Candidacy for community
For the first time in Mexican history, an Indigenous woman is running for president. The country hasn’t had an Indigenous president for 145 years, and a woman has never held the highest office. But gender and heritage aren’t the only aspects that set Maria de Jesus Patricio apart from her contenders.
“Marichuy,” as she’s known, is a 57-year-old traditional Nahua healer from southern Jalisco. She isn’t backed by a political party, but rather by the Indigenous National Congress, which groups together representatives of dozens of nationalities and tribes from across Mexico. And she says that winning the presidency — or even getting votes at all — isn’t the aim of their venture into the electoral arena.
“Our participation is for life; it’s to bring together our communities that have been hit hard for years and years and that, I think, right now need to look for a way to keep on existing,” Patricio told followers and reporters gathered in Chiapas recently.
She clarified that the effort isn’t just for Indigenous people, but for Mexicans from all walks of society, “to join forces to be able to destroy this system that is generally finishing us all off.”
Her candidacy also has the backing of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army. The rebel army — famous for its black ski masks and its spokesperson once called Subcomandante Marcos — led an uprising in 1994 in the southern state of Chiapas to demand rights for Indigenous people.
Like the Zapatista uprising, the move to put an Indigenous woman on the July 2018 ballot is a swipe from below at Mexico’s dominant economic, political and social order. The campaign promises to be anything but politics as usual and draws on Indigenous governance philosophies and communalism, rather than polling, focus-group testing or other usual tactics. It also comes at a time when Indigenous groups worldwide are fighting to defend their rights and territory from interests that seek to profit from resources on their ancestral lands.
As a traditional healer, Marichuy has the kind of skills learned at the side of other healers who pass down their knowledge to younger assistants, who are often relatives. Forests and fields are their pharmacies. They depend on trees and plants within thriving local ecosystems to cure their communities. It’s just one example of why maintaining a healthy environment is a core value for so many Indigenous cultures.
Marichuy became involved in Zapatista-inspired struggles at least as early as 1996 when she participated in the formation of the Indigenous National Congress, known by the Spanish acronym CNI. In 2001, she spoke before the national legislature in Mexico City about the situation of Indigenous women nationwide — a hearing that most lawmakers at the time opted to skip.
Throughout the campaign launch event, Marichuy’s cohort referred to her as “spokesperson,” never “candidate” — a key little detail that speaks to the collective nature of the effort.
That aspect may be particularly hard for people accustomed to party politics to understand. It comes from traditional governance models used in Indigenous communities, where collective bodies like popular assemblies outrank individual positions like mayor.