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This article discusses women’s political participation in the 2006 insurgent episode in Oaxaca, Mexico (when the city was occupied by the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO), from the perspective of the singular experience of women schoolteachers. This article highlights how women teachers experienced dilemmas and paradoxes related to their specific social and political embeddedness in local (and national) society. Bringing together questions of gender, employment and active protest, the aim is to explore the specific political commitment of the Mexican maestras through a dual approach, regressive and ethnographic. This approach to politicization, linking the long timespan and routine activities, will allow us to situate the political experience of these women in the broader framework of gender relations in Mexico.