Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
lationship to corn. It speaks in the subtle dialects of flavor and nourishment. During my travels in Oaxaca, I visited nine rural house- holds for pláticas (chats) with women about tortillas and maize. Most women generously showed me how they made tortillas and where their family grew its corn, and most visits ended with a delicious snack of tortillas with cheese or meat. The North American Free Trade Agree- ment, and its ongoing effects, hung around the edges of all of the conversations. As I entered the tortilla-making hut (a small wooden building common to rural households in Oaxaca) of María Antonieta Gigón in the Sierra de Juárez mountains, she asked to see my passport. The request was startling and vaguely alarming to me; as a mixed-race Chicana, I’m very experienced with intercultural encounters in the United States, but in the rural pueblos of Oaxaca I was gringa as gringa could be, and the Lonely Planet guide had warned travelers to relin- quish their passports only if absolute- ly necessary. I thought about it for a minute, taking in my surroundings and noting how unthreatening my hostess seemed—a mother, probably in her early 40s, wearing a modest navy-blue circle skirt, intent on bak- ing her tortillas—and offered to show Señora Gigón my passport in ex- change for her allowing me to try and bake a tortilla or two. As we laughed together at my attempts to move the sticky, delicate tortilla dough from the prensa, a metal press which converts a mound of masa into a flat circle, to the comál, a pre-Columbian wood-heated hot plate where tortillas are baked, she told me more about why the pass- port fascinated her. She wanted to learn what they looked like and how to obtain one because she wanted to visit her eldest son, who had been working in San Diego for the last several years. The way she looked past me as she told about her desire to see him, and the urgency in her voice when she asked how much a passport cost, pointed to an unspeakable sense of loss. This same sense of loss came through again and again as women spoke of their sons or brothers, uncles or spous- es in the United States. By flooding the Mexican market with grossly over-subsidized U.S. corn, NAFTA’s “liber- alized trade” has displaced millions of commercial corn growers in Mexico, causing increased male immigration to the United States and a tandem increase in women’s poverty, as the women left behind must act as de facto sin- gle heads of household. Today, impoverished Mexican and Central American women make the dangerous journey north “across the line” in increasing numbers, in the hopes that the money 52 | SPRING 2011 they’ll send home will make up for the economic hardship suffered in the absence of husbands, fathers, brothers. These women carry memories of wrenching goodbyes with their children and loved ones. The domino effect of their poverty falls hardest, perhaps, on their children, as demonstrated by a new generation of child immigrants who ride the tops of trains through Mexico and risk their lives crossing into the United States to find their mothers. Although I never probed deeply enough to determine if NAFTA could have been at the root of the emigration ac- counts from the particular women I spoke with, the knowl- edge that an agreement pushed along by the United States has led to dramatic increases in family fragmentation and women’s poverty should weigh heavily on further consider- ations of the expansion of trade liberalization in the Amer- icas. Real power to address poor and/or rural women’s priorities is entirely absent from the history of NAFTA’s creation and implementation. Here, one of the most basic ecofeminist lines of logic can easily be drawn, a line connecting the treatment of women to the treat- ment of the environment. NAFTA accords the same disempowered status to the environment as it does to rural women. The only international NAFTA- related body that has sought any input from rural women is the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a NAFTA board that can only provide “en- couragements” and “suggestions,” rather than fines and enforcement, on matters of environmental concern atten- dant with the implementation of the agreement. While it is written into NAFTA that a corporation can take legal action against a state in which environmental regulations hamper that corporation’s business, NAFTA limits the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s official realm to that of toothless “cooperation.” Thus the CEC becomes the environmental equivalent of the angel in the house for NAFTA, a beneficent body whose role is to pro- vide gentle guidance on eco-right and -wrong, while wielding none of the economic power of a head of house- hold, a role in this case played by the few wealthy men of the signatory nations whose stock investments have swelled as a result of NAFTA. The reverse of the old ecofeminist equation, in which the trampling of women’s rights is contemporaneous with the trampling of environmental rights, remains to be explored: If the architects of international trade agree- ments kept rural women’s needs more centrally in view, would wiser environmental stewardship and greater bio- diversity ensue? In the case of maize, the answer may well be yes. www.feminist.org