Masked beauties and lethal.

I was chilling out with one of my sisters a few days ago. I was talking to her about the coming of age class I am taking. While we where talking one of my favorite song came on the television, and it started to make me thinking of what I really want to present to my class mates on Monday. The song is from a band called Rage Against the Machine, and the song that was Play on the television was People of the Sun. Which to me makes perfect sense because it stated to make me think of something I felt dear and near to my heart in the mid 1990’s was the Zapatista movement of Chiapas, in the Southern part of Mexico.

The reason is simple to me because it incorporates pretty much everything we have talked about all this semester of women coming of age. This was a movement that started with the indigenes Indians of Chiapas fighting the government from having American oil companies coming to their state and displacing them for corporate greed. The Zapatista movement started with peaceful demonstrations and marches, but that did little for the Mexican government from having their northern neighbor from invading their lands. With major power forcing them off their lands many of the people started to take arms to protect their lands from invaders.

People of the Sun, is how I feel about the Zapatistas in Chiapas because it was a movement that was out of force and fear for the survival of the people of that area. But a major force for the Zapatistas was the women of the women of these small towns. Women made the majority of the force due to the displacement of the men going north to find work to support their families. So with women of these rural areas taking up arms transformed the women from being just supporting role members of the town , to protectors of not only the town, but also their culture, traditions, and rituals that would have been lost due to the displacement of these people.

The women were commanded by Commandant Marcos, but at least eighty-five percent of his force was rural women. It was not just young women that started to take arms for the battle they envisioned that was coming to a head. But it was also grandmother, mothers, daughters, and grand daughters that started to form an army that would fight Mexican troops from being displaced from their home land. So when women left the comforts of being mothers, cooks, wives, caregivers and what ever else you might feel Mexican women should be. But with the action of taking up arms to protect their interest in their town, these women went from being seeing as caregivers, daughters, wives, girls into freedom fighters.