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The next chapter approaches the decolonial in anthropology via the usages of the influential term ‘internal colonialism’ in mid-twentieth-century Mexican scholarship, and the feminist and legal anthropology which has been a salient feature of recent Mexican social science.

A close reading of this very rewarding literature shows that, despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, Mexican feminist anthropologists are universalists because, while by no means dismissing the value of cultural recognition, they prioritize the question of violence against women and effective equal opportunities for them over the cultural rights of indigenous peoples.

Those anthropologists were the first to extract a feminist message from the Zapatista phenomenon, which hit the headlines on January 1994 as an uprising more strategic in its theatrical performance than in its political effectiveness, and continues as a quasi-independent enclave in the Southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The original Zapatistas and associated organizations said little about activist women or gender, although they demonstrated their feminism by the presence of women in leading positions, including as military commanders, but in their subsequent research the anthropologists found women who infused the movement’s message with a defence of their rights and their bodies. The Zapatista leaders were the product of a Marxist and Maoist stream going back to the 1960s, and only discovered their indigenous vocation after they had found glamour in the world’s media. By returning to the literature on the background to the uprising and its setting in the Lacandonian jungle of Chiapas I have been able to recognize its originality and the context in which its ideals were forged.

The feminist anthropologists force open the issues of class and ethnicity (Hernández Castillo 2003; Sieder 2017). The most original figure among them, the Bolivian Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, defies categorization in one or another camp of identity or left-wing politics and rejects identification with one or another racial or ethnic group in a society at once predominantly indio and also marked by pervasive métissage. These feminist-ethnic intersections draw our attention to important tools in the understanding of Latin American society, and in later chapters I describe those in detail with examples, mostly from Bolivia, whose intelligentsia have generated some of the most compelling debates about race and gender.