Refusing to take men for an answer

The exclusion of women from government rule in Oaxacan towns is ostensibly protected by Article 25 of the state constitution, which establishes the rights of groups such as the Zapotecs to elect municipal officials according to "the traditions and democratic practices of indigenous communities." The Zapotecs, most famous as the builders of the pre-Columbian city of Monte Alban, today number about 400,000, living mostly in rural Oaxaca state.

"It's the way things have always been done here, since we've had the use of reason," said Eloy Mendoza, a 32-year-old schoolteacher who was declared the winner of the mayoral election. Only men are allowed to run the city government because, as Mendoza put it, "we do all the hard physical work."

Cruz remembers growing up in a place where illiteracy was common among women, whose feet were calloused and scarred from working barefoot in fields and at home.

Allowed to go to the village school, Cruz saw in her classrooms another vision of what a girl's life could be: Her teachers valued girls as much as boys. She worried that after she completed primary school, her education would stop, as it does for most girls in the village.

"In school, I was happy," she said.

"But when I went home I returned to my reality: They would treat me badly and say I wasn't worth anything because I was born a woman. They would order me around and say, 'Do this, do that.' "

By the time she was 11, she said, "I began to realize that at any moment any man could come for me" in an arranged marriage. "Just the idea was horrible and terrified me."

For two weeks, a tearful Cruz implored her father to let her leave the village to continue her studies. He relented, walking 10 hours with her to the next town so she could take a bus to the city of Santo Domingo Tehuantepec.

In the city, she lived with uncles who allowed her to study on the condition that she also work selling peppers, oranges and corn on the streets, a job that required her to begin her day at 3 a.m. Later, she won a scholarship that allowed her to attend and finish high school.

Eventually, she found her way to college in Oaxaca city. She wanted to study medicine but chose accounting because the tuition was lower.

"I lived with a cousin of mine in a little room with a tin roof," she recalled. "It was hard, but I kept going because I had this dream that one day I would be called 'doctora' or 'licenciada,' " the titles Mexicans confer on people with doctorates and bachelor's degrees.