1. The Zapatistas’ disagreement

The Zapatistas timed their insurgency on the eve of the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement on January 1, 1994, countering the projected image of a modern Mexico poised to enter a new era of free trade. The Zapatista rebellion amounted to what Jacques Rancière (Reference Rancière1999) calls disagreement or that which disrupts a political landscape marked by consensus around who counts as a political subject and what counts as politics. For Rancière, consensus points to a system or “police” that relies on formally including people who are otherwise considered to make “noise” rather than “discourse” (Reference Rancière1999, 27–30). For Rancière, the police not only limits who is considered a legitimate political subject, but also which issues are considered of common concern and thereby legitimate “discourse” that is worthy of deliberation. Rancière (Reference Rancière2004) later developed an aesthetic understanding of the police through his concept of the “partition of the sensible” through which he referred to the ways in which societies collectively delimit what is visible, audible, or sayable through their rules and presuppositions.

The Zapatista rebellion illustrated what Rancière termed “disagreement.” For Rancière, consensus produces the potential for disagreement when marginalized subjects dis-identify with the police order by enacting discourse and bringing to the table previously excluded issues, creating “polemical scenes” with the potential to “unstick” the previously taken-for-granted “consensus” (Reference Rancière1999, 36, 41, 60). For Rancière, disagreement doesn’t require success—something we should keep in mind when examining the Zapatistas’ trajectory and Marichuy’s bid for an independent candidacy, which can hardly be said to have “unstuck” the previous consensus. Even failed acts, such as Jeanne Deroin’s unsuccessful 1849 candidacy for legislature in France, which was launched before women were allowed to run for office, count as disagreement (Rancière Reference Rancière1999, 41).

Both Rancière’s concept of disagreement and consensus are fitting for the political climate that emerged in Mexico in the 1970s. At that time, respect for liberal democracy, multiculturalism, and market policies came to form a climate of consensus or what Erik Swyngedouw (Reference Swyngedouw2010) has referred to as “post-politics.” Swyngedouw defines post-politics as the discouragement of ideological contestation and struggle in favor of techno-managerial and socio-cultural changes that are compatible with capitalism (225). Post-politics in Mexico entailed a new partition of the sensible through which the ruling political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in power since 1929, agreed to a democratic opening when it faced a deepening crisis of legitimacy. The powerful anti-authoritarian student movement of 1968 and the government’s response to it via the Tlatelolco student massacre magnified the widening cracks in the PRI’s hegemony. Over the next decade, the rise of an autonomous union movement, increasingly active urban and rural guerrillas, and new leftist oppositional parties continued to widen such cracks (Morton Reference Morton2003, 641). To discourage oppositional parties from recurring to extra-legal processes, in 1977, President López Portillo issued the Law on Political Organizations and Electoral Processes (LOPPE), which offered all political parties legal recognition and guaranteed oppositional parties a minimum number of seats in Congress (Morton Reference Morton2003, 642).

The PRI’s electoral reform was accompanied by an internal reorganization around a new technocratic wing of the party which held a pro-market ideology. The 1982 presidential election of the technocrat, Miguel de la Madrid, marked a turning point for the government’s long-established import substitution industrialization model. When the Mexican government became unable to service its external debt payments needed for its high public spending, de la Madrid imposed structural adjustment programs mandated by the IMF, World Bank, and US government in exchange for refinancing Mexico’s debt. Besides decimating public spending, Mexico went on to liberalize trade, deregulate finance and labor, and privatize state-owned companies.

Despite its promise of a democratic opening, the PRI continued to use authoritarian tactics. In 1988, the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, representing the technocratic wing of the party, was declared the victor despite widespread accusations that the candidate of the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, had won the popular vote. Salinas de Gortari went on to pass controversial counter-agrarian reforms that further consolidated the post-political articulations between democracy and neoliberal capitalism while introducing moderate multicultural policies.

Salinas de Gortari’s reforms, which signaled the end of the previous “language of contention” by which peasants and the government had come to the table, were key catalysts for the Zapatista’s disagreement. In 1992, Congress, largely a rubber stamp for the executive, eliminated the Constitutional right to agrarian land redistribution—one of the most notable achievements of the Mexican Revolution. This right had led over the course of the twentieth century to the redistribution of slightly over half of the country’s territory in the form of unalienable social property. In the same year, Congress allowed existing recipients of social property to transform their parcels into private property. These reforms, which aimed to secure a dynamic property market to attract foreign investment, were critical for NAFTA’s success, then under discussion. The PRI passed these controversial reforms by coopting critical segments of the peasant sector and by discrediting the PRD, the only party in Congress to oppose the reforms, as the “party of violence”—a message which was reinforced by the government-influenced media (Bartra Reference Bartra2019, 225).

Mexico’s limited democratic opening combined with its weak embrace of multiculturalism created a space of maneuver for a new brand of Indigenous organizations vying for autonomy. In 1992, Mexico modified Article 2 of the Mexican Constitution to recognize the nation’s multicultural composition, specifically its Indigenous peoples, for the first time. This modification has been interpreted as representing what Charles R. Hale called “neoliberal multicultural” governance, which advances the downsizing of the state by allowing a more pluralistic civil society a greater role in mediating social conflict (Speed Reference Speed2005, 32–33). Wendy Brown (Reference Brown1995) and John Gledhill (Reference Gledhill and Wilson1997) likewise emphasized that expanding democratic freedoms was key to neoliberalism for it encouraged the emergence of a self-governing population that was necessary for downsizing the state. By offering Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups recognition and rights based on cultural difference, so long as such difference did not interfere with the market, certain governments in the region and international institutions such as the World Bank expected Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups to positively contribute to social capital (Hale Reference Hale2004, 17–19). Thus, the call for autogestión or self-determination, the emerging banner of Indigenous organizations in the 1980s in Mexico, had the potential to be compatible with neoliberalism (Bartra Reference Bartra2019, 220). Relatedly, Congress’s efforts to “free” Mexican peasants from the tutelage of the state by allowing them to privatize social property encouraged the formation of neoliberal subjects who relied on the market rather than the state for their survival (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 67). These reforms were implicitly gendered in so far as dependency on the so-called “nanny” welfare state was considered emasculating.

Besides enticing Indigenous peoples to become self-governing through the market, Hale argued that the shift to neoliberal multiculturalism in Latin America also encouraged Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups to use the sanctioned spaces of the state. Hale argued that neoliberal multiculturalism opened certain spaces through which Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups and activist anthropologists such as himself could wield “struggles from within” for legal pluralism (Hale Reference Hale2004, 17–19; Reference Hale2006). While Hale remained conflicted by the limitations and contradictions of such struggles from within, he nevertheless defended them as a space of maneuver that could yield significant victories (Reference Hale2006, Reference Hale2020).Footnote ² According to Hale, such strategies tapered off after 2015 when the passage of the last set of new multicultural reforms in Latin America signaled the end of neoliberal multiculturalism (Reference Hale2020). Compounded by the rise of authoritarian governments on both the right and left ends of the spectrum, Hale claimed Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups have turned to “using-and-refusing” (Reference Hale2020, 623). This entails the use of legal instruments made available through neoliberal multicultural reforms even as groups lean more heavily toward refusing them.

While Hale cited the Zapatistas as among the most well-known groups to have taken up using-and-refusing, he did not dwell on the fact that the Zapatistas first mobilized well before 2015 (Reference Hale2020, 619, n. 4). This raises the question of whether struggles from within were ever the primary response to neoliberal multiculturalism, as he suggests. Neither did Hale consider the Zapatistas’ bid for an independent candidacy for the 2018 presidential election which raises the continued relevance of using certain state platforms rather than refusing them. I suggest, therefore, that the Zapatistas provide a useful window to re-examine the utility of struggles from within versus using-and-refusing as distinct forms of disagreement against neoliberal multiculturalism which, despite being weak in Mexico, may still be in effect. First, since their emergence, the Zapatistas used the state by laying claim to the vehicle of the nation-state, as the “national” in their name makes clear, even as they refused it by founding several autonomous municipalities as early as December 1994 (see Speed Reference Speed2005, 40). It is noteworthy, for example, that the Zapatistas invoked Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution to justify their insurgency rather than the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination. Article 39 stipulates that it is “the people” from which “[a]ll political power emanates … [and who] have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government” (EZLN 1993). In this way, the Zapatistas tapped into an older Indigenous and mestizo grassroots tradition of mobilizing national-popular democratic discourse to call for a more inclusive and egalitarian nation-state (see Mallon Reference Mallon1995; see also Ducey Reference Ducey2004; Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 148). The Zapatistas’ using-and-refusing strategy can likewise be gleaned from their reimagination of the national revolutionary agrarian leader Emiliano Zapata into their own hybrid Tzeltal/nationalist “Votán Zapata” (see Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 167–68).

At the same time, the Zapatistas used-and-refused the nation-state by attempting to fuse an alternative nation-state that would accommodate Indigenous sovereignty while at the same time enacting autonomy without waiting for state authorization. For example, early on the Zapatistas ousted government programs, teachers, and civil servants while establishing their own services and government (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo, González Pérez, Burguete Cal and Ortiz-T2010, 295). At the same time, the Zapatistas called on the Mexican people to convene a constitutional assembly to draft a new constitution that would, among other things, recognize Indigenous peoples’ rights to cultural difference and autonomy (EZLN 1995). Shortly afterwards, the Zapatistas convened more than 6,000 delegates from throughout Mexico to what they called the National Democratic Convention wherein they discussed a new constitution and democratic process from below (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 187). In these ways, the Zapatistas used elements of the existing nation-state while refusing others such as electoral politics to fuse a new autonomous project and a new nation-state.

In 1996, the Zapatistas continued a use-fuse-and-refuse strategy by agreeing to negotiate peace with the Mexican government in a process that culminated in the San Andrés Accords. Through this process, the Zapatistas clarified that their demands extended beyond Indigenous autonomy and disrupted neoliberal post-politics by challenging the limits of Mexico’s electoral reforms and their alignment with neoliberal multicultural capitalism. That the Mexican government agreed to some of the demands nested under the theme of Indigenous Rights and Culture, while abandoning the table once discussion began on the roundtable labeled “Democracy and Justice,” seems to confirm the extent to which political leaders in Mexico were averse to democratic reforms that could disrupt neoliberal capitalism (Stahler-Sholk Reference Stahler-Sholk2007, 53).

After the Accords were signed in 1996, a legislative initiative intended to implement the Accords was shelved in 1997 due to concerns over the “balkanization” of the country (Speed Reference Speed2005, 39). In the face of the government’s recalcitrance, the Zapatistas retreated to practice their autonomy without state authorization. In 2001, after Vicente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was elected, marking the first time a party other than the PRI was to rule Mexico since 1929, the Zapatistas once again mobilized in support of the passage of the legislative initiative meant to implement the Accords. They did so by marching from Chiapas to Mexico City to speak before Congress and to address the nation through the Zócalo or central square. Yet after Congress passed a watered-down initiative known as the COCOPA law later that year, spurning the core elements of the San Andrés Accords, the Zapatistas retreated once again to practice their autonomy without state authorization (Speed Reference Speed2005).

By 2005, the Zapatistas retook to reclaiming the nation-state by launching “La Otra Campaña” or “The Other Campaign.” According to their Sixth Declaration, La Otra Campaña encouraged Mexican civil society to refuse mainstream electoral politics on behalf of “a national campaign for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution” (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo2007, 65). Through La Otra Campaña the Zapatistas made clear that the Zapatista autonomy project was limited without a broader national process of redistribution (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo2007, 70). A Zapatista man named Nicolás summarized this sentiment by stating:

As I have emphasized, the Zapatistas have striven to “fuse” or grow their movement from within and without while using and refusing the state. “Fusing” with other organizations nationally and beyond has been critical to the Zapatistas’ survival (Leyva Solano Reference Leyva Solano, Oikon and Ugarte2001; Nash Reference Nash1997; Oleson Reference Olesen2005; Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 167–70). Since their first communiqué, the Zapatistas worked to expand by inviting all Mexicans to join their national liberation army. Subsequently, they called on Mexicans to join their civilian support network or Zapatista National Liberation Front (Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) and the National Democratic Convention, as I explained earlier. The Zapatistas also collaborated with local peasant organizations in Chiapas and those fighting against high electricity and gas prices across Mexico (Andrews Reference Andrews2010, 97). Among the Zapatistas’ closest national coalition has been the Congreso Nacional Indígena or CNI, formed in 1996 in the context of the San Andrés Accords, which focuses on advocating for Indigenous autonomy. The Zapatistas have also implemented an internal education system that is meant to replace the public school system while offering education in Indigenous languages that also responds to the needs of autonomous municipalities (Klein-Cardeña Reference Klein-Cardeña2024, 418–19). The Zapatistas have also organized educational opportunities for international activists such as the Little Zapatista School (La Escuelita Zapatista) held in 2013 and 2014 which centered around the pedagogical interventions of Indigenous members of all five regional civic centers or caracoles (Klein-Cardeña Reference Klein-Cardeña2024, 417–18). While “fusing” could be collapsed under either the use or refusal of the state or nation-state, I suggest it deserves visibility as a tool through which social movements seek to amplify, replenish, and sustain their efforts.

The Zapatistas’ fusing, however, has not been without its own complications and police structures. Comandante Marcos himself discussed that the Indigenous communities that initially coalesced to form the EZLN had already been practicing communitarian democracy as individual communities and that the EZLN was an “antidemocratic” element that “contaminated” a relationship of “direct communitarian democracy” (2003). It was the creeping realization of such dynamics that led the EZLN to organize a series of assemblies which it abstained from participating in (Klein-Cardeña Reference Klein-Cardeña2024, 414). It was in these assemblies that participating communities decided to establish autonomous municipalities that would take over the organizational capacities that had been assumed by the EZLN (Klein-Cardeña Reference Klein-Cardeña2024, 414). Marcos explained that it was the autonomous municipalities in partnership with civil society from around the world that helped establish educational and health services (2003). Marcos recognized that such collaborations, or what I call fusing, served to nourish resistance—in his words, to “make grow one more, perhaps the smallest, alternative in the face of a world that excludes all ‘Others’” (2003, my translation).

While fusing by establishing coalitions and partnerships has helped protect the Zapatistas from state and paramilitary violence (Burguete Cal y Mayor Reference Burguete Cal y Mayor, Rus, Hernández Castillo and Mattiace2003) and partly funded their autonomous schools and clinics (Andrews Reference Andrews2010), it has also implied negotiating multiple power structures. In 2003, for example, the Zapatistas reworked the North/South power relations that characterized their global solidarity networks in favor of greater Zapatista control (Andrews Reference Andrews2010). Mora also discusses how through La Otra Campaña the Zapatistas confronted sectors of the left unwilling to struggle for Indigenous rights while she critiqued the events organized by the Zapatistas around La Otra Campaña for ignoring questions of intersectionality (Reference Mora Bayo2007, 66). Furthermore, the Zapatistas’ appeals to national-democratic discourses have also entailed sacrificing a greater emphasis on Indigenous cultural elements (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 173; Eber Reference Eber2001) and partially legitimated the Mexican nation-state despite its ongoing settler colonialism and anti-Blackness.Footnote ³ Mora and Moreno Figueroa (Reference Mora and Moreno Figueroa2021), 241–42) also criticize the Zapatistas and the CNI for not adequately or substantively engaging with anti-Black racism or organized Black communities.

In all, the Zapatistas’ strategy of using-fusing-and-refusing points to another response by which Indigenous peoples have challenged a complex post-political consensus marked by the articulation of liberal democracy, multiculturalism, and neoliberal capitalism. By vying for a national transformation rather than solely pursuing Indigenous autonomy, the Zapatistas may have avoided the pitfalls of neoliberal multicultural governance, which pivots on generating self-governed multicultural citizens who do not threaten the market (Bartra Reference Bartra2019, 220; Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo2007, 69; Speed Reference Speed2005, 33). Alternatively, by refusing the state by implementing their autonomy without state authorization, the Zapatistas may have avoided falling into a dependency on the state had they exclusively pursued struggles from within. Yet, while using-fusing-and-refusing has allowed the Zapatistas to avoid some of the double binds associated with neoliberal governance, it has also entailed sacrifices and costs, as I have outlined. Understanding the EZLN’s long-term strategy as one of using-fusing-and-refusing, however, helps us situate the CNI-EZLN’s turn to independent candidacies in 2018 within this impure and messy strategy as well as to assay Marichuy’s novel contributions to such a strategy.

2. Indigenous women speak

Before delving into Marichuy’s gendered disagreement with neoliberal capitalism, I would like to turn to Zapatista women who laid the foundation for Marichuy’s disagreement. Zapatista women waged a unique disagreement compared to the broader Zapatista movement based on using-and-refusing neoliberalism’s promise of liberation for women. In the process, Zapatista women have disrupted a police order in Mexico in which Indigenous women are invisible and inaudible except as passive victims or docile workers (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 199–210; Speed Reference Speed2019). To disrupt these terms, Indigenous women have claimed the position of political subjects within their own families, communities, and workplaces and in the process created new ways of doing politics (see “Women’s Rights” Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006 [Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen1994]; Hernández Castillo et al. Reference Hernández Castillo, Stephen, Speed, Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006; Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo2017).

Deciding to wage their struggle from within Zapatismo rather than separately, Zapatista women have been key actors for the Zapatistas’ using-fusing-and-refusing. Not only were Zapatista women central participants in the EZLN, comprising a third of its forces, but they also commanded important military operations such as the siege of San Cristóbal de las Casas in 1994 under Comandanta Ana María (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 179). Zapatista women were also central actors in pushing the EZLN to implement intersectional principles of gender equality in the day-to-day, which is a defining marker of Hale’s understanding of use-and-refuse strategies (2020, 627). In this regard, the Zapatistas passed the Women’s Revolutionary Law before their emergence in January 1994. Nevertheless, challenges remain in the Law’s implementation within Zapatista base communities (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 176–97).

Zapatista women have been critical advocates of the Zapatistas’ using-and-refusing of the state. As key participants in the preparatory meetings for the San Andrés Accords, Zapatista women used the platform to demand gender equality within the home, including with regards to housework and land rights, and accountability for sexual violence. Even so, Zapatista women’s demands were excluded from the final San Andrés Accords (Stephen Reference Stephen2002, 197). Yet, when Congress finally debated legislation to implement the Accords, mestizo policymakers cited concerns that recognizing Indigenous autonomy would leave Indigenous women vulnerable to violence by their communities and fellow men. In response, Zapatista Comandanta Esther denounced such legislative paternalism in her famous address to Congress in 2001 as part of the Zapatistas’ campaign in support of legislation implementing the San Andrés Accords. Comandanta Esther reminded legislators that Indigenous women did not need their “saving” for they had long been fighting to eliminate harmful cultural practices. Comandanta Esther’s message exemplified the using-and-refusing of a settler colonial post-politics that rendered Indigenous women invisible and inaudible except as perpetual wards of the state and as social reproducers of a neoliberal multicultural police order that was said to liberate them.

Zapatista women waged a unique disagreement to neoliberal multicultural post-politics compared to the broader Zapatista movement. Zapatista women disrupted the narrative that Indigenous women’s liberation was to be found through the neoliberal market. As several scholars have argued, supporters of neoliberalism legitimated market policies by underscoring its benefits for women (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2005; Fraser Reference Fraser2009). Yet, even as these supporters claimed neoliberalism helped level the playing field between men and women, they legitimated capitalism as the only means toward achieving that equality. On the ground, however, neoliberal capitalism did not just bring gender equality but rather exacerbated gender and racial hierarchies. For example, neoliberalism entailed a shift towards “dual” gendered market structures in the 1980s and 1990s that were characterized by a small echelon of well-paid, mostly male bureaucrats at the top and a large pool of low-wage, mostly female workers at the bottom (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein2005, 499). Neoliberalism also entailed the transfer of manufacturing from so-called developed to developing countries, driven by the search for a plentiful supply of “cheap, docile, and dexterous” female laborers (Salzinger Reference Salzinger2016, 8–9).

Mexico, a poster child of neoliberalization, implemented these policies largely to the detriment of women. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mexican policymakers who considered women a “wasted” resource adapted legal frameworks to incorporate them into paid labor, education, and politics in the name of fomenting national economic growth (Becerril Albarran et al. Reference Becerril, Nahela, García, Jiménez, Lara and Ruiz2000, 369; Bernal Gómez Reference Bernal Gómez1984, 303–4; González Alvarado Reference González Alvarado, García, Millán and Pech2007, 84–85; Schmidt Camacho Reference Schmidt Camacho2005, 258–59). When ballooning rural-to-urban migration increased the demand for government services and drove up unemployment, policymakers modified the state’s longstanding emphasis on motherhood in line with so-called modern gender roles and support for family planning (Laveaga Reference Laveaga2007). The Mexican government celebrated women who could both care for themselves and others by so-called developing their human potential through formal education and professional training and raising a (small) family (Laveaga Reference Laveaga2007, 26). Policymakers redefined masculinity, too, away from stereotypical masculine behaviors that were thought to cause overpopulation and migration (Laveaga Reference Laveaga2007, 24–25). Yet, by encouraging so-called modern gender roles and family planning, the state transferred its responsibility for the welfare of the family to the Mexican couple (Turner Reference Turner1974). These changes contributed to the increase in Mexico’s “economically active feminine population” from 23.5 percent in 1990 to 43 percent by 2014 (Becerril Albarrán Reference Becerril Albarrán2015, 10). Women’s paid work, however, remained concentrated in low-wage positions lacking security of employment in the informal, service, and maquila industries.

The importance of producing caring, yet responsible mothers who took an active role in family planning and in paid work shows the importance of gendered care as a neoliberal “technique of governing” (Brown Reference Brown2003), one that Zapatista women used-and-refused. Contra Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2003) who argues that neoliberalism interpolates subjects as moral homo economicus who enact self-responsibility by caring for themselves, Andrea Muehlebach (Reference Muehlebach2012) demonstrated that neoliberalism also requires subjects who care for others. Muelebach showed that the curtailment of state-provided social services in northern Italy led to enlisting selfless and caring citizens who could fill in the void left by the state. Similarly, the Mexican government’s transfer of responsibility for the welfare of its citizens from the state to the couple required caring women and men who aspired to modern gender roles. These self-governed subjects reflected the new emphasis on a neoliberalized state absolved of its responsibility for the welfare of its citizens and economy increasingly dependent on privatized care.

As rural women who were hard hit by Salinas’s counter-agrarian reforms, armed and unarmed Zapatista women used-and-refused a neoliberal capitalism that threatened their very way of life but also offered them new opportunities. By reducing the tariffs and subsidies that had protected small-scale farmers, Salinas’s counter-agrarian reforms and implementation of NAFTA threatened the subsistence livelihoods of rural Indigenous families, serving as one factor driving especially women and girls in search of seasonal agricultural and wage labor (Arizpe Reference Arizpe1985; Velasco Reference Velasco, Gonzalez Montes, Ruiz, Velasco and Woo1995; Stephen Reference Stephen2007; Durin Reference Durin2009; Castellanos Reference Castellanos2010; Scott Reference Scott, Fox and Haight2010, 75). In fact, some Zapatista women were politicized in part by engaging the neoliberal economy that provided women opportunities to work outside the home. Zapatista women discussed how the contradictions of the economy, including the large gender wage gap between Indigenous men and women, low wages for domestic work, and violations of their oral contracts politicized them (see “Women’s Rights” Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006 [Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen1994], 6–7). Still, Zapatista women insisted on their right to work because it allowed them to “go out of [their] communities, to travel, to see and buy things … to support [themselves]” (“Women’s Rights” Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006 [Reference Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen1994], 7). Still, through the Women’s Revolutionary Law, Zapatista women disagreed with the state and capital’s absolving themselves of their responsibility toward ensuring the social reproduction and human development of their workers and citizens. Zapatista women did so by demanding fair wages, social services, and education.

Unlike the post-revolutionary period, which offered Indigenous women recognition for their reproductive and social reproductive role in mestizaje, the process by which Indigenous and Spaniards were said to have mixed to create the normative racial category of the mestizo (Ruiz Reference Ruiz2002; Taylor Reference Taylor2009, 95), the neoliberal period offered Indigenous women limited recognition as culturally differentiated Indigenous collectivities or as individuals in search of gendered liberation through the market. Zapatista women used-and-refused these silos by engaging work outside the home and supporting the Zapatista struggle.

Besides using-and-refusing, Zapatista women have also “fused” their own unique coalitions, including within Indigenous and feminist organizations. With roots in the peasant, Indigenous, and Catholic liberation theology movements of the 1970s and 1980s and in dialogue with popular feminism and feminist non-governmental organizations of the 1980s, Zapatista women have nurtured their own coalitional spaces, disrupting the police orders that made their experiences and needs invisible or sought to coopt them. For example, Zapatista women challenged the ethnic essentialism of Indigenous organizations through which they were given the choice to “stand by tradition or embrace modernity” (Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo, Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006, 68). Zapatista women responded by demanding that Indigenous communities and organizations modify their traditions to reflect women’s desires and needs. At the same time, Zapatista women challenged the ethnocentrism of urban feminists who tended to dismiss their demands for redistribution and autonomy (Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo, Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006, 60–71). Zapatista women waged these struggles while participating in the State Convention of Chiapanecan Women in 1994, largely dominated by mestizas (Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo, Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006, 66–69). Zapatista women also nurtured Indigenous-women-only spaces by participating in the First National Congress of Indigenous Women in 1997 and internally through gardening collectives, which provide critical resources for the Zapatistas (Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo, Speed, Aída Hernández Castillo and Stephen2006, 66–69; Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo2017). In March 2018, Zapatista women convened their first international gathering of women, which 7,000 women attended, and which followed earlier gatherings since the EZLN’s uprising in 1994 (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo, Stephen, Speed and Tucson2021, 158).

In these ways, Zapatista women disagreed with neoliberal multiculturalism in a much more ambiguous way than the broader Zapatista movement. Not only did they demonstrate an openness to the opportunities provided by the neoliberal economy, but they also refused their inclusion as passive and disadvantaged subjects of neoliberal multiculturalism. In other ways, Zapatista women were key actors who advanced the Zapatistas’ using-and-refusing of the state while fusing their own networks and alliances. Throughout, Zapatista women have waged novel disagreements against who counts as a political subject and what counts as politics.

3. Marichuy’s disagreement with the “war on life”

Through her bid for an independent candidacy, Marichuy built upon Zapatista women’s prior disagreement with the post-political promises of market rule. In contrast to ongoing post-political narratives that posited the market as the key to women’s liberation, Marichuy denounced neoliberal capitalism as a “war on life” (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo, Stephen, Speed and Tucson2021, 177). According to Mora, the “war on life” discourse became especially clear in Marichuy’s meeting with the inhabitants of the Netzahualcóyotl district or Neza, as it is called, located in the periphery of Mexico City. The importance of Neza for Marichuy’s discourse is not only that it has been widely settled by Indigenous migrants and descendants, but that it has also become a grim epicenter of femicide, one of Mexico’s most persistent and growing gender issues. According to Marichuy, the proliferation of femicide in Neza reflected neoliberal capitalism’s cannibalization of all life, especially of those at the bottom of Mexico’s racial and gendered hierarchies.

In her visit to Neza in November 2017, Marichuy not only took issue with the gendered violence produced by neoliberal capitalism in ways that were distinct from the CNI-EZLN’s discourse but also emphasized a new way of doing politics by stressing the importance of listening to the experiences of pain and rage wrought by such violence. In her speech to Neza, Marichuy described the war of “capitalist patriarchy” as the “very hate of the powerful against life” (my translation), emphasizing the gendered aspects of capitalism seldom discussed by the broader Zapatista movement.Footnote ⁴ Marichuy delivered these words after listening to Neza community members summarize the findings of meetings held in anticipation of her visit in which residents discussed the importance of femicides, environmental pollution, and housing shortages in their neighborhoods (Mora Bayo, Reference Mora Bayo, Stephen, Speed and Tucson2021, 176). After listening to their speeches, Marichuy interpreted such femicides as products of the cannibalizing logic of “capitalist patriarchy.” She stated:

By foregrounding the importance of listening to others’ experiences of pain and rage as a necessary step in healing from “capitalist patriarchy,” Marichuy also disrupted the privileging of the Rancièrean speaking subject of politics. While the Zapatistas have emphasized listening as an everyday key political praxis (Andrews Reference Andrews2010, 97), the novelty of Marichuy’s discourse resided in articulating listening with healing, what scholars term repair or the ongoing and quotidian processes that “address historic (and present) disciplinary harms” (Thomas Reference Thomas2024, 102). In many of her visits across the country, Marichuy met and listened to the plight of those whose family members had been disappeared or murdered. This included meeting with organizations for the disappeared in the northern city of Torreón and with Araceli Osorio, mother of Lesvy Berlín Osorio, a young woman who had recently been murdered at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City, yet which authorities had hastily labeled a suicide.Footnote ⁶ In her visit to UNAM, Marichuy noted that the CNI was attentive to the “rage and pain” (las rabias y los dolores) of the cities and explicitly of Lesvy’s recent murder (CNI 2017). Emphasizing healing as a political process that requires work, Marichuy added that her struggle was for “a Mexico in which women will no longer be missing in the path and the work to heal our motherland.”Footnote ⁷ Likewise, in her visit to the Yaqui nation in January 2018, Marichuy foregrounded the need to heal all life, which she claimed was interdependent. Marichuy spoke after listening to Yaqui community members discuss their struggles against the dispossession of their water by the nearby city of Hermosillo. In response, Marichuy discussed the importance of healing “mother earth” through a broad and daily “struggle for life” (CNI 2018).

Marichuy’s emphasis on fusing a broader struggle by articulating the pain and rage resulting from capitalist patriarchy’s war against life was absent from the CNI-EZLN’s public documents surrounding their decision in late 2016 to bid for an independent candidacy. In their first communiqué in which the CNI-EZLN announced their intent to weigh the possibility of launching a bid for an independent candidacy, the CNI-EZLN denounced the femicides and rape perpetrated by narco-state violence in Oaxaca (CNI-EZLN 2016). Yet by their second communiqué in which they announced their decision to move forward, the CNI-EZLN dropped all references to gendered violence (CNI-EZLN 2017), forgoing the opportunity to articulate the intersections between racism and patriarchy. In that communiqué, the CNI-EZLN’s only implicit reference to gender was their prediction that their decision to elect a woman spokesperson to lead them in their bid would elicit a “racist” (although not misogynist) response from the Mexican electorate.

I suggest that Marichuy’s bid for an independent candidacy thus illustrates the value of waging disagreement through using-fusing-and-refusing. Marichuy’s engagement with the nation, including its oldest public university and marginal spaces such as Neza, and the reformed space of electoral politics speak to the value of using-fusing-and-refusing in the name of healing all life, notably the most disenfranchised. Marichuy’s struggle for broader national transformation echoes Bonnie Honig’s (Reference Honig2021) concept of “feminist refusal,” which she claims is based on a return to the city-state rather than its abandonment. Based on Euripides’ tragedy of the Bacchae, Honig asks why a group of women banished from the city-state of Thebes by its king would return despite having reveled in newfound freedoms and practices of care in exile. Honig speculates that the women returned out of a refusal to be erased from the city or to allow others to tell their story as well as to share their new-found freedoms and practices of care.

Honig’s interpretation of the women’s exile as a rehearsal of freedom and care, one that they aimed to transplant to Thebes, finds echoes in Marichuy’s practice of politics by listening to the pain and rage of others. According to Honig, in exile, the women practiced a form of “care” when they “join together in dance, worship, and sleep and in caring for the animals in whose midst the women find themselves” (54). Marichuy, too, seems to be enacting a return to the nation after rehearsing forms of care through her campaign for an independent candidacy by fusing together a broader community of those seeking public redress for their pain and rage. Marichuy’s emphasis on the importance of listening to others’ pain and rage likewise echoes Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million (Reference Million2009, 58) who argues that Native people in the 1980s and 1990s in Canada took “a significant political action” by bravely telling their stories of pain at the hands of priests, teachers, and caretakers in boarding schools, but also their own relatives. Million argues that telling these stories was “neither emotionally easy nor communally acceptable” and yet by keeping silent, she asserts Native people could not heal. Million writes:

Million’s insistence that Native people’s actions were political is, of course, itself political. As Mario Blaser (Reference Blaser2019) suggests, adjudicating an action by calling it disagreement is an attempt to influence whether it is ultimately successful in generating a new order.

4. Tending to everyday forms of healing

Marichuy’s vision of politics as a daily act of fusing together those experiencing pain and rage from capitalist patriarchy offered a profound example of how to mount a broader struggle against femicides, disappearances, and everyday forms of exploitation and oppression. And yet, despite being the first Indigenous woman to run for president, Marichuy was not alone in articulating listening and healing to resistance. In this last section, I explore what using-fusing-and-refusing may look like in the everyday practice of Indigenous women such as Candy, a Nahua woman who used-and-refused the neoliberal economy to sustain her daughter before returning to her home region.

I suggest that Candy’s engagement with domestic work illustrates how ordinary women use-and-refuse the neoliberal economy by, like Zapatista women, disrupting the expectations that Indigenous women be docile workers. Such disruptions merit our attention since they show how Indigenous women may not be able to wholesale refuse the neoliberal economy but rather may only engage in a partial refusal. This is because neoliberalization in Mexico has also made it harder for rural Indigenous people to sustain themselves through, for example, subsistence farming, and because neoliberal processes have also increased women’s social-reproductive responsibilities as the state divests itself from social welfare. As I have already explained, the state’s divestment from social welfare also increases pressure on women to work outside the home to sustain their families, even as it has generated an economy highly dependent on low-wage, gendered care. I suggest Candy’s life and struggles reflect these processes as she struggles to live out the contradictory expectations that women both work and serve as caretakers for themselves and others. As a single mother who engaged in migrant domestic work to sustain herself and her daughter, Candy partially refused the terms of the neoliberal economy by demanding respect from her female employer or patrona. Candy did so by claiming to be a self-governed domestic worker who knows how to care well without her employer’s constant surveillance. Candy’s using-and-refusing of the neoliberal economy by invoking the ideal of the self-governed worker demonstrates that self-governance can be a tool of resistance when wielded to ward off surveillance and disrespect within the workplace rather than simply a tool used by neoliberal policymakers to achieve the downsizing of the state. What’s more, I suggest that Candy fuses or nourishes networks of resistance to the neoliberal economy by teaching her own daughter the importance of speaking out about the pain and rage caused by such economies and that of listening to that of others in the interest of individual and collective healing or repair.

I met Candy, a middle-aged Nahua woman from the Huasteca region of Hidalgo, Mexico, in 2015 in the town of Tepetzalan (pseudonym) in the state of Hidalgo where I carried out ethnographic fieldwork on the impact of NAFTA on migration from the Huasteca region. Candy, who lived a few yards away from my host family, agreed to share her experiences as a migrant in Mexico City with me. On the day of the interview, which Candy arranged to take place outside her two-room house due to the punishing summer heat, Fiona, her 12-year-old-daughter, joined us. Candy began by sharing how she had first migrated to Mexico City at the age of 12 with her cousin to work as a domestic worker. At the time, her family experienced hunger due to an ongoing communal land conflict with a mestizo landowner that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s. Candy had then met Feliciano, a Nahua man from Veracruz who served in the Mexican military. However, when the two began cohabiting, Feliciano had become physically and sexually abusive towards Candy. After having a son together, they moved to Neza in the outskirts of Mexico City. In Neza, Candy’s husband accused her before the DIF (The National System for Integral Family Development) of having an affair with his brother who often stepped in to defend her from the abuse. As a result, Candy tragically lost custody of her son and in the ensuing years became further estranged from him.

Candy then returned to Hidalgo to begin a new life. There she met a younger Nahua man with whom she had her second child, Fiona. After her second husband left her for another woman, Candy was forced to return to Mexico City in search of domestic work and to leave Fiona to her sister’s care in Hidalgo. It was at this point that Candy recounted the series of humiliations and abuses she endured at the hands of her patrona, a mestiza single mother of one son. I have previously interpreted the exploitation Candy suffered at her patrona’s hands as a process of “ungendering” and “unkinning” (Pacheco Reference Pacheco2023) due to the ways in which her patrona and the circumstances of migrant domestic work curtailed her ability to parent Fiona. Here, I would like to highlight how Fiona’s presence in the interview suggested another important layer of Candy’s politicization as a migrant domestic worker.

Throughout the interview it became clear that Candy had shared her experiences in Mexico City with Fiona. Throughout the interview, Fiona listened to her mother recount these experiences again, mostly patiently listening, though interrupting from time to time with corrections or sarcastic remarks about how abusive Feliciano and Candy’s patrona in Mexico City had been. Yet towards the end of the interview, as Candy recounted some of the worst abuses by her patrona, Fiona took the reins of the interview by insisting, “But tell her what you told her that time” (Pero dile lo que le dijiste esa vez). Candy obliged by recounting that one day her patrona had accused her of eavesdropping at the dinner table instead of tending to her work. Candy shared that she had gotten so upset that she spoke up, something she rarely did, by responding that listening to her patrona’s conversations was part of her job. Candy added proudly that her employer had not had any other choice but to remain quiet.

The dynamic created between Candy and Fiona in the context of the interview demonstrated several forms of disagreement. Like Zapatista women, Candy “used” the state-endorsed neoliberal economy but also refused it. At the same time, Candy’s rebuttal to her patrona exemplified one way by which she refused the expectations of docility imposed on Indigenous domestic workers by supporters of neoliberalism who expected poor women of color to accept low-wage work such as domestic work. What’s more, I suggest that by asserting her capacity to be a good caretaker rather than an eavesdropper who needs to be surveilled by her employer, Candy appears to be strategically laying claim to the ideal of the self-governing caretaker that has been promoted by Mexico’s neoliberal policymakers. Candy’s act suggests that, despite the post-political framing of self-governance as a kind of governance that facilitates neoliberal capitalism, workers such as Candy demonstrate that it can also be politicized and wielded to demand respect and autonomy in the workplace. This form of disagreement echoes Thelen and Coe (Reference Thelen and Coe2019, 290–91) who argue that the giving and receiving of care is a key medium through which groups of people, including caretakers, negotiate their rightful belonging in a household, city, or nation.

In Candy’s case, however, her appeals to being a self-governing caretaker were not sufficient to garner her long-term respect and autonomy in her workplace. As Candy explained, her patrona’s continued disrespect eventually led her to quit. She proudly recollected that when she notified her patrona of her decision to leave, her patrona expressed remorse and confessed that she held Candy in high regard and viewed her as her best employee. Such emphasis by Candy on her self-governing abilities should give us pause before over-emphasizing Indigenous women’s capacities to refuse. Instead, I suggest we underscore the ambivalence that Indigenous women may hold toward the neoliberal economy and their reliance on the messy and impure strategy of using-and-refusing.

Finally, Fiona’s familiarity with Candy’s experiences suggests that Candy was also committed to teaching her daughter the importance of speaking up against exploitation and dehumanization as well as of speaking out about the pain and rage caused by such dehumanization. Fiona’s familiarity with Candy’s painful experiences also suggests that she had been taught the value of listening to the pain and rage of others. I suggest that these valuable lessons constituted a way by which Candy fused together a wider network of struggle and repair. Fiona’s engaged presence throughout the interview contrasted with the moments of isolation and despair Candy recounted having experienced as a domestic worker. She had shared that in her moments of greatest despair at her patrona’s house, Candy had sought refuge and solace in the bathroom, the only room in which she could lock herself up to escape her patrona’s possible blows, cry her heart out, or even beat herself out of rage. By sharing these experiences and feelings with Fiona, not only had Candy externalized feelings that may have well destroyed her and her daughter but also taught Fiona the importance of sharing and listening to such feelings. Furthermore, by sharing her experiences and feelings with me, an anthropologist who purported to want to share her story with others, Candy may have also sought a public accounting for such feelings and repair despite anthropology’s deep colonial legacy.

In these ways, Candy demonstrated how Indigenous women use-and-refuse the neoliberal economy while raising their children not simply to reproduce these systems, as may be the objective of the Mexican state, but to challenge them by striving for individual and collective struggle and repair. Candy’s using-fusing-and-refusing therefore demonstrates how such a tool can be practiced not just at the scale of political organizations—prime foci of masculinist notions of the political—but also at the scale of the personal, familial, and intimate (see Berry et al. Reference Berry, Argüelles, Cordis, Ihmoud and Velásquez Estrada2017, 550).

5. Beyond refusal

By thinking across the disagreements of the Zapatistas, Marichuy, and Candy, I have tried to show how Indigenous people have challenged neoliberal post-politics by using-fusing-and-refusing. By using and refusing a neoliberal state and economy and fusing the political kinships necessary for a new partition of the sensible, Candy, Marichuy, and the Zapatistas have disrupted a neoliberal consensus that seeks to produce self-governing Indigenous people who quietly and docilely care for themselves and others. In their own ways, Zapatista women, Marichuy, and Candy challenge the extraction of their care, one that undermines their individual and collective well-being. What’s more, by emphasizing the importance of telling and listening to each other’s stories of pain and rage caused by capitalist patriarchy, Marichuy and Candy point to a new way of enacting disagreement that decenters the paradigmatic speaking subject of politics. Zapatista women, Marichuy, and Candy also disrupt the state’s neoliberal multicultural discourse by refusing the slot of the passive Indigenous woman who needs saving.

Through using-fusing-and-refusing, the Zapatistas, Marichuy, and Candy at various points demonstrate that a return to the city, specifically its most marginalized sectors such as Neza, is a necessary refusal to die of the pain and rage caused by capitalist patriarchy or to be denied a public accounting for such oppression and feelings. Their disagreements, which are woven through state platforms and hybrid discourses and waged on contested workplaces and research methods such as anthropology as well as nation-states built on stolen land, demonstrate an impure politics that fuses struggles across spaces such as Chiapas, Hidalgo, the UNAM, and Neza, but also across generations. Their disagreements suggest, too, that struggles from within have not been the only strategy by which Indigenous people have resisted neoliberal multiculturalism. Using-fusing-and-refusing, too, is a vital disruption by which Indigenous people have pursued their survival, resistance, and healing.

Accounting for the Zapatistas’ turn to using-fusing-and-refusing even before 2015 forces us not only to reconsider whether struggles from within were the only or even the main response to neoliberal multiculturalism in Mexico, but also, relatedly, whether neoliberal multiculturalism is over, as Hale suggests. Mexico’s passage of multicultural reforms in 2019 and the Morena party’s ongoing embrace of free trade (including through now two Trump administrations), despite its rhetoric to the contrary, and its decisions to further integrate the Southeast into transnational flows through “mega” development projects (see also Talanquer Reference Talanquer2020; Aguilar Gil Reference Aguilar Gil2021; Coughlin Reference Coughlin2022) suggest that the post-political terms of neoliberal multiculturalism are far from over.Footnote ⁸ Even if multiculturalism continues to be relatively weak in Mexico, it is not dead, as President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent restitution of 2,471 hectares of land to the Indigenous Wixarika as recently as May 2025 attests. Yet the Morena party’s continuing undermining of autonomous spaces and oppositional movements in general and their invocation of the “people” suggests that we can continue to expect a narrowing of opportunities for refusal and the ongoing significance of using-fusing-and-refusing.