Ra Ximhai (Jul 2014)
WOMEN SITUATION AT TEPEXILOTLA, MÉXICO
Abstract
Through the years, rural women have been immerse in different situations that have condemn them to suffer bad treatments or discrimination, machist treatments, and lack of equity. However, in recent years, Mexican public politics are looking after the improvement of women quality of life, particularly in the last ten years. Implementing governmental actions to prevent different ways of discrimination towards women, looking for gender equity in the Mexican society. In particular, Tepexilotla is a community of the Mexican state of Veracruz, that despite of being so small village, is actively its development. Regarding gender, after four years of continuous work in the community, there are initiating changes in social and familiar relationships, because is getting each time more involved in the economical activities, such as agroecotourism. Specifically, these have been observed on relation to their participation in the agro-ecoturistic activity that has started to be a resource of employment and development in the town. As far as Tepexilotla has been received the training from “Colegio de Postgraduados” to design rural touristic routes that have encouraged this activity en this community (between other active-research and projects in that microregion). Between these projects, Rural turism emerged from a integral participative diagnostic (DIP) to detect potential projects of the microregion, where the people from the community raise their interest to learn “touristic guides” habilities, because they were interested on showing prehispanic ruins as well as caves and ecological areas, that emerged as potential resources for development. In this way, the project borned to achieve agro-ecoturistic activities that help to potentialize the agricultural, ecological and touristic activities, with the gender perspective view, (considering both men and women). In this project, rural women are being carrying out a very active role, which is empowering them in decision making both in families as well as in the community and into the agro-ecoturistic community group, that they are part of since 2010, when that group was borned. Their participation have positively impacted, not only in women herselves, but also in their relationships with men, to men himselves and children. And also it can be observed positive changes towards a better education to the girls that are now studying secondary school.
