Cancun Dispatch: 9/13

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At the torn-down barricade where we sit, the students want to make a proposal, but when finally the crowd pressure gets a woman student up there, one of the men takes the bullhorn out of her hand. When she speaks, and proposes that we hold a people's assembly in the park, she's booed and shouted down, and I find myself feeling very angry. It has been an incredible day, full of awesome power, but still women have to fight for our space in the movement, and still women's voices aren't heard.

We get another call that the Koreans are being bussed out, and have not been arrested. We wait to greet them, then leave, eat, go home, rest and write, and return for yet another meeting, involving the long and difficult process of deciding what to do tomorrow and how to close the mobilization. But in the process, one of the campesino women, Dolores, speaks of how important it was for her to be part of taking down the fence, how it represents a kind of power and action that she hasn't much experience with, and how we need to struggle not just against neoliberalism, but against patriarchy as well. As the meeting ends, I tell her I appreciate her words, that I could have said something of the same myself because it was a struggle to find space for women. She pats my arm, and smiles. "Poco a poco," she says. Little by little.

The women's thread is one of the strands of the cord. The campesinos, the students, the black bloc, the internationals, the indigenas, all distinct, all maintaining their identity and autonomy, still struggling to work together, to be twined into the same braided rope, a rope twined of the many threads that can bring the empire down.

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