My first novel

In 1987 I lived for a year in the home of Flor de Margarita Pérez Pérez and her husband and children in San Pedro Chenalho’, a Tsotsil-speaking Maya township in the highlands of Chiapas. I was there to do fieldwork for my Ph.D. in anthropology, but it was a pivotal year in my development as a human being. I arrived during the debt crisis in Mexico and saw how difficult it was making life for women and their families. Sharing daily life with women and learning about their problems, enabled me to see how I could “walk with them” (the way they talk of struggling for social justice) in the years to come.

Since the 1980s, I have tried to balance advocacy with writing and teaching, first at Central Connecticut State University and then at New Mexico State University. In the process I’ve created networks of accompaniment for my friends in Chenalho’ among my students, colleagues, family, friends and the public. Weaving for Justice in Las Cruces is the hub of that network (www.weaving-for-justice.org).

My friendships and working relationships with Maya women have given me the gift of hearing what they say about the dramatic changes that have occurred during their lifetimes. I visit once a year and since cell phones became available I stay in touch by phone. I’ve had the privilege to see the children and grandchildren of Margarita and my other friends carry on weaving traditions and the struggle for social justice. They are all Zapatistas and or members of Las Abejas, the Catholic social justice organization in Chenalho’. Given the effects of centuries of racism and the fact that they do not take government hand-outs, in material ways my friends are not much better off than they were in the 1980s. But they feel “clean” and in greater control of their lives.

Over the years, I’ve also been witness to the tension and stress in families when young women try to live different lives than their mothers, like Magdalena and Lucia try to do in my novel. When a Woman Rises gives readers a chance to learn both about the lives of young women on the front lines of change and middle-aged Maya women who have been largely overlooked in the writings about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. But most importantly, I hope that my novel will enable readers to see Maya women of all ages as complex and multi-faceted people, with strengths and weaknesses, dreams and desires, not that fundamentally different from their own.