Theory, Not in Practice

Abstract

In 2014, Mexican voters approved a ballot for electoral reform that allowed independent candidates to run for office for the first time in the nation's 204-year history. The only prerequisite for the presidential ballot was to gain the political backing of 1% of the country’s eligible voters by collecting the signatures of roughly 865,000 people eligible to vote. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional had long refused to engage in institutional politics, but the electoral reform presented an opportunity to reveal systemic inequities and disenfranchisement in rural communities while breaking colonial gender norms, challenging the long-standing notion of what a woman’s place should be in the political sphere. However, doing so risked legitimizing the colonial government, endangering organization members, and wasting resources. They created the Congreso Nacional Indígena to further explore the possibility of nominating a figurehead for the presidential ballot. During such discussion, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, a traditional Nahua healer from Southern Jalisco, emerged as a key figure. This case examines the possible implications of a female nomination from a movement that avoids labeling itself a feminist cause, instead incorporating principles of Indigenous gender complementarity, inherently different from the strict Western binary.