Against machismo in organizing

A compañera from the Chatino region marches in 2020. Photo courtesy of OIDHO. 

Book excerpt • Guiomar Rovira • July 4, 2025 • Leer en castellano

This week we’re sharing the prologue to Irene Ragazzini's La lucha dentro de la lucha (The Struggle Within the Struggle), recently published by El Rebozo and Bajo Tierra Ediciones. The book’s subtitle is The political challenges faced by women in gender-mixed social organizations, a problematic Ragazzini discusses in her edited conversations with the women of Indigenous Organizations for Human Rights in Oaxaca (OIDHO by its Spanish acronym), a coordinating body with many years of organizing experience in the southern Mexican state—Eds.

The Struggle Within the Struggle could not have been written without the author's lived experience as a participant in women's organizing processes throughout her life.  In it, Irene Ragazzini weaves her own experience with the shared experiences of women of organized Indigenous communities and peoples.

Through her meticulous research Irene Ragazzini provides a nuanced read on a hard reality: that popular processes not only suffer defeats due to co-optation or succumb to enemy opposition, but also fail because of internal dynamics.

Often, a perverse patriarchal orientation fractally propagates the oppression and silencing of the state it claims to fight. Dominion over feminized bodies is reproduced through structural machismo and the abuse of power.

This distortion, which appears in activist spaces both intimate and public, makes it challenging to achieve the alternative world toward which so much work is being done.

That is why Irene warns us of the importance of taking depatriarchalizing efforts within struggles seriously. To do so, we must start with spaces where we can be “among women,” spaces that enable the generation of personal capacities to change organizational forms and their ability to effectuate change.

The kind of Indigenous community-based feminism described in this book does not seek to break with men. It proposes, rather, building a shared struggle alongside them.

OIDHO is a mixed-gender community organization established in Zapotec and Chatina territories in Oaxaca, Mexico, a region marked by local powerbrokers, counterinsurgency, extractive projects, agrarian conflicts, and electoral disputes. 

Initially, the organization’s women members attended assemblies without actively participating in them. Little by little, they began to participate, but it took them 16 years to do so fully and to assume positions of leadership. Ultimately, they transitioned from being invisible to becoming indispensable in processes of political decision-making and community leadership.

Friendship is political

Women’s participation in politics requires rebelling against “must be” mandates that assign women as caregivers to their husbands, children, the elderly, and other dependents. That’s why they must transform themselves personally, in front of and alongside other women, constructing a positive and powerful vision of themselves—creating political friendships that obliterate the discipline of some women against others and of men against all women. 

Through this transformation, women can stand together not only within mixed social organizations, but also in front of their husbands, fathers, brothers, and partners and demand their place, prove their worth, and overcome fears as they become community leaders.

To me, the most difficult question Irene asks is: What does it mean for women to participate in politics? Taking this question seriously opens us up to an unexplored dimension. We know what it means for men, with narratives of hero figures, and many historical examples of male sacrifice, conviction, ideas of fighting for the people, all driven by righteous anger. 

To understand what political participation means for women, we must shed the mythical masculine veneer and examine the individual and collective steps that some women have taken. In this book, it is the women of OIDHO who guide us and light the path forward.

Because it’s not just about dealing with frustration and internalized gender insecurity, but also the reactions their participation provokes at all levels. Community control and discipline prevent many from overcoming the fear of what others will say about them. In addition, women have too much labor to do, the research makes this very clear. If able to participate, they face difficulties in sustaining child-rearing, family care, and the endless tasks that totally occupy their time.

That is why being politically active means deconstructing the very idea of what it means to be a woman, daring to break those constraints, and doing away with infantilizing labels. It means exposing oneself to all kinds of rumors: if you leave town, it's because you're after someone else, you're a cheater. Then the husband is discredited, he’s expected to take responsibility for keeping her in check: he is ridiculed when his wife becomes a leader, travels, and plays an active role in organizing.

That is why not all women dare to step forward. The path of least resistance is to leave things as they are. It’s a survival strategy that guarantees less suffering because energy is finite and constant urgency lies in attending to the day-to-day tasks of raising children, caring for dependents, the husband, and in-laws.

What Irene Ragazzini demonstrates is that when women’s participation does occur, it’s because it is sustained by collective effort, as gratification becomes greater and multiplies. The crux of the issue around which the text is circling emerges as another question: how does political friendship among women develop? Wherein lies the capacity to support one another that makes it possible to get beyond the imposition of silence, defamation, and criticism?

Against macho mandates

Social organizations in rural Mexico have seen emergence of a popular, Indigenous, and community-based feminism that is also cosmopolitan, driving shared struggles against injustice and dispossession. But the struggle within the struggle is not easy. It can only arise from an awareness of one's own subordination. Only in a separate space—in gatherings and organizing among women—can trust in one another be built. Only there can shared strength emerge that enables the creation of political space within the wider mixed organization that allows women to demonstrate their ability to make valuable contributions.

There are several problems facing popular feminism in these spaces: first, that activist men feel women's participation is not their problem, that it is better not to get involved, that it is women's business. And second, that left-wing social movements have overlooked feminist struggles in favor of an ideology that places economic redistribution above all other axes of transformation.

Militant machismo has built a pyramidal system of priorities in its struggle against power. That is the root of the belief that only once capitalism has been defeated, can “women's issues” be addressed. The idea that tending to these issues beforehand would destroy the unity of the group still haunts mixed activist spaces. Women wanting to come together to raise awareness and build political strength have often been accused of seeding division.

In my view, The Struggle Within the Struggle serves as a guide to understanding the concept of the “mandate of militant masculinity” and how to fight it. The militant macho is fascinated by heroism, weapons, and sexual affirmation through political power. He fetishizes conflict, adores the limelight, and is ego-blinded.

Ragazzini invites us to consider how to dismantle the patriarchal order that is deeply rooted in left-wing male brotherhood, how we can establish autonomous mechanisms of anti-patriarchal justice independent of the state, and how to deal with similar contradictions within our own organizations. 

In one harrowing section, she describes how it can be easier for women to report domestic violence than sexual abuse by their political leaders. That’s why political friendship among women is a collective revolutionary project. Against the punitive order, the glitch in the system is women’s political friendship.

Political friendship is a decision and a desire, a process of recognition where women learn to admire each other, to be there for each other, to give care, and to deserve being cared for. It enables us to help, hear and see one another to participate more wholly as women.