Home ›› 25 Mar 2023 ›› Opinion
International Women’s Day 2023 was a day of “women in all forms”, of youth, of diversities, of tens of thousands of women marching in the streets of Mexico City. From the Plaza of Women Who Struggle, where the statue of Columbus was torn down and women have claimed a monument to their movement’s leaders, to the central Plaza of the Constitution, where police guarded government buildings, the all-women march exuded joy and pain, anger and courage.
With official estimates at nearly 100,000 and organizers asserting closer to 200,000, the demonstrators packed the city’s main avenues, the sidewalks and surrounding streets. They even organized to escort women out in claustrophobic moments, like in front of the emblematic El Caballito sculpture, when no one could move due to the crowding of bodies, women occupying public space that belongs to us by right and reality.
So many women came out, that even the absent were present. The thousands of disappeared and murdered women, in a country that accumulates more every day. Like Paula Camargo, her adolescent face smiling down from the palm tree where her picture is hung with her name and the caption: “2,752 days missing” –days counted with anguish by her mother who has never stopped searching. Or the loved ones of Marlen Cruz, who stands beside the flow of marchers holding larger-than-life photos of her daughter, Janette Tafoya Cruz, a victim of femicide, and Angelica Ambriz Tafoya, her granddaughter kidnapped by the killer.
“The State has done absolutely nothing more than mock our pain,” says Marlen: “I came to the march because all of us together make one voice asking for something that may be impossible in our lifetime–justice.” Through tears, she adds a message for her little granddaughter: “Angelica, wherever you are, I love you with all my soul and you deserve a life of love.”
The women present also marched on behalf of the thousands of women who were afraid to come, still unable to cope with trauma, pain or anger. Handwritten signs read: “For my grandmother, for my mother, for my sister, for my daughter, for me, FOR ALL OF US”.
Daniela López replied to the question of why she marches: “I come because I am literally fed up with the fact that we cannot go out into the streets… I come because many of my relatives were afraid of coming to the march, I come on behalf of my relatives, my friends, my clients–because I am a hairdresser– my nieces, my goddaughters, of all those who didn’t come because they’re scared of not coming home again.”
For every woman yelling slogans in unison, there is an unnumbered contingent of women behind them, those that remain invisible. With this physical strength and this moral strength, as a sign raised high read: “Nothing can stop this herd.”
In early March in Mexico City the giant jacaranda trees turn lavender, seeming to endorse the purple-clad feminists. One of the tactics of the “progressive” patriarchy in government has been to attempt to divide and weaken the feminist movement. As feminists criticize unabated femicide and violence against women in the country, president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s response has often been to brand the movement as neoliberal, white, upper-middle class. While there are groups with these characteristics that call themselves feminists, the march 8, 2023 Mexico City march completely refuted the myth of a conservative movement led by the privileged.
Amid the diversity, if there was any predominant feature, it was the youth of the participants. Mexico’s women’s movement is not only strong and huge, it is regenerating, reinventing itself, with an energy incomparable with other times. Call it the fourth or fifth wave, it’s actually a tsunami.
Counterpunch
