Mexico’s Street Brigade: Sex, Revolution, and Social Change

The alliance between Zapatistas, sex workers, and transvestites shows the power of social change
in a key cultural way—when it’s anchored to daily life. In Mexico, one of the strongest and most overbearing
enclaves of patriarchy and machismo, Subcomandante Marcos has opened the doors to debate about discrimination
in a controversial area.

What purpose is there, in classic revolutionary logic, in covering thousands of kilometers to meet
with a handful of whores and crossdressers? What can such alliances offer to strengthen the "accumulation
of power," any professional politicians’ central task? It seems obvious, from a cost-benefit analysis,
that this type of effort should be useless. However, Subcomandante Marcos has been committed to this
kind of meeting since January of last year under the auspices of The Other Campaign (La
Otra Campaña), with the understanding that it means looking for new ways of doing politics.
It passes through places that are far from the madding crowd and takes place with actors who, like indigenous
people, understand social change as an affirmation of difference.

Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer (Women’s Supportive Street Brigade) is a Mexican collective
that has managed, in the last 15 years, to weave a wide net of social work with prostitutes and transvestites,
called the Mexican Sex Work Network. This has meant transcending the "victim" role and becoming
people who want to be recognized as workers by their peers, not seen as beings who have "fallen" into
the world’s oldest profession through ignorance, poverty, or submission. A quick look at what they have
tackled so far reveals a deep work of emancipation.

Education, Clinics, and Condoms

A differentiating characteristic of the Network is that its members don’t want to depend on the State,
although they are constantly criticizing it. Street Brigade began its work 15 years ago, its base a group
of sociology graduates from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The small initial nucleus—Elvira
Madrid, Jaime Montejo, and Rosa Icela—began to weave a net that now reaches 28 of Mexico’s 32 states.
Over time they chose to work in a horizontal form, but not for ideological reasons. "The government
co-opted many state coordinations, a habitual practice in the political culture of this country, so we
saw that the best way to work is horizontally, in an assembly style, and trying not to have representatives," Elvira
points out.

The Network encouraged women to form cooperatives to avoid dependence and to make themselves the bosses
of their sources of employment. They rented hotels and shared the profits among the members. The first
were the transvestites who formed the cooperative Angeles en Busca de Libertad (Angels Searching for
Freedom).

"The cooperative hotels exist in various states but some of them failed because the members would
end up replicating the same behavioral patterns as the ones they were organizing against," Rosa
comments.

But the star project, the one most valued by the workers, are the clinics. Two clinics already exist
in Mexico City and are self-managed and free of charge. They were born from the corruption and discrimination
of the state organisms that only provided them with services through bribery. Moreover, Elvira indicates, "Getting
tested scared them because it could mean loss of income, given that when a girl has AIDS there are state
governments that will put her photo up in hotels so that they don’t give her a room." On the contrary,
in the Network clinics tests are voluntary and confidential, emphasizing education. "The majority
of sex workers are illiterate and many are indigenous. For this reason we dedicate most of our efforts
to education, to the point that most of the participants in the Network are health promoters and educate
their peers, which is much more effective."

The clinics, one of them situated in the center of the city right in the "red light district" offer
colposcopies and pap smears and also electrosurgery because, as Rosa says, "in Mexico papiloma viruses
(HPV) cause more deaths than HIV." While inefficient public hospitals have two-month waiting lists
for being seen and one year waiting lists for surgery, the Network clinics’ results are ready in just
a week.

The prostitutes and the transvestites seem enthusiastic about "their" clinic, where they
often bring their partners, and where some even drag their clients. "The main part of our work is
respect. We don’t ask why they got infected, rather we concentrate on educating them so it doesn’t happen
to them again, so they aren’t just patients any more, so they begin to be active participants in their
health care," Elvira says. The project is rounded off with a food program for people with limited
resources or who for some reason can’t work, a school assistance program for the kids, and another to
help mothers finish school.

The Network’s projects are financed by "social condom marketing." Condoms are sold at different
prices depending on the ability and responsibility of the buyer, and represent 85% of the Network’s income.
No one is salaried and the only people who are paid for their work are the doctors. "We don’t agree
with sex work, but it exists and will continue to exist, and in the meantime we have to do something.
We were an abolitionist group but later we saw that it wasn’t about saving anybody, but really about
working together," Jaime intervenes. For those who are looking for alternatives to sex work, there
are productive projects, the most outstanding of which are handicrafts, production and sale of clothing,
and condom stores. Although some projects have turned out to be unviable, as families collaborated they
managed to keep two-thirds of the attempts open.

Survival in the Jungle

In 2004, the members of the Street Brigade came into contact with the Health Collective for Everyone
(Colectivo de Salud para Todos y Todas), university students who coordinate health projects in the autonomous
Zapatista communities in Chiapas. For two years they worked with a group of health promoters in the communities,
indigenous people chosen by their neighbors to specialize in sanitary assistance. "One of the first
challenges was breaking the fear of supposed cultural resistances about the subject of contraception,
sexual and reproductive rights, and sexually transmitted diseases," they relate.

During these consultations and workshops they chose the themes that would later resurface in the elaboration
of a long and densely-named manual: The Other Campaign of Sexual and Reproductive Health for the Indigenous
and Peasant Resistance in Mexico. Over 270 pages, this text, full of detailed illustrations designed
for work with indigenous women, covers the usual issues like anatomy and physiology of the reproductive
organs, use of contraceptives, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other illnesses. They also
speak of abortion, although the catechists condemn it. "Samuel Ruiz, a man who is very close to
the indigenous people, toured the communities when the Zapatistas decriminalized abortion, saying that
it’s a crime," Jaime remembers.

But there are sections imbibed with diverse currents of alternative health. One of these concentrates
on "women’s bodily autonomy," which covers education on how to avoid illnesses, choosing how
many children to have, and how to enjoy one’s sexuality (almost a taboo among indigenous people). Bodily
autonomy supposes, according to this manual, the exploration of the senses, connection with language
to do with the body, and the different reactions of the body in extreme situations. Collective and self-massages
link this to a holistic conception of health and curing.

The development of this manual meant overcoming more than a few obstacles. In regards to family planning,
three strikingly different community experiences emerged: repressive and authoritarian government schemes,
the religious ban on contraception, and "the guerilla wish to populate the earth with little
guerilla sons." From three different angles, these three policies overlooked women’s wishes. The
manual is used by hundreds of educators working in tens of Zapatista-constructed clinics, in over a decade,
in the thousand supporting communities.

As opposed to what the sociologists thought at the beginning of their work, say Elvira and Rosa, the
women of the Lacandon jungle communities were eager about contraceptives. And little by little they open
up about other things. "We work in the promotion of sexual and reproductive health as a practice
of liberty and not as an imposition or a prohibition. For this reason we also live out the principle of
respect for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. It’s not easy, but we’re starting
to see male couples walk hand-in-hand through their communities. Or women making the decision to divorce
when before Zapatismo it had been the parents who found them marriage partners. This is social change,
and what a change."

Can Transvestites Change the World?

Can indigenous people? Half a century ago, one of the founders of so-called "scientific socialism," wrote
that the proletariats could change the world because they had nothing to lose "but their chains." Today,
the heirs of those proletariats are rebellious at the hour of losing privileges like steady work and
retirement, they refuse to pay taxes, and they strike to avoid being charged the tax on their income.

Marcos himself hints at this in his epilogue to the manual, laying bare how the alliance between health
and sex is one of the strongest nuclei of social control. "Capitalism converts health into a market
good, and health administrators, doctors, nurses, and all the apparatus of hospitalization or health
distribution are also turned in to a type of foreman of this business, turning the patient into a de
facto client, from whom the object is to get as much money as possible from without necessarily giving
more health back in return." It seems to be no coincidence that, along their dependency-breaking
road, the Zapatistas have run up against the area of prostitute health and organized transvestites, groups
that have been forced to take control of healthcare into their own hands. Seen in this light, some people
belong in the "disposable" category, barely even having chains, material or symbolic, to lose.