Eufrosina Cruz lives in the Zapotec village of Santa Maria Quiegolani, where women aren’t even second-class citizens; they’re not citizens at all and, as such, aren’t eligible to vote. That didn’t stop Cruz from running for mayor, though:

The all-male town board tore up ballots cast in her favor in the Nov. 4 election, arguing that as a woman, she wasn’t a “citizen” of the town. “That is the custom here, that only the citizens vote, not the women,” said Valeriano Lopez, the town’s deputy mayor.

Rather than give up, Cruz has launched the first serious, national-level challenge to traditional Indian forms of government, known as “use and customs,” which were given full legal status in Mexico six years ago in response to Indian rights movements sweeping across Latin America.

“For me, it’s more like ‘abuse and customs,”’ Cruz said as she submitted her complaint in December to the National Human Rights Commission. “I am demanding that we, the women of the mountains, have the right to decide our lives, to vote and run for office, because the constitution says we have these rights.”

Lopez acknowledged that votes for Cruz were nullified, but claims they added up to only 8 ballots of about 100 cast in this largely unpaved village of about 1,500 people.

Cruz says she was winning — and wants the election to be annulled and held again, this time with women voting.

There are other hipocrysies at work within the village, which Eufrosina is working to bring to light:

She is single, and in a village culture where most women wear skirts, she wears pants. Because her village has no formal jobs for women, she works as a school director in a nearby town, and returns to Quiegolani most weekends. That, authorities say, disqualified her from running for mayor because she wasn’t a full-time resident. But the man who won the race also works outside the town, and there are questions about how much time he actually spends here.

One major obstacle in Eufrosina’s way, though, is the fact that her struggle to have rights, such as suffrage, awarded to women undermines the traditions of Indian rights reforms granted after the Zapatista uprising:

The law states that Indian townships may “apply their own normative systems … as long as they obey the general principles of the Constitution and respect the rights of individuals, human rights, and particularly the dignity and well-being of women.”

Despite this specific protection, about a fourth of the Indian villages operating under the law don’t let women vote, putting human rights groups in a dilemma: Most actively supported recognition for Indian governance systems, and few have therefore taken up the women’s cause.

We’ll refrain from going on a diatribe on the futility and meaningless of the concept of “rights,” of which this story is a pretty good example, and extend our sincere hope that Eufosina continues to kick ass and take names in her village and beyond.

Some Mexican women lose right to vote [MSNBC]