Federico Reyes Heroles
In Mexico, the axis was fear and rage.
They walk on the cobblestones of the most party town I have ever known. It looks like a slow procession. I edge “to the edge”. There is no coffin in front; with a frown, very serious, dressed in white and with a crucifix in her hands, walks a terrified little woman. I read “Lucy turns 15”.
There are faces of wake; dozens accompany her, and they will go to a church. I remember I’m 14, and It’s Not Good News by Jo Witek and Jimena Estíbaliz. In the same place, I hear in the distance the shout: “Applause for Mary, who turns 20”. Hours before, millions of women visited 170 cities worldwide: Istanbul, Paris, Afghanistan, Serbia, Honduras, Buenos Aires, etc. In my country, there were dozens. The most visible in the CDMX. The demand is the same and universal, yet they are all different.
The Argentinian women are threatened by Milei of losing their right to decide about their bodies. In Serbia, the demand is simple: “Girls want to have fundamental human rights.” Wit overflows the slogans: “We are not heretical; we are historical.” Genius. “Years working twice as long and getting paid half as much,” in Spain; “Woman: neither submissive nor devoted, I love you beautiful and crazy”; “Calm down, sister.” In Mexico, the axis was fear and rage: femicides, disappeared women, violated in many ways. And the deafness of power as a response. “If they touch one, they touch us all”; “The police don’t take care of me, my friends take care of me”; “Girls should NOT be touched, they should NOT be raped, they should NOT be killed”; “Today I fight to exist tomorrow”.
While in other countries, women fight for gender equity on boards of directors or for equitable salaries, here, it is a matter of survival. One would assume that progress is undeniable. My mother, faced with her family’s refusal to let her go to UNAM, enrolled – she was the first – in the Women’s University. She obtained her degree in the early forties. A decade later, women in Mexico would gain the right to vote. Now, there are schools and faculties of the UNAM where women are the majority, not only in the traditional careers of Philosophy and Letters but also in engineering.
It could be assumed that progress is unstoppable, that with more significant development, basic demands disappear to give way to new ones. But this is not necessarily the case. The Secretary General of the United Nations warned: “Throughout the world, in both developing and developed countries, women’s rights are under threat of reversal, and in some cases may even be reversed. He then threw out figures; at the current rate, it would take 300 years to reach full equality and the end of child marriage. “…by 2030, more than 340 million women and girls will still be living in extreme poverty, some 18 million more than men and boys. That is an insult to women and girls.”
Optimism? But an individual with many accusations of harassment, with a conviction for sexual abuse for which he paid 5 million dollars, could become president again. An individual who was known to have misogynistic recordings before his first election, who is known to have paid millions of dollars to a porn star to buy her silence. Some studies affirm that this fame does not affect him; it may be the opposite. Misogyny and machismo can be found from Argentina to the U.S., passing through Mexico, where the presidential attitude towards them speaks of just that: machismo. And where did they learn those ” little tricks” that led them to touch strangers or their own relatives -the great majority- as in the case of a girl of only four years old raped by her uncle? Well, in their homes, fathers and mothers transmitted and transmitted values.
I see them marching this early spring, firm, joyful, furious, with little clothing to challenge them, and I agree. Many minds are shorter than their skirts, fascinatingly short.
May they live in the strictest sense and to the fullest!
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