In traditional Mixtec communities, women have long played essential roles in organizing family and communal life, but their contributions have often gone unrecognized in public or ceremonial settings. Natalia Bautista Chávez, a cultural practitioner from Santa María, California, has observed this dynamic throughout her life. Raised in a migrant family originally from San Juan Mixtepec, she describes how women have “carried the reins” in the home—managing resources, organizing fiestas, and sustaining everyday life—while men were more visible in formal leadership roles. For Natalia, this reflects a contradiction: women have always been protagonists in practice, even if not in title.

Music and dance—especially within Mixtec traditions—have served as one of the clearest arenas where gender boundaries have been negotiated. Natalia points out that in her home community of San Juan Mixtepec, public music-making was largely a male domain. While there were women who sang or played music outside the pueblo or in private, it was rare to see women musicians in formal communal performances. That’s changing. She proudly describes a young woman violinist in the pueblo who performs ancestral music with precision and power—something that would have been nearly unimaginable a generation earlier. For Natalia, the presence of women like this signals something much deeper than a change in representation—it’s a sign that tradition itself is evolving, not disappearing.

She carries this change in her own body through dance. While growing up, she watched her father disguise himself as a catrín during pueblo festivals, participating in the ritualized performances of the danza de los catrines. At the time, masked dances, particularly those where men dressed as women, excluded actual women from participation. Today, Natalia and her daughters take on these roles themselves. She describes how women in her community have “broken the rules a little,” putting on the traditional masks, covering their faces, and wearing the costumes once reserved only for men. These performances are not meant to undo the meaning of the dance, but to expand who is allowed to embody it.

Though she doesn’t describe herself as someone who seeks the spotlight, Natalia plays a quiet leadership role by encouraging women’s participation across generations. She believes that meaningful cultural change is already underway, as more women take up space in music, dance, and public life within Oaxacan communities—both in Mexico and in diaspora. These shifts, for her, are signs of cultural resilience.

Natalia’s vision of gender in Mixtec tradition is grounded in practice: women have always sustained culture, and now, increasingly, they are being recognized for it. By stepping into roles once closed to them and affirming the presence of others who do the same, she helps ensure that tradition remains not only alive, but inclusive and evolving.