Women's Handicraft Collectives

Women's handicrafts co-operative zapatista autonomous municipality '16 de Febrero'

The women in The Highlands of Chiapas are famous for their skill in embroidery and handicrafts. In '16 de Febrero', as in other zapatista autonomous municipalities, the women have formed themselves into a co-operative.

Twenty three women from 3 different communities were present to tell us about the work of the Women's Co-operative for Artesania, at a meeting in February 2007. The Collective involves 122 women from 11 villages in '16 de Febrero'.

"Thank you for all your work selling our products. Now that we're working in a collective it is much better than individually.

"The Co-operative works well. It helps by enabling us to sell our artesania (handicrafts)."

"But there are problems. Even if the artesania is sold at a better price, the money that actually reaches the women is less than the selling price, and then we need to buy more materials."

"If sales are low then it's difficult to buy the cloth and other things we need, also because of the economic situation that we find ourselves in, in Co-operative."

"The Co-operative helps quite a lot, if you take work as an individual to places like Simojovel (the nearest big town), you don't get a good price."

"I can remember going to Simojovel and they would refuse to pay the price I needed - they would impose their price. With the Co-operative it is better, we still get little but as a Collective we get more than individually."

"I am happy even if I am not really sure what to say. We are in struggle to be able to work. It is a sacrifice to do the work, it costs time and suffering. but now it is different, it is good in the Co-operative."

"Normally we get paid a bad price for our work. It can be discouraging, but with the Co-operative we are encouraged to keep going forward. At times it is difficult but we go on with the struggle."

"We find it difficult to explain. We are not used to meetings, to speaking in front of other people."

The Organisation of the Co-operative

It is part of the Women for Dignity Co-operative who have a shop at Oventik. Four women from the '16 de Febrero' Co-operative take it in turns to go to Oventik and work there for 8 days in the shop.

The Co-operative has meetings every so often. A representative comes from each group, in each community. They bring and take back information, eg on what progress there has been with the Co-operative, etc..

How the Women Work

"We work every day, but not all the time, because we also have a lot of other work, our main work, to do. We have to make the tortillas, look after the children, make food for the family. We usually work at the artesania for between 2 and 4 hours per day.

We work together in each community in a specific place all together. We don't have a special building set aside for this work, in Berlin for example the women work under a shelter where the firewood is stored, in another community they work in one woman's house.

Working this way helps us quite a lot because we can help each other in how to do the work. If one woman knows one kind of work but another knows another work, then we can help and support each other. For example if one of us knows how to make a star on the bags, then they can show the rest, we can help each other."

Women Situation

Before there was oppression, we didn't know how to explain our needs, women grew up without studying. We didn't have education, we didn't have learning, we were forgotten and ignored.

The birth of collectivism has helped a lot, it has enabled us to work and to sell our products.

Before when we weren't organised, it was very difficult to sell our products, we didn't know where to go to sell the products. Now it's different from before. Because of the collective we can sell our work.

"There's been a big change, even though before we did work, we didn't know where to sell our products. The government left women in oblivion, they denied women any rights. Through struggle this has changed, now we can work, we can sell our work in other places.

The government made false promises that it would help women sell our artesania, our handicrafts, but it didn't keep these promises. The government didn't give any recognition to women's artesania.

(NOTE In our visit to '16 de Febrero', we could observe that more changes were needed till women achieved equality - from the gender imbalance in holding positions of responsibility, to the simple fact of many more boys than girls wearing shoes in some areas. But we could also see the progress made, in that for example there are now women on the autonomous council, and in all the meetings in the villages, women attended and spoke out about their situation.)

Education

"Before, girls didn't have the right to go to school. This was mainly because of the landowners. before, this area was all fincas (big estates) and ranches. We were in the hands of the estate owners, we had to work for the boss.

Not only the girls, but also the boys were not able to go to school. Even if you were only 7 or 8 years old, you had to start to work. This was before we started the land occupations in the 1980's. But even then the women couldn't go to school, there was still an inequality due to gender. Few women participated in education, because of how we were badly treated. This still continues.

Now things are a bit better, due to our work. We now have some hope for the future through our hope that you will seek some more markets for our artesania. We hope that this will not be your last visit, we hope to have more visits from you."