Reina Luz Santiago is the first person who’s ever left her small town in the southeastern Mexican state of Oaxaca and traveled to a foreign country, she said, and her departure raised some objections from her brother.
With anthropology professor Lynn Stephen translating from Spanish, Santiago said, “He said to me, ‘I’m a man and I’m older than you and I haven’t left my home. How is it that you are leaving?’”
Her brother’s reaction was typical in her community, a town made up largely of people of the Mixtec indigenous group. Women in her community marry young, have children and commit to the domestic life without having other opportunities. Education is considered more important for men than for women, she said.
On Wednesday evening, Santiago, along with filmmakers and activists Julia Barco, Margarita Dalton and Concepción Núñez, discussed the problems faced by women in Mexico’s second-most impoverished state.
They began the evening by telling the crowd in the packed Knight Library Browsing Room about the Guadalupe Musalem Scholarship Fund, which they are trying to raise money for. The scholarship helps young women from Oaxaca receive more education.
Barco’s film, Step by Step, underlined this point. The video recounts the story of Chayo, a fictional woman whose story represents the reality of many Oaxacan women.
Chayo was denied an education in order to care for her father and brothers. She was married off to a man who beat her. He prohibited her from going to the woman’s clinic for a gynecological exam because he did not want another man looking at her. Chayo died during a troublesome pregnancy.
“She died doing what she should, like a saint,” the narrator relates, explaining the views of community members.
For Oaxacan women, pregnancy is dangerous. Oaxaca has the highest rate of maternal deaths, along with some of the highest rates of domestic violence and murders of women in Mexico.
Margarita Dalton further discussed the danger that women face. She gave a short presentation concerning presidentas municipales, or women mayors, of the towns in Oaxaca. Since politics is dominated by men, many women mayors are threatened.
“One of the candidates for presidenta municipal in 2003 was killed during the campaign in a small town on the coast of Oaxaca,” Dalton said. “She was killed because she said that she was going to demonstrate how the money and the resources of the municipality had been misused… The presidente, (the mayor of a small city), went to where she was and he took his gun and he killed her. Nobody stopped him. He left and when they asked the policemen ‘why didn’t you stop him? He’s a murderer, he killed her,’ they said ‘How can we stop him if he’s the presidente? How can we stop him from killing?’”
The women’s presentation drew comment from several audience members.
“It’s really different from anything I’ve seen on campus,” said freshman Lidiana Soto. “I’ve never seen four women coming from Mexico to talk about something so recent and so important that’s happening.”
“I enjoyed getting the various points of view on women in Oaxaca,” said Maurice Magana, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology.
Senior Joy Gibson found hearing about the current events of rural Oaxaca refreshing.
“It’s not often that you get frontline news about what’s happening in little villages in Oaxaca,” she said.