Week 6: Our experiences in an indigenous community and an introduction to the FMLN of El Salvador

Doña Ximena speaks to the group in her corn field.



By Megan Vees

On Friday afternoon, we went to an indigenous community not far from Cuernavaca to participate in a ceremony of thanksgiving in honor of the Festival of the Pericón, the Feast of the Goddess of Xilonen, and the Feast of St. Michael. Here, we made indigenous crosses (that is those that are equal lengths in each direction) out of pericón flowers. One community leader, Guillermo González Rodriguez[1], shared with us some of the significance of these crosses, which can be seen hanging in doorways of homes and businesses all over Mexico. The pericón crosses are intended to ward off evil spirits. There are several aspects of the flowers that endow them with symbolic meaning: first of all, they are made up of many smaller flowers; second, their golden color represents the sun; and third, the way the plant itself grows resembles a cross.

Members of the group make pericón crosses

After making the crosses, we participated in a syncretic ceremony that blended aspects of indigenous tradition and Catholicism. The group stood in a circle, in the center of which burned a fire with ears of corn. The ceremony consisted of turning in the four cardinal directions, then to the sky, and to the earth. In each direction, a conch shell was blown. Afterwards, incense was blown on each member of the circle and the prayer Our Father was recited in Nahuatl, an indigenous language spoken by some members of the community. Guillermo explained the meaning behind the ceremony and the Feast of the Goddess Xilonen, the goddess of young corn. That day represents the time when the corn begins to mature so that humans may eat it, or as it was described to us, the corn begins to self-sacrifice for humanity. Though this tradition is anywhere from seven to ten thousand years old, it has now been integrated with Catholic tradition.

Guillermo blows the conch shell as ceremony participants face in one of the cardinal directions

The next day, we met with two members of the community who fulfilled non-traditional roles with regard to gender and sexuality. One was Doña Ximena[2], a woman of seventy-two years who had never married and who owned and worked her own corn fields. She described the pressures she had received from the government and those outside her community to change her farming practices, to use chemical fertilizers and change the type of corn she grows. She also described the difficulties in competing with the cheap, genetically modified corn that has flooded the Mexican market. We next talked to a young man of nineteen years, Adolfo[3], who spoke about being openly gay in his small community. He too fulfills a non-traditional gender role by working as a stylist and dance instructor, and also by serving as a care-taker for his ailing mother. His talk allowed us to see some of the positive aspects of influences from outside of his community. He was able to achieve success through training in a non-traditional career for a young man, and he also found his identity as a gay man – one that is very seldom embraced in small communities – as a liberating factor in his life.

Our visit to this community allowed us to see the effects of the blending of cultures on a small scale. The blending of ancient Mesoamerican religious tradition and Catholicism was demonstrated in all its beauty and complexity in the ceremony and feast of Friday night. The talks with Doña Ximena and Adolfo allowed us to see both positive and negative affects of blending of cultures. For Doña Ximena, the traditional ways of growing corn are being threatened by a culture of modernity. However, for Adolfo, embracing an identity that would not usually exist in an indigenous community has been liberating. Yet both speakers we heard and the ceremony and feast we participated in also represent the overcoming of oppressive forces. Doña Ximena and Adolfo triumph by surmounting traditional roles, while the entire community overcomes a dominant culture that marginalizes traditional indigenous culture and spirituality by continuing in their customs and traditions.

[1] A pseudonym used to respect the requested privacy of the speaker. Information from a talk given before the ceremony on September 28, 2007 in a community (also to remain anonymous out of respect for wishes of community members) in the state of Morelos, Mexico.
[2] A pseudonym used to respect the requested privacy of the speaker. Information from a talk given September 29, 2007 in unnamed community, Morelos Mexico.
[3] A pseudonym used to respect the requested privacy of the speaker. Information from a talk given September 29, 2007 in unnamed community, Morelos, Mexico.


The group stands in a circle before the ceremony begins.






Héctor Ibarra Chavez speaks with the group






By Dan Staples


This week we learned about the popular revolution and concurrent emergence of Christian Liberation Theology in El Salvador during the 1980's. One important theme I noted throughout this history was the struggle for autonomy, both for women and for the peasant class as a whole.

Our first speaker this weak was Héctor Ibarra Chávez, former “Comandante Genáro” of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerrilla organization from the El Salvador revolution, and a current Masters student at the National School of Anthropology & History (ENAH) in Mexico. Hector told us about the religious roots of revolution and guerrilla movements in El Salvador, in which Liberation Theology played a key role. The revolution emerged as a class war between the ruling class of the military dictatorship and armed peasants, or campesinos, who were extremely impoverished by the unequal distribution of land and resources. However, rather than the more common trend of Marxist-Leninist guerrilla vanguardism, Héctor told us how the campesino communities of El Salvador organized themselves by means of Base Christian Communities (BCCs).

In our reading of Anna L. Peterson's Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion, we learned that the transformation of religion in campesino communities, via reinterpretation of biblical text, took power away from the Catholic Church hierarchy and created a horizontal, popular movement of autonomous lay parishes, from which BCCs emerged. Through education and empowerment initiatives, BCCs strengthened collective identity and helped campesinos, men and women alike, to develop leadership and organizational skills. It was only after these local, autonomous groups were organized that the guerrillas came and mobilized them into a mass movement of armed resistance.

On Thursday, we had another former FMLN guest speaker, Lucia Raya, a current doctoral student at ENAH. Lucia spoke to us about women's experiences in the FMLN military during and after the El Salvador revolution. Life in the guerrilla armies let women experience freedoms outside traditional, patriarchal norms. For instance, women had autonomy in their sexuality, with the liberty to have sexual relations outside the confines of marriage and monogamy. In addition, reproduction and maternity took on different, though arguably negative, forms. However, women found that traditional gender roles and expectations were still prevalent, even inside the guerrilla movement.

Lucia described the experience of women militants as the process of overcoming (or losing) their gender identity, having to conform to the expectations of a militant, a traditionally male role. Lucia described militancy to us as one's total commitment, self-surrender, and sacrifice to a cause. This clearly opposes the idea of autonomy, which I would define as self-determination, independence, and self-government. Therefore, by becoming “equal” with their male compañeros in the war to gain class autonomy, they lost the ability to gain autonomy for their gender.
Lucia Raya

However, the struggle for women's autonomy didn't end after the war was over. In Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution, Karen Kampwirth notes that the negotiated peace accord ending the civil war in El Salvador completely leaves out mention of women. She says the failure of revolutionary politics to improve the lives of women caused many women's groups to seek autonomy from their sponsoring political parties or guerrilla organizations. Despite aggressive reactions from the so-called “revolutionaries”, the women's autonomy movement in El Salvador achieved notable success. This was the result of Salvadoran women's groups organizing gatherings in solidarity, international support and influence, the examples set by earlier women's groups who successfully achieved autonomy, and the courage of truly revolutionary women.

These struggles have a lot of importance to me because I believe that no matter what oppression we fight, we cannot fight without autonomy. In addition, successful liberation means nothing if it is not based in autonomy for all. There are many mistakes we can learn from in the El Salvador revolution, but we must find inspiration and guidance in its successes if we don't want this bloody history to repeat itself