Zapatista Women: Ramona & the Women's Revolutionary Law | SanCrisGo
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Zapatista Women: Comandanta Ramona & the Women's Revolutionary Law
Women have been central to Zapatismo from before the 1994 uprising. The Women's Revolutionary Law set out ten rights in 1993, Comandanta Ramona became one of the movement's best-known Indigenous leaders, and later Zapatista women continued to organize around autonomy, gender inequality and violence.
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Women were not a side story in Zapatismo. Before the EZLN became publicly known in January 1994, Zapatista communities had already approved a ten-point Women's Revolutionary Law covering political participation, work, reproductive decisions, health, education, marriage, freedom from violence and leadership.
Comandanta Ramona became one of the movement's most visible Indigenous women during the 1990s. But the story is larger than one person. Zapatista women have participated as insurgents, political representatives, autonomous authorities, education and health promoters, organizers and community members — while also describing gender inequality inside their own communities as an unfinished struggle.
That last point matters. The Women's Revolutionary Law should not be read as proof that sexism disappeared in Zapatista communities. Zapatista women themselves have repeatedly described the process as slow, uneven and still contested.
What is the Women's Revolutionary Law? A ten-point set of rights approved within the EZLN before the 1994 uprising and first published in the movement's newspaper El Despertador Mexicano in December 1993.
Who was Comandanta Ramona? A Tsotsil Indigenous woman, member of the EZLN's Indigenous leadership, participant in the January 1994 uprising and Cathedral dialogue, and one of the movement's most important public representatives in the 1990s.
Did Ramona write the law by herself? No reliable source supports that simplified claim. She is widely described as one of its key promoters and as part of the organizing process behind women's demands, but the law emerged through consultation and collective political work.
Did the law immediately create gender equality? No. Zapatista sources and academic fieldwork both describe advances alongside persistent contradictions and patriarchal practices.
Are Zapatista women still politically visible? Yes. Official EZLN material in 2025 presented work by young Indigenous Zapatista women reflecting on what it means to be a woman today, and in 2026 Zapatista events continued to use the name of Comandanta Ramona for an important meeting space.
What did the Women's Revolutionary Law say?
The Ley Revolucionaria de Mujeres was published at the end of 1993, just before the uprising. It contained ten points.
In summary, it stated that women had the right to:
participate in the revolutionary struggle according to their will and capacity;
work and receive a fair wage;
decide how many children to have and care for;
participate in community affairs and hold office if freely elected;
primary healthcare and food for themselves and their children;
education;
choose their partner and not be forced into marriage;
protection from physical abuse and severe punishment for rape or attempted rape;
hold leadership positions in the organization and military rank;
hold the same rights and obligations established by the revolutionary laws and regulations.
Those points were unusually direct because they addressed both the wider conditions facing poor Indigenous communities and power relations inside families and communities.
The original law is a primary EZLN document. It tells us what the movement formally declared. It does not, by itself, tell us how completely each right was implemented in every community.
Why was the law important?
The law made gender-specific demands part of the EZLN's political program before the movement became globally known.
Some of its demands — education, health, work and political participation — overlapped with broader Zapatista demands. Others challenged practices that particularly affected women, including forced marriage, domestic violence, lack of reproductive choice and exclusion from community authority.
Academic work on Zapatista women often emphasizes this double dimension: women were participating in a movement demanding Indigenous autonomy from the Mexican state while also pushing for changes in gender relations within Indigenous communities themselves.
That is why reducing the Women's Revolutionary Law to a generic “feminist manifesto” can lose context. It emerged from Indigenous women inside a specific political and community struggle in Chiapas, even though many of its demands overlap with wider feminist struggles.
Who was Comandanta Ramona?
Comandanta Ramona was a Tsotsil Indigenous leader of the EZLN and one of the most recognizable women in the movement's early public history.
Mexican institutional sources place her birth in 1959 in San Andrés Larráinzar, which the Zapatistas refer to as San Andrés Sakamch'en de los Pobres. Before and during her political work she was known as an embroiderer.
Ramona was part of the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena (CCRI), the Indigenous political leadership of the EZLN. She became publicly known after the 1994 uprising and participated in the political process that followed.
She should not be treated as a symbolic “female version” of Subcomandante Marcos. Their roles, public profiles and positions inside the movement were different. Marcos became the best-known spokesman to national and international audiences; Ramona represented Indigenous leadership and women's political demands from within the CCRI.
What did Ramona do in January 1994?
Current Mexican historical sources and later accounts place Ramona among the Zapatista leaders who participated in the January 1, 1994 seizure of San Cristóbal de las Casas.
Women were present at different levels of the uprising. Major Ana María is another important example of a woman who held military command. Ramona's significance was both military-political and representative: she was already part of the Indigenous command structure and became one of the voices explaining why women were participating.
After the federal ceasefire of January 12, the first major peace dialogue opened in San Cristóbal Cathedral in February 1994.
Ramona was part of the Zapatista delegation. This is important because the negotiations were not simply a meeting between Marcos and the government. The EZLN delegation included Indigenous commanders and political representatives whose presence showed the movement's collective leadership structure.
Ramona's participation also made women's political authority visible at one of the most important public moments of the early conflict.
Why was her 1996 trip to Mexico City important?
In October 1996, Ramona traveled to Mexico City as a Zapatista representative and participated in the process around the National Indigenous Congress (CNI).
Her appearance in the capital became one of the most remembered moments of the movement's post-uprising public history. She addressed a large gathering in the Zócalo and helped represent the movement's effort to connect the Chiapas struggle with a wider national Indigenous political agenda.
This came after the signing of the San Andrés Accords in February 1996, when Indigenous rights and autonomy had become central to negotiations between the EZLN and the federal government.
Was Ramona the author of the Women's Revolutionary Law?
It is safer to say that Ramona was one of the central promoters associated with the law and with the organizing process that produced women's demands, rather than crediting the full text to her alone.
The EZLN itself presents the law as a collective revolutionary law approved through its organization and communities. Later institutional and movement histories repeatedly connect Ramona with the law, but turning that into a single-author story simplifies a collective process.
This distinction matters because the political significance of the law is precisely that it represented demands developed among women across Zapatista communities, not merely a declaration by one famous leader.
What changed for women inside Zapatista communities?
There is evidence of real institutional and social change, but not of a simple transformation from inequality to equality.
Research in autonomous communities has documented women participating in:
community decision-making;
autonomous government;
education and health work;
productive and agroecological projects;
political meetings and territorial organization;
military and insurgent structures;
international gatherings organized by Zapatista women themselves.
At the same time, academic studies have continued to identify contradictions involving domestic work, access to land, political participation and gendered power.
A 2022 peer-reviewed study on women and territory in Zapatista communities explicitly described advances, contradictions and challenges rather than a completed achievement of equality.
That is a more useful description than either romanticizing the communities as free of sexism or dismissing the Women's Revolutionary Law as purely symbolic.
What did Zapatista women themselves say about progress?
One especially useful source is a 2013 EZLN text by Zapatista women reflecting on their own history.
The speakers explained that the Women's Revolutionary Law was written because women lacked many rights and needed equality with men. They also said that progress in the Altos region had been small and slow, while emphasizing that change was still taking place.
This is important evidence because it comes from inside the movement and openly acknowledges unfinished work.
The document does not present the law as a magical solution. It presents it as a framework used to evaluate actual practice.
The 2018 Women's Gathering
In March 2018, Zapatista women organized the First International Gathering of Politics, Art, Sport and Culture for Women in Struggle at the Caracol of Morelia.
The gathering was organized specifically by women and brought together Zapatista women with women from Mexico and many other countries. The official closing statement explained that the organization had been built through meetings from communities to regions and zones.
The importance of the gathering was not that all participants shared one ideology. Zapatista organizers framed it as a space where women involved in different struggles could speak, listen and organize without male control of the event.
It also showed that the political trajectory that began before 1994 had expanded well beyond the original ten-point law.
Are these ideas still present today?
Yes, but the current evidence should be described carefully.
In June 2025, Enlace Zapatista published “As the Women We Are,” presenting a poem and reflections developed by young Indigenous Zapatista women from the Caracol Jacinto Canek. The text says the young women had listened to older generations — grandmothers, great-grandmothers, mothers and older sisters — and reflected on what it means to be young Zapatista women today.
The source is useful because it shows an explicit intergenerational discussion of women's condition continuing three decades after the Women's Revolutionary Law.
In 2026, the movement also continued using the name Semillero Comandanta Ramona for a meeting space next to the Caracol of Morelia. An August 2026 arts and resistance program was inaugurated there. That does not prove that Ramona's historical role is interpreted identically by every community, but it does show that her name remains part of the movement's current institutional memory.
Does Zapatismo equal feminism?
That depends on what exactly is meant by “feminism,” and broad labels can obscure more than they explain.
Zapatista women have articulated demands that overlap strongly with feminist struggles: freedom from violence, reproductive decision-making, political participation, work, education and opposition to patriarchal power.
But Indigenous women's political positions in Chiapas have also developed through struggles around racism, land, poverty, language, community autonomy and state power. Academic literature repeatedly warns against assuming that Indigenous women's politics can simply be absorbed into a single urban or Western feminist framework.
A more accurate description is that Zapatista women have developed their own gendered political demands inside a broader Indigenous autonomous movement, while also creating connections with women and feminist struggles elsewhere.
Common mistakes
“All Indigenous women in Chiapas are Zapatistas.”
No. Indigenous identity and Zapatista political affiliation are not the same thing.
“Ramona single-handedly wrote the Women's Revolutionary Law.”
That overstates one person's authorship of a collective political process.
“The law ended sexism in Zapatista communities.”
Neither Zapatista testimony nor academic research supports that claim.
“Women only supported male Zapatista leaders.”
Women held military, political, autonomous-government and organizing roles of their own.
“The topic ended with Ramona's death in 2006.”
No. Later women's gatherings, autonomous participation and current Zapatista material show that gender remains an active field of political discussion.