Abstract
Fieldwork in the Zapotec textile-producing community of Teotitlán del Valle from 2000 to 2004 suggests that indigenous responses to increased economic globalization and Mexico’s neoliberal economic policies do not always involve solutions of individualization, but can also generate collective efforts. From the late 1980s, textile cooperatives were first organized by women and most recently by men and women to such a degree that by the summer of 2004 about 15 percent of the local households were involved in textile cooperatives. In an attempt to bypass local merchant control of the textile industry and to gain political and cultural rights in their community and in the global market as independent artisans, these women pioneered a new era in gender relations.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
