By Yakira

Women have not only acted as participants in the ongoing popular movement in Oaxaca, but have also profoundly shaped the course of its history. They have created some of the most powerful stories and moments in the past nine months, and have helped tell them. Stories of women who have built the movement are everywhere in Oaxaca. There are the stories of housewives arrested and beaten by police, who in response have begun to organize for the first time in their lives. There are the stories of elderly women from local communities who have cooked huge pots of food for people guarding barricades and soothed tear-gassed eyes with vinegar and Coke. Then there are the stories of women who have been involved since the beginning, participating in the teachers’ strike or organizing the movement to support it. Their stories, of personal histories aligned with the movement since its very inception, are the ones that may best shed light on how women have helped create a widespread and lasting popular resistance in Oaxaca.

Florina Jiménez Lucas is one of those women. She is a teacher, and looks very much the part. She sits still and composed, her red suit bright against a plastic chair, as she tells her own story in an even, measured tone. Through her long career as a teacher, she has worked in many of Oaxaca’s most marginalized indigenous communities, where she has witnessed the conditions of extreme poverty and injustice that exist in the state. This intimate knowledge of poverty and struggle led Florina to participate as a longtime active member of Section 22, the teachers’ union.

In 2006, she joined many other teachers in setting up a camp in the central square of Oaxaca’s capital city as part of an annual strike to protest poor living conditions and teachers’ salaries in the state. When the movement grew following a police attack to dislodge the camp, Florina’s participation grew alongside it. She introduced her husband to the popular movement; he and their three children became her frequent companions at meetings and marches. As a family, they participated in guard duty at barricades placed throughout the city to keep police from attacking neighborhoods. Florina or her husband often spent entire nights on watch.

Her reflections on the movement continued to deepen, leading her to wonder about her own community’s involvement. She refers to San Felipe, the area where she lives, as “a forgotten town where powerful men have bought up large plots of land.” She says that “extreme poverty and extreme wealth live side by side” in San Felipe, and that the state’s powerful figures often hold meetings in the “castles they have built” there. On July 1, she organized the first group of neighbors to take action in San Felipe. They covered the community with posters in support of the popular movement. On that same day, governor Ulises Ruiz arrived in San Felipe to attend a meeting. The words and images of his opposition were there to greet him.