The Marginalization of Mesoamerican Indigenous Women in Mainstream Feminism: Recognizing Overlooked Subjectivities
“[T]here is no way out of coloniality from within modern categories of thought.”
– Gabriela Veronelli, “A coalitional approach to theorizing decolonial communication”
Although contemporary, Western society may no longer be overtly colonial or patriarchal, its structures remain deeply shaped by these legacies. These forms affect minorities in a disproportionate manner, one of these marginalized groups are Mesoamerican Indigenous women. It is crucial to not grow blind to remnants of these legacies persisting within movements first appearing as progressive, such as mainstream feminism.
To begin, it is essential to define the key concepts that will be employed throughout this article. Mainstream feminism, often referred to as liberal feminism, historically emerged as “bourgeois feminism” addressing primarily the concerns of white women. It operates within existing social structures, seeking to integrate women into them without fundamentally altering those systems. Similarly, its natural descendant, modern neoliberal feminism, “seems perfectly in sync with the evolving neoliberal order” (Rottenberg, 2014). This implies that mainstream feminism seeks to achieve women’s freedom and equality while leaving society’s capitalist and neocolonial aspects unchanged. This view contrasts with radical feminism, which argues that only a unified “anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, ecological, and decolonial fight” (Dorlin, 2008) can restructure society to truly liberate all women from their interconnected yet distinct struggles. However, it is crucial to address mainstream feminism’s marginalization of Indigenous women, as this type of feminism dominates global women’s rights discourse. Major cultural productions, like the Barbie movie, and most feminist institutions, like ministries for women’s rights, predominantly adhere to a liberal feminist agenda. Indigenous women referred to are those from a region including parts of modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. These women are descendants of ancient civilizations such as the Maya, Mexica, Zapotec, Olmec, among others who have inhabited this area for thousands of years. Their identity is characterized by their blood lineage, but also by their cultural, linguistic, spiritual and social ties to their original communities.
This article first aims to highlight how the perspectives of Indigenous women, shaped by unique cultural contexts, often conflict with the mainstream feminist framework, exposing its limitations. In second place, this article’s intent is to show how mesoamerican Indigenous women transcend the limits discussed in the first part, expressing their subjectivities in manners that diverge from mainstream feminists’ ones. Ultimately, this article underlines the demand for true inclusivity in feminism, for both marginalized women’s self-expression and feminists’ efforts to create a space that welcomes and embraces them.
I. The limits of mainstream feminism and the need for an Indigenous framework of feminist theorizing and self-expression
While mainstream feminism doesn’t perpetuate colonialism itself, it incorporates elements of coloniality – the enduring patterns of power, knowledge, and social relations that outlived formal colonial rule. This issue is embedded in the history, structure, and principles of mainstream feminism, rather than a simple pattern within the movement.
Speaking on behalf of Indigenous women or speaking over them?
The exclusion of certain groups – whether based on race or gender – has been central to both colonial histories and mainstream feminism. Just as the “distinction between the human and the non-human became central to the expansion of Europe to Abya Yala” (Espinosa-Miñoso, Lugones, Maldonado-Torres, 2021), the distinction between the woman and the non-woman has always been central to whom the feminist movement advocates for and whom it overlooks. The main issue is merely about recognizing someone as human or as a woman in a general sense, but ensuring that they are acknowledged in a way that grants them their rights and benefits associated with those identities. The native people of Mesoamerica weren’t considered human in an equal way as their colonizers, because under the imposed framework only “the bourgeois white Europeans were civilized, (…) were fully human” (Lugones, 2010), and so the same rights didn’t apply to them. Similarly, non-white women historically weren’t considered women enough for feminism to include them in its struggle. Today, Mesoamerican Indigenous women stand at the intersection of colonialism’s and mainstream feminism’s exclusionary practices’, facing both the lingering dehumanization of colonial structures and the more complex exclusion of mainstream feminism.
Mainstream feminism no longer openly excludes women from certain minorities such as lesbians or women of color. However, it remains unwelcoming to some groups like trans women or muslim women and often ignores others, such as Indigenous women. This is not only a question of ignorance. Some radical feminist theorists go as far as saying that there is an incommensurability between white women and women of color, who live within the vagueness of unresolved colonial violence (Park, 2020). Prioritizing certain women’s identities as “woman” over others based on their alignment with a specific archetype, carries significant consequences. These women who don’t fit the current mainstream woman archetype are either not advocated for or other women speak in their place, for them though instead of them. They seldom get the opportunities to express themselves on their own.
Mainstream feminism’s dominance by white women, combined with Indigenous women’s divergence from the conventional female archetype, has led to the creation of a stereotypical archetype for Indigenous women. Multiple radical feminists have warned against this “ethnocentric habit that consists in constructing the ‘third world woman’ as an object of oppression that requires our support” and they equated “this form of ‘solidarity’ to benevolent paternalism, which has a lot to do with colonialism” (Braidotti, 2018). While not all Indigenous women fit the label of “third world women”, yet the archetype, portraying Indigenous women as helpless victims of gender oppression, viewed as an element inherent to their indigenous cultures, still prevails. Institutions, such as those involved in anti-domestic violence campaigns for fundraising events when asking for help for Indigenous women, frequently use this imagery to elicit pity. Although it is important to provide support when needed, relying on such stereotypes undermines the agency and rationality of Indigenous women. It preemptively forms opinions and actions without considering their own perspectives, strategies, and interpretations of their circumstances.
Certain scholars believe that “feminism, in general, has historically (…) generated skepticism among Indigenous women” (Bardwell-Jones, McLaren, 2019). However, that should not be surprising, taking into account mainstream feminism’s mechanisms that lead to the creation of the Indigenous woman stereotype. That is for example “undermining traditional gender norms of Indigenous communities” (Bardwell-Jones, McLaren, 2019). Rather than critically examining potential inequalities within these communities, they instead depict Indigenous gender roles as inherently oppressive. This approach judges Indigenous women without understanding their context, denying them the agency and insight to interpret their own experiences. It effectively says, “you are oppressed because your societal role, which I neither value nor relate to, appears oppressive to me.” The only way to break this cycle is by giving Indigenous women the space to share their own stories first. This is not about avoiding evaluation or commentary; it’s about ensuring there is a genuine foundation for any analysis that follows.
Elements of colonial legacy in mainstream feminist thought
Indigenous women’s knowledge systems are often marginalized within dominant knowledge frameworks. In a sociopolitical framework that still incorporates colonial elements, knowledge is often constructed through categories that prioritize values like productivity and progress, echoing the aims of colonial power structures. This approach promotes norms such as economic growth and individual achievement, while often marginalizing alternatives — particularly those that emphasize community, spiritual connection, and sustainability, as reflected in many Indigenous knowledge systems. It seems to some that Indigenous people are “better able to capture the complexity of the world, in part because the underlying ontology of Indigenous logic is relational, fluid, and pluralist” (Sinclair, 2019). Furthermore, this logic “validates truth claims made by Indigenous peoples about land restoration, ecological harms, treaty rights, and violence against women.” For example, collectives of Mesoamerican Indigenous feminists are calling for a holistic approach to the environment and its protection, since they consider nature as an extension of themselves. All in all, philosophical insights generated by Native scholars about their cultural cosmologies could result in “thinking about decolonial possibilities and cultivating socially just futures” and make feminists “more curious about the land, ocean, and sky” (Bowman, Rebolleda-Gómez, 2020). This requires distancing oneself from mainstream feminism, which does not advocate for broader (anticapitalist and ecological) societal change.
Indigenous women’s knowledge resulting from their historically and socially complex standpoints can be illustrated by a beautiful quote by Chela Sandoval: “An Indigenous woman’s standpoint is produced through inheritance and achieved through struggle: it is constituted by our sovereignty and constitutive of the interconnectedness of our ontology (our ways of being), our epistemology (our way of knowing) and our axiology (our ways of doing)” (Weir, 2017). However, Indigenous feminists in academia are “inserted into a dominant framework that recognizes neither multiple ways of knowing, nor the colonial power structures that shape both knowledge and knowers” (Bowman, Rebolleda-Gómez, 2020). As a result, their unique understanding of feminism-related topics cannot flourish within that framework. It is, in fact, more complicated for Indigenous feminists to build their theory in a mainstream feminist conceptual framework, which neither provides them with nor automatically acknowledges ways of reasoning, concepts and values that they ought to use. Overall, Indigenous feminist theory requires the introduction of entirely new premises and concepts that may seem counterintuitive or irrational to dominant modes of thought, even in feminism, often resulting in their devaluation.
Furthermore, there are clear imperfections in the practical exercise of trying to include Indigenous women in a framework that was not made with them in mind. It seems like “senior white feminists need to interrogate diversity projects; if they recruit women of color without changing the racist and colonialist structures of the university, diversity projects may be harmful to those they are seeking to support” (Bardwell-Jones, McLaren, 2019). Hence, the true goal of any branch of feminism should be to genuinely listen to Indigenous women, making space for the development of their feminist beliefs, rather than falling into the trap of creating superficial diversity projects or theories that fail to address their actual needs or aspirations.
II. Indigenous women’s feminist self-expression or techniques of revealing their unique subjectivities
It is paramount for Indigenous women to tell their own stories, ones that were told in their place for so long. For example, until recently, archeological studies contained androcentric biases for years and used “assumptions, theories, and methods that have reified the modern gender mythology of women’s subordinate status [in Indigenous communities]” (Mercado, 2004). Feminist theorists helped critique these studies and establish the standpoint theory with subjectivity as its key concept. Within standpoint theory, subjectivity refers to the unique perspectives and experiences shaped by an individual’s social location, including factors such as gender, race, class, and culture. It highlights that identity, knowledge, and truth are socially situated, with marginalized groups offering valuable, often overlooked perspectives from their lived experiences. There are strict norms as for the way one expresses subjectivity within the Western intellectual tradition. For example one can choose clear and structured discourse. It seems like sticking to those norms guarantees that others will pay more attention to what one expresses. Indigenous women are challenging those norms with their poetry, crafts, music, academic studies and plenty other outlets of self-expression.
Native language poetry as a reflexive protraction of Indigenous heritage
Mesoamerican culture is diverse and constantly evolving, shaped by regional and local traditions. While its people often identify more with their village, region, or language than the nation-state (Mercado, 2004), much of their cultural output, including literature, is created in the official national language. However, a writer can only fully retain her cultural framework of meaning by preserving her mother tongue. This is why “cultural continuity through a revitalization of Indigenous language” is so essential (Bardwell-Jones, McLaren, 2019). Some messages can only be expressed in a specific language to maintain their power. A series of three untitled poems by Irma Pineda constitute the best example. Originally written in Isthmus Zapotec, the poems are based on the brutal group rape and murder of a 73-year old Nahua woman in rural Veracruz by Mexican soldiers in 2007. By writing in her mother tongue, Pineda is able to show resistance not only in the content of her poem but also via its form.
“Peace was always our sister
until evil
eviscerated the earth
with its greed
Our cowering in the corner wasn’t enough
our silent pain did not satisfy
the thousand sly devils
dug up her body
to erase our history”
“Ay soldier you don’t care that
this is our house
this is our mother and daughter
we know every inch of her skin
just by smelling her scent
she doesn’t want you inside her
and so you will have no peace”
In this poignant poem, Pineda tells the story of both her people and herself. On one hand, rapes on Indigenous women by soldiers — the state’s representatives — are a recuring problem in the Oaxaca where Pineda is from. On the other hand, Pineda’s father, Víctor Yodo, founder of Workers-Peasants-Students Coalition (Cocei), disappeared because of the Mexican army when she was four years old. These two elements deeply connect the poetess with the experiences of other Indigenous women victimized by the military in diverse ways. She genuinely shares their pain and expresses solidarity by using “us/our” pronouns when referring to them as “our mother and daughter”. But Pineda’s work is not only an expression of emotions such as hurt, rage and regret. She also associates Indigenous women’s bodies with their history and land — a perspective central to Indigenous feminist thought. The woman’s body has been “dug up” to “erase [her people’s] history” from the earth, “eviscerated” by the same “evil” or “devils”. This phrasing shows that the destruction of an Indigenous woman is, in a symbolic and in a literal way, the destruction of her whole heritage. Hence, even horribly intimate experiences of Indigenous women, such as rape, are intertwined with the broader sociopolitical struggles that the Indigenous community has endured for centuries. Through her poetry, Pineda reclaims agency to narrate these struggles, telling her story on her own terms.
Another Indigenous poetess, Briceida Cuevas Cob, focuses on conveying a message to young women from her community in Tepakán (Campeche, Mexico). She writes in Yucatecan Maya and intends to be read in this language, motivating this desire by her concern that “young people and children are being alienated from their own land and their own language” (Wubbold, 2005). The translation of her “Yaan A Bin Xook” poem, goes:
“You will go to school,
You will not be empty-headed.
You will cross the threshold of
your imagination
going all the way into your own
house
without having to knock on the door.”
Cuevas Cob challenges the conventional idea of a woman’s role, offering a perspective shaped by her experiences both inside and outside her community of origin. She criticizes the traditional division of labor that confines women to the home rather than education spaces.et, she simultaneously expresses sorrow because young women are drifting away from home. What she actually desires is for Indigenous women to be educated and fully self-aware, so they can consciously choose to perpetuate their own culture — since “women and the home (…) they manage, represent a societal role and locus that are essential for cultural continuity” (Wubbold, 2005). While this ideal sounds essential, the poetess believes it is not problematic as long as a young woman conforms to it and does it in a creative, modern way. Overall, she seeks to present the Indigenous culture not as a gendered constraint but as a genuine source of empowerment.
Further in the poem, Cuevas Cob praises the features of Maya women, the same as those being disregarded by contemporary beauty standards. She portrays the way her “juntats’óol ‘sincerity, humility, and sincere, pure heart,’ [the indigenous woman] is able to see ‘recognize and appreciate’ the na’akal ‘ascent’ of her nojil ‘great’ ch’íibal ‘race, noble ancestry, lineage, blood origin’” (Wubbold, 2005). In other words, the poetess recognizes a type of beauty found in the purity of a bloodline, because it is physically safeguarding a heritage that has long been at risk of being lost. This kind of beauty holds much more significance than the ever-changing beauty standards. Such a message can be regarded as a more spiritual form of feminist body positivity. Overall, Cuevas Cob empowers herself and her people by expressing and reevaluating intimate experiences and conditions of being an Indigenous woman.
Silence as resistance to hegemonic modes of self-expression
Self-expression and advocacy are vital in situations of oppression, where others may not only deny one a voice, but may also attempt to speak on one’s behalf. Even if speaking up can be risky or nerve-racking, according to many feminists, it is the only possibility to initiate change and create more solidarity among women. This is how Audre Lorde, a Black feminist, explained it: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But (…) for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths (…) I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” (Lorde, 1980). This perspective remains valuable and has proven its efficiency, for example during the #MeToo movement, particularly among socially privileged women. However, recent years have seen a growing recognition of a new perspective on silence — silence as an act of resistance, silence as a unique mode of nonverbal self-expression.
In her essay “Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence” (2019), Martina Ferrari theorizes how, within a colonial framework of meaning, Indigenous people’s silence is stripped of depth and rendered incomprehensible, losing its complex sense. She argues that an Indigenous woman can only be understood by others if she abandons her mother tongue for a historically imposed language, thus losing the unique meaning and context of her own language. Overall, using the colonizer’s language is on one hand subscribing to a “conceptual and linguistic framework that inscribes [Indigenous women’s] culture, language, and being as inferior, while also, on the other hand, sacrificing their cultural specificity.” However, the issue extends beyond this point. In order to express her situation, the Indigenous woman not only has to give up on her mother tongue but also conform to a hegemonic western standard of communication. To express her situation, the Indigenous woman has to not only abandon her mother tongue but also conform to a hegemonic communication style issued from the Western tradition. That is a calm, serious, highly structured discourse with clear cause-effect chains. If the woman does not conform to this standard, and appears as overly emotional or expresses ideas that are not intuitive to a Western locutor, then “her voice is reduced to nonsense.”
Finally, the “incommensurability between [the hegemonic and the Indigenous] systems of meaning” results in what Ferrari coins as Indigenous women’s deep silence. Deep silence is not an overall lack of self-expression, but a lack of self-expression intelligible to the Western ear. This type of silence can be preferred over miscommunicating or being misunderstood and devalued. It can serve as a form of resistance to hegemonic norms, encouraging expression through nonverbal means. In summary, there is no binary logic of speech versus silence, as expression versus lack of expression. The equation of silence with powerless passivity might be rooted in the Western tradition, but cannot be automatically used for the interpretation of Indigenous women’s silence.
Discussing Indigenous women’s experiences of being silenced or choosing silence is delicate, as according to the deep silence theory, they do not directly verbalize this experience. However, there are artworks that help explore themes of silence of Indigenous women. Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo, while not Indigenous herself, explores themes of oppression and silence among Indigenous women from her country. Very importantly, Galindo does not speak on behalf of Indigenous women; instead, she figurates possible aspects of their experiences, expanding the audience’s sensitivity to recognize and acknowledge them. In the performance Meanwhile, they continue to be free (2007), eight months pregnant Galindo lies on a table with her hands and feet bound by an umbilical cord. The scene evokes the suffering of Guatemalan Indigenous women during the Guatemalan civil war. Many Indigenous pregnant women were tortured and raped by soldiers. They intended to destroy Indigenous women’s fetuses in a colonial and racist effort to ethnically cleanse their country’s population.
On one hand, Galindo expresses her compassion with the once tortured Indigenous women through her own physical discomfort and humiliation during the performance. On the other hand, through figuration, she draws attention to the collective trauma that the Guatemalan Indigenous women endure in silence. The artist stays completely silent throughout the whole performance. Making this choice, she strives to create “a space of tension between her body and the one of the public (…), a milieu of communication is created, but it does not follow a linguistic rule.” (Casalini, 2013). This serves as a compelling example of a highly persuasive method of self-expression, where no verbal communication is needed. In fact, the absence of words intensifies the impact of the message that could be flattened by Western standards of communication explored earlier in Martina Ferrari’s theory.
To avoid leaving Indigenous women in a state of obscured understanding, we must remain open to diverse forms of communication and be receptive to information that may, from our perspective, seem illogical, counterintuitive or shockingly emotional. Martina Ferrari does not ask us to speculate on the meaning of Indigenous women’s silence; rather, she calls for us to create an environment where silence is not the only viable form of resistance to the oppression they endure. Artists like Regina José Galindo may be moving us closer to such an environment; ideally, in the near future, their acts of solidarity will complement an even broader spectrum of Mesoamerican Indigenous women’s self-expression.
While Mesoamerican Indigenous women have a presence in feminist academia and cultural production, they are pushed to the margins of these spaces. This situation is not a reflection of the women in question, but rather of the structures within which they operate. Our current society remains unwelcoming to expressions of female subjectivities that fall outside mainstream feminist discourses, which are still tacitly influenced by colonial legacies. For Indigenous women, articulating subjectivity within this framework is a particularly difficult task, and one that even dedicated feminists struggle to fully understand due to their immersion in Western tradition. Thus, what we discussed can be encapsulated in its epigraph: “there is no way out of coloniality from within modern categories of thought” (Veronelli, 2016). However, we have also seen that Mesoamerican Indigenous philosophers, writers, artists, and activists are actively challenging these limiting categories, stretching them, blurring them, crushing them, showing their absurdity, transcending them. By doing so, they not only preserve their communities’ traditions in a creative way, but also invite society to reconsider the horizons of feminist thought. Their work is essential to develop an accomplished feminism, one that successfully addresses the full spectrum of women’s experiences and fosters true international affection and solidarity among women. Yet, if we hope for more Mesoamerican Indigenous women’s cultural production, we ought to do our part in learning how to understand them and building intellectual and creative spaces that truly welcome them.
Rozalia Kowalska
Bibliography
Bardwell-Jones, Celia T., and Margaret A. McLaren. “Introduction to Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy.” Hypatia 35, no. 1 (2020): 2–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2019.19.
Bowman, Melanie, and Maria Rebolleda-Gómez. 2020. “Uprooting Narratives: Legacies of Colonialism in the Neoliberal University.” Hypatia 35(1): 18–40.
Braidotti, Rosi. “Difference, Diversity, and Nomadic Subjectivity”, lecture in Cultural Studies at Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna, November 2018.
Casalini, Giulia. “Feminist Embodiments of Silence: Performing the Intolerable Speech in the Work of Regina José Galindo.” (2013).
Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8
Cuevas Cob, Briceida. “Yaan A Bin Xook” in Words Without Borders, Mexico: Jaguar Tongues, 2005. Accessed November 17, 2024: https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2005-10/school/.
Dorlin, Elsa. “Le sujet politique du féminisme” in Sexe, genre et sexualités, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008.
Espinosa-Miñoso, Yuderkys; Lugones, María; Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “An Introduction” in Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
Ferrari, Martina. “Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence.” Hypatia 35, no. 1 (2020): 123–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2019.9.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997, first published: 1980.
Lugones, Maria. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40928654.
Mercado, Marta. « Feminist theorizing in time and space: A study from Mesoamerica. » Agricultura, sociedad y desarrollo, 1.2 (2004): 111-131.
Oxlajuj B’atz’. “About” and “Programa mujeres mayas jóvenes”. Accessed on November 17, 2024. https://oxlajujbatz.wordpress.com/
Park, Shelley. 2020. Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries. Hypatia 35(1): 97–122.
Pineda, Irma. Untitled poems in “Guie’ ni zinebe/La Flor que se llevó”, Mexico City: Pluralia, 2013. Accessed November 17, 2024: https://adimagazine.com/articles/five-poems/.
Regina José Galindo. “2007. Mientras, ellos siguen libres.” Accessed on November 17, 2024. https://www.reginajosegalindo.com/en/home-en/
Rottenberg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies, 28, (2013): 418–37. doi:10.1080/09502386.2013.857361.
Sinclair, Rebekah. 2020. Exploding Individuals: Engaging Indigenous Logic and Decolonizing Science. Hypatia 35(1): 58–74.
Territorio y Feminismo. “Metodologias. Mapeo del Cuerpo como Territorio.” and “Initio” Accessed November 17, 2024. https://territorioyfeminismos.org/
Veronelli, Gabriela. “A Coalitional Approach to Theorizing Decolonial Communication.” Hypatia 31, no. 2 (2016): 404–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44076478.
Weir, Allison. “Chapter 10: Decolonising feminist freedom: Indigenous relationalities.” in Decolonizing Feminism: Transnational Feminism and Globalization, edited by Margaret A. McLaren. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Wubbold, Manya. “Language and Symbolic Representation in Contemporary Mayan Poetry: a Linguistic and Literary Analysis of “Yaan a bin xook” by Briceida Cuevas Cob (2005)”. Estudios De Cultura Maya, 47, (2015): 181-216. https://doi.org/10.19130/iifl.ecm.2016.47.747.