The book Women and Alcohol in a Highland Maya Town was written by Christine Eber and published in 1996. It gives a broad historical understanding of how women in what is now Zapatista territory had lived. It tells about their lives both before and after the 1994 rebellion. The book focuses on women in a Tzotzil township in Chiapas, Mexico, that is now one of the strongholds of the Zapatista rebellion. It is about women's participation in revolutionary changes.
This book is more dedicated to the topic of ritual drinking. It explores the role of alcohol in defining gender relations. It gives both the positive and negative aspects of "Rum." It tells about a religious symbol wherein highlands drinking is the service of God, and it empowers individual drinkers, spread unity in groups, and carries family values. It makes there belief stronger. The narrator describes the gender role of men and women in highland and how they discharge their duties to run a family economically and socially.
The narrator takes the responsibility to detail the complexities of Zapatista women, their group sacrifice in generating new values. The drinking habits harmed society, too, such as man, started excluding themselves from economic activity, and the burden of the family was mainly on women. Initially, the women had to fight for their status in the family. They raised voice for respects, deciding the role in the family and taking the responsibility of children. Finally, they overcome all complexities of gender-based discrimination.
Here, the title tells how the drinking ritual changed them socially and opened them towards the world. The narrator phrases it as "Water of hope" and "Water of sorrow." For women of the Zapatista community, it has been both.
