Women's Lives, Pt. 2

(I seem to have lost some text from my last posting, as I was shuffling around the photos. I'll try to rewrite it here, and include descriptions of the photos from the 4/4/06 post.)

As thousands gather today in downtown Washington, DC, to rally in support of an overhaul of US immigration policy, I think of all the women who remain behind in Mexico while their men head north to work. Missing their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, they tend children and elders, run family businesses, and struggle to keep food on the table in an increasingly globilized economy that does little to benefit them.

On a historical note, while in San Miguel de Allende on International Women's Day, I heard a lecture on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17th century feminist nun who is pictured below on the 200-peso note. Sponsored by PEN International, which defends writers who are imprisoned or under attack for their work, the author Mamie Spiegel described the controversial life of this early woman-of-letters. Sor Juana was a widely-read scholar and author of plays, sonnets, carols and ballads that were enjoyed throughout Colonial Mexico and Europe at the time. Initially protected from church and state authorities by her close friendship with the wife of the Viceroy of New Spain, Sor Juana held regular salons with prominent scientists, theologians and philosphers. All this from behind the grill of her convent walls! She amassed a huge library (pictured behind her on the peso note), but became under increasing pressure from church authorities to cease writing and resume a life more "appropriate" to a woman religious. Her own confessor, a priest with close ties to the Spanish Inquisition, eventually pressured her into a "confession" where she supposidly recanted her heretical views that women should read books and write. However, recent research has uncovered that she went on to collect a second sizeable library and kept writing until her death in 1695. She continues to be an important icon in terms of Mexican women's self-identity, one whose historical record and evolving popular lore is hotly debated.

Next is a photo of Gina, our host in Puerto Escondido, as she introduces a group of us to her friend and local "curadera" (healer and herbalist). The woman's shop was filled to the ceilings with bags of dried herbs, bottles, boxes and potions (including flasks of "Lydia "Pinkam's" tonic), devotional pictures and statues ranging from Jesus and Mary, to the Buddha and various Hindu gods and goddesses. "Local people come here first, because it costs less than the hospital," explained Gina. With a sly wink, the curadera handed Chris and me herb tea bags for increased feminine strenth and virility (respectively).

The two young women in the market are cutting up "nopales" (cactus), a common staple of most Mexican diets. We had them for breakfast, stewed in a yummy sauce and eatten alongside a pile of rich black beans.

And finally, a picture of women in San Miguel de las Casas (in Guanajuato), washing their clothing in the outdoor "Lavenderia." Fed by underground springs, the washing place used to be the site of communal bathing pools in a town park. This is considered a quaint site by the local gringa women, and much photographed. I found it dismaying to see these women having to deal with mounds of clothing, which they will have to lug home heavy and wet, in a part of town filled with fancy homes and B and B's. The accessibility of clean running water in people's homes, especially here in the high desert, is an ongoing problem.

-ASG

Women's Lives, Pt. I

These photos of women I have encountered in Mexico are but a few of the images that fill my mind's eye. I remember us passing Mayan women carrying huge loads of firewood along the mountain roads in Chiapas, shapely young executives toting briefcases down the crowded hallways of the Mexico City airport, the teenager in the small tortilla store pulling hot tortillas off the machine and laughingly waving away my pesos when I only ordered half-a-dozen, the university girls with numerous piercings and low-slung tight pants stridding down the streets of Guanajuato, the tiny elderly street vendor in Puerto Escondido who carried a pile of wrapped hammocks on her head, the enterprising jeweler at her art opening in San Miguel fashioning extravagent necklaces for the gringa women to buy, a mother with children praying in front of the Mexico City bus station altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a mother in mini-skirt driving a motor scooter with her grinning grade school age daughter in school uniform hanging on the back, the gal on the corner selling fresh fruit and green mangoes carved like flowers, the very young girls begging me to buy their woven braclettes on the central Jardin in San Cristobal, the preteens giggling at the boys during a long church service in Amatenango while their mothers solemnly arrange flowers on the altar....

-ASG