How and to what extent does “the shock of modernity” reconfigure the value-laden geography of gender difference?

Guided by that question, I returned to Honduras this summer to conduct pre-Masters thesis research on the post-Hurricane Mitch (1998) citizen participation movement. Drawing on Ruth Gilmore’s phrase: “from the crisis of place to the politics of space,” I had planned to investigate the complex and contested cultural politics of gender and place precisely where Mitch collected its highest toll of social infrastructure, crops and soil: on the waning agrarian frontier of northeastern Honduras. There, out of the debris of the region’s worst natural disaster in 150 years, a new grassroots, community-based social movement-- the Committees for Local Development, CODEL--had arisen. Having been directly involved with this nascent effort based on citizen participation, diversity, transparency, and respect for ethnic, gender and environmental rights while seeking “not to govern but to be well governed”, I had wanted to understand the conditions that contributed to its constraints and potential. With 47% women in membership and leadership, the CODEL represented a break with the single-sex dominated social organizing of the past. Specifically, through structured interviews and participant observation combined with the recollection of available archival information, I had intended to go beyond the numbers and investigate the re-workings of gender relations in and through the post-Mitch citizen participation movement in the Aguan River Valley of the Colón Department.

My research plan underwent a series of adjustments shortly after my arrival in the Aguán. Because of my long-standing relation to the region (7 years as a pastoral/development worker), I had committed myself to a participatory research philosophy that facilitated questions and hypotheses emerging from informants. I soon learned that the CODEL movement and its place in the regional map of social forces had changed more drastically than I had imagined. Four years ago, with the accompaniment of the Catholic Diocese, the CODEL, representing over 400 villages, towns and urban neighborhoods had articulated a movement for citizen participation and local development that represented over 47,000 families and boasted over 11,951 active members. Now, despite the opposition of the Catholic Diocese, the CODEL leadership had joined with other post-Mitch and more traditional local development organizations to form an umbrella civil society association. Landless peasants, communal counsels, African Palm cooperative members, Black Carib indigenous, and small plot agricultural producers aligned to share technical support in order to strengthen their citizen participation goals for policies and projects that would contribute to poverty reduction, land reform and communal management of environmental resources. The formation of this association and its growing push for autonomy had resulted in not only in numerous layers of conflict with the Social Justice Ministries of the Catholic Church, but also with a small feminist NGO that had also separated from the Church. My unique position as an Outside/Insider meant that while informants willingly engaged with my structured interviews, they were more eager to share their analysis and opinions regarding the newly contested spaces of social change.

Given the centrality that the conflict occupied both in people’s everyday lives and in the larger movement’s citizen participation potential, I expanded my secondary research goals--the mapping of social forces and the recovering of historical documentation from the Catholic Church—and reframed my gender questions while narrowing my pool of informants. Moreover, at the request of the new civil society association, I dedicated more time to participant observation or co-facilitation of workshops, assemblies and meetings at different levels of and between the groups in conflict and engaged in more open-ended interviews with the leadership of the different organizations and institutions. I also carried out in-depth interviews with individuals (mainly women) who identified themselves as having been outcast or betrayed by the Church or the citizen participation process. Lastly, I traveled to Guatemala, to interview the Jesuit priest who had led the Catholic Diocese in promoting citizen participation and who had been abruptly removed from the region after numerous death threats. At his invitation, I traveled to the Ixil Triangle region of Guatemala which he suggested could serve as a basis for comparison.

A common theme that emerged from most of my research and that I am just beginning to process is the construction of trust vs. the real or perceived breach of trust. My interviews abounded with narratives of men, women, leader, grassroots, Catholic Church, citizen participation group, land owners, land squatters who lie, cheat, steal, defame, leave for another, abuse, BETRAY the other. Often, I found, that a person who simply held a divergent opinion would be labeled a traitor by compañeros/as as a traitor. Trust emerged as a primary issue in family relationships, community organization, cooperative efforts, Church-laity relations and the larger social movement. In a parallel fashion, the women’s economic initiatives that I visited, emphasized loyalty to the group procedures, the group rules, and the creation of a safety net of money that could be lent to any member in an emergency over economic viability of their business, even though they all cited aspects of poverty as their primary concern. They gave priority to mechanisms of trust building, while having rather unclear economic or political goals.

In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, the majority of my informants offered that the citizen participation movement had sparked the imagination and illusions of men and women alike and people who had never attended a meeting became involved, convinced that their participation would lead to potable water, housing, land reform. But the forces bringing together the new social movements, have not adequately assumed the historical experience of betrayal and the need to build trust. While I need to look more closely at literature on social movements, I suspect that a gender lens can help reveal the symbolic and material practices that engender trust.

In analyzing the materials I collected during my field research, my understanding of gendered reworkings of civil society has broadened and deepened . The participation of women has brought about new opportunities for women to own land, attend workshops, hold leadership positions, negotiate space; but the movement in general is in its own “crisis of place” The second part of Joan Scott’s definition claims that gender is a way of signifying relations of power, that gendered meaning transcends male and female and power in itself is understood in a gendered way. In a place like the Aguan, that highly differentiates symbolic and material practices as masculine and feminine, I am exploring whether differences and scarcity take on the characteristics of binary opposition, and in turn limit the production of trust needed in a broad-based citizen participation movement. I recognize, with a bit of awe, how deeply my summer research has re-shaped the course of my theoretical process and Masters project.