Conversation With a Maya Indian Woman - No Room For Our Point of View at Beijing Conference

Calixta Gabriel, 39, is a Cakchiquel Maya, one of six to seven million indigenous people who make up the majority of Guatemala's 10 million population. Nevertheless she won't be represented at the United Nations International Women's Conference in Beijing which is now daily fare in the capital's newspapers. A social worker by profession, Gabriel has more education than most Maya -- especially women -- who have long been invisible in government offices and social and economic planning efforts that address indigenous problems. She is also a Mayan priest -- there is no gender impediment among those chosen to perform ceremonies and pray for others. Her life typifies a generation who survived three decades of civil war during which small villages were erased or depopulated by the government's anti-insurgency campaign and over 100,000 persons (including several of her relatives) were killed. Now as the war wanes, these survivors are digging in to reconstruct their personal and community lives. PNS Central America editor Mary Jo McConahay interviewed Calixta Gabriel in Guatemala City to find out how women like herself see the relevance of the Beijing Conference to their lives.

Gabriel: As a Maya, I don't feel our concerns will be taken into account. It's governments who determine who goes to such conferences, and indigenous people don't have the same links to them that non-Indians have. Even when women from non-governmental organizations met recently to discuss the conference, there was opposition to sending certain Maya women. They argued that the focus of the Beijing conference was women, not "ethnic matters." There was no national call to Indian women to make proposals or nominate delegates.

PNS: Why can't a representative speak for both Indian and non-Indian -- aren't their concerns as women the same?

Gabriel: You have to share our situation, know our cosmology, to understand the difference. Most Maya women who are employed work as domestic servants for non-Maya women who don't even pay them minimum wage. Discrimination for us can be how non-Maya women treat Maya women.

Part of our struggle as indigenous women is also about maintaining respect for nature and access to land which we see as Mother Earth. The non-Indian woman makes important demands about equality, but there are aspects she may neglect because she lives a different reality than we do and she doesn't listen to us.

PNS: The high-profile issues in Beijing right now are reproductive rights and abortion. How do you view these issues?

Gabriel: No one has asked us aborigines how we conceive of reproductive rights, let alone population control. We have our own systems of birth control, of determining when men and women ought to have sexual relations. We are not seeking to impose our views, but we do want to have our concepts for survival listened to.

In developed countries there is a struggle to accept abortion as a woman's right or because she can't afford to maintain the children she has. Our struggle is so grave it's at a different level. We have survived decades of political violence and lost many children and relatives. We don't want to lose more. We want to recover a population that has been lost.

There shouldn't be rigid laws to punish a woman who has an abortion because each woman must measure such things according to her own needs and possibilities. But Maya don't emphasize abortion because we do not see it as a priority.

PNS: What is?

Gabriel: The greatest need is to stop a kind of social disintegration that hurts women and is affecting even our Maya communities. In recent years, the military has drafted young Indian men and trained them with certain values. They have had sexual relations with many women outside and come back to the village with no respect for women. They even expect women to serve them. Missionaries from many religious denominations have also come, further dividing our communities. Political parties divided us too -- there are more than 20 of them. All this has meant we can no longer unite our thoughts or take the collective steps we need to survive.

The result of all this confusion is that many young village women, those with education, are now looking to our ancestral thinking as a guide. They want to take up the principles of our grandmothers.

PNS: Does this return to ancestral values mean young women will retreat from the modern world?

Gabriel: Not at all. We have always seen radio and TV as important, for instance, especially for those of us who have no schools. It helps us feel connected. Technology and the products of modern industry are positive. The problem arises when these things completely replace our old ways. When people watch the screen 24 hours a day, there's no time left to meditate, to ask old people what they think about the news based on their experience, to deal with serious problems within the household. That's when women wind up suffering.

What is important is to stay in equilibrium with Mother Nature -- to not live mechanically.

PNS: The Beijing Conference emphasizes women's political rights. Can participating in the political process help you achieve this equilibrium?

Gabriel: Of course women need greater participation in public life. For us each person can play a political role but it is accomplished by consensus in our communities. Women are consulted and give their advice on issues to husbands or fathers who then offer these views in public. But since this system of consensus has no place in Guatemala's political system so our form of women's participation has no voice.

PNS: Is this changing?

Gabriel: Something must change, because the war has left our rural communities in disaster. Many are going to the cities where they have no homes. Some two thirds of the Maya population are now women and one-third are men. Thirty percent of Maya women head their own households. This means there are many women who have become leaders at the local level but they lack the training to participate at higher levels. But there is no entity in Guatemala which concerns itself with their development. It would take much work to bring their points of view to the level of conferences like Beijing.