In this article I want to approach the debate on multiculturalism in Mexico as these are circulating around debates and discourses of indigenous rights, emphasizing the tensions that exist among gendered perspectives on identity politics within the indigenous movement and also among Mexican intellectuals. This debate became very important in the Mexican political agenda after a proposal for a law on indigenous rights was discussed and passed by Congress in April 2001. As has happened in other geographic contexts, "women's rights" have been used by feminist and not feminist intellectuals and politicians attempting to disqualify indigenous cultures and traditions and to oppose indigenous peoples' demands for autonomy.1 Indigenous women have played a very important role in confronting these uses of a discourse about indigenous women's rights as arguments against indigenous cultural rights more generally.Through their participation in a nation-wide organization known as NationalCongress of Indigenous Women (CNMI), these women are developing a discourse that demands that indigenous rights and women rights are not intrinsically opposed to each other. Their conception of multiculturalism and autonomy emerges from a dynamic perspective on "culture," a vision that, while it claims the right to self-determination, does so from an understanding of identity as an historical construction which is formulated and reformulated in daily living.First, I will describe some of the settings in which the concepts of autonomy and cultural rights are being formulated in contemporary Mexico, and show how these demands represent a new political discourse about self-determination that reaches even 1. The rights of indigenous women were vindicated as an argument against de-colonization movements in Africa and Southeast Asia and are now being used in Afganistan to justify the bombing and destruction of this country, in the name of democracy. Different feminist positions on multiculturalism can be found in Okin (1999).

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