As feminists rise against violence, Mexico mourns
A vigil held by the Las Luciernagas collective before dawn on March 8, 2025 in Mexico City. Photo © Erika Lozano / @erika.kuru.
Opinion • Dawn Marie Paley • March 19, 2025 • Leer en castellano
On March 8, in the darkest hours before dawn, mothers, sisters and friends of murdered and disappeared women began to gather in Mexico City’s central square. They lit small white candles and carefully laid photographs of their loved ones out on the pavement. As night turned to day the Luciernagas—which means fireflies in Spanish—emerged, a new, women-led collective born from the ashes of the violence and injustice that so defines Mexico today.
Their action was the first in a series of activities on International Women’s Day. It also kicked off a busy week in Mexico’s biggest town square. On March 9, supporters of President Claudia Sheinbaum would file into the city’s Zócalo and stand neatly according to their affiliation, waving white and burgundy flags. And on the following Saturday, March 15, tens of thousands more would again take over the square, laying down shoes and lighting candles to show outrage and deep sadness after an extermination camp was discovered by mothers of the disappeared in Jalisco State.
Mexico is a country at war, and its people are mourning, which is famously difficult to do in the wake of a disappearance. Since taking office in October, Sheinbaum’s government has focused on positive messaging, business-friendly policies, increasing military operations, and insisting that violence is waning. The solemn, angry crowds that gathered to grieve together with a few days’ notice in Mexico City and throughout the country made clear the tide of disappearances —which now number over 124,000, most of which have place since 2006—has not receded, nor has justice been done.
And the hundreds of thousands of women, trans and queer folks who marched around the country on March 8 showed that it's the feminist movement—which is deeply intertwined with the organizing of mothers of the disappeared and victims of feminicide—that’s expanding the fight for justice and social transformation.
Women burn cardboard replicas of government offices on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City on the morning of March 8, 2025. Photo © Erika Lozano / @erika.kuru.
An 8M mega-march in Mexico City
In the days leading up to March 8, city workers installed tall metal fences around the cathedral, the national palace and other government buildings in the square and the monuments along the path of the annual march. The early morning action by the Luciernagas kicked off a full day of protest in the largest city in the western hemisphere, during which hundreds of thousands of feminists streamed through Mexico City. Before noon, activists and mothers of victims staged street theater performances and set up tendederos (areas where women call out abusive men) in front of the Anti-monument to Women in Struggle roundabout on Reforma Avenue.
The earliest contingents of mothers of victims and march coordinators set off from Reforma to the Zócalo around noon. The bulk of the march was made up of hundreds of thousands of autonomous feminists, many organized into blocs by school or by issue swelled the streets and overflowed the city center. They chanted now familiar call-and-response protest songs, spraypainted everything in their path, lit off purple flares, and carried homemade signs in support of Palestine and against patriarchy, violence, and complicity with abuse. Marchers continued to enter the Zócalo well into the evening. Unlike in previous years, there was almost no police presence along the march route in Mexico City. The mood was jubilant, militant and defiant.
That afternoon, march coordinators set up a stage in the Zócalo where speeches were made, but by the time I arrived at around 4:30 p.m., there was no centralized activity at all. The walled-off plaza was filled with feminists; the atmosphere was electric. Young women in purple lit flares and posed for pictures with their friends. Others fashioned protest art out of clothing. The black bloc, dressed in black with their faces covered, ardently banged their hammers against the metal walls. Some propped their protest signs along a street leaving the square, others threw theirs on a pile and watched them burn.
A woman marches in Mexico City with a sign that reads “Ms. President, we didn’t all make it, many women are killed every day” on March 8, 2025. Photo © Dawn Marie Paley.
A constellation of protest
Mexico City’s march was so massive there’s no way a single person could make sense of the event as a whole. What’s crucial to remember is that as feminists took over downtown, so did their counterparts in cities all over Mexico. And though each local context is different, the messages were similar across the other 31 states of the republic.
Women called out politicians who are abusers or those who block justice. Others did escraches, pasting up the name and photographs of victimizers along the march route. They held signs speaking out about violence they experienced and kept silent about before. They spoke up on behalf of those who can’t.
A woman seated in a wheelchair holds a sign that says “I’m a woman, of course I’m a feminist” during on March 8, 2025 in Mexico City. Photo © Dawn Marie Paley.
In marches around Mexico, protesters lit government buildings on fire. The rage that powers feminists in the street is such that when symbolic vandalism occurs, the most common response among those nearby is to chant “fuimos todas [we all did it]” or “esa morra sí me representa [that young woman, she represents me].” In march after march, women carried signs critical of the attempt to create moral panic around vandalism by noting that no such uproar ensues after women are disappeared or murdered. In this way, feminists have shed disagreements about direct action that have long divided traditional left movements.
In Oaxaca City and Pachuca, Hidalgo, barriers erected by city governments were torn down and protesters were gassed by police. In Oaxaca, agents fired rubber bullets. In Chihuahua City, the march was prevented from advancing to the cross of nails, a monument created by local activists to remember victims of femicide. A group of 10 women was roughed up by plainclothes police officers, and three were detained. “They didn’t say anything at all, they just grabbed us and detained us,” said one of the demonstrators at a press conference the next day.
The presence of trans-exclusionary feminists (TERFs) was negligible on March 8 in Mexico City. On March 15, trans-exclusionary feminists held a diminished counter-march where they shouted slogans against the “erasure of women” and birth control. In other cities around the country, there were larger contingents of TERFs, some of whom marched with right-wing Christian women with anti-abortion politics. Anti-trans feminism has been linked to Mexico’s rightwing political parties trying to capitalize and coopt the feminist movement, and large sections of the feminist movement have explicitly distanced themselves from the violence of TERFism.
Feminists loiter in Mexico City’s Zócalo nearly six hours after the first contingents started to arrive on March 8, 2025. Photo © Dawn Marie Paley.
Women in power and Mexico’s death machine
This year’s International Women’s Day march in Mexico was the first under President Claudia Sheinbaum of the Morena Party. Mexico City is governed by Morena’s Clara Brugada, and 12 other states have women governors, most of them part of Morena. The President’s slogan “llegamos todas” or “we [women] made it” was directly confronted by activists, who pointed out that 11 women are killed every day in Mexico. That very morning, Gilda Guadalupe Pérez Rivera’s body was found in a park in Tlatelolco, less than 5km from the city’s Zócalo.
Though more diplomatic about protests than her predecessor and political mentor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as president Sheinbaum has minimized the scale of violence in Mexico, deepened militarization, and formally presided over a more aggressive army. When Trump applied 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods entering the US in early March, Sheinbaum called on her supporters to gather for a public, political gathering on Sunday, March 9 where she said she would announce countermeasures. But the tariffs were lifted on March 6 and the Sunday event was turned into a festival of nationalism and free trade.
By the time Sheinbaum’s supporters filed into the Zócalo on March 9, the black metal barriers around government buildings had been removed, and feminist graffiti from the day before was already painted over.
While some of those present were true blue supporters of Shienbaum, who continues to enjoy high approval ratings, others were bussed into the city center from as far away as Ciudad Júarez (a 30-hour ride) to attend. Tragically, 18 people who had attended the event were killed when their bus flipped as they returned to Oaxaca. Some attendees were paid up to 45 dollars to participate or did so out of fear of losing government jobs. Unlike the disruptive, self-organized demonstrations around the country the day before, Sheinbaum’s show of force was stage-managed and centrally organized in a single location.
Sheinbaum addressed the crowd flanked by her cabinet. Mexico’s first woman president failed to mention the historic mobilization the day before, recurring instead to nationalist and pro-free trade sloganeering. In fact, the only holdover from the day before was a banner hung by the Women’s Secretariat that read “The judiciary owes a historic debt to women. They must pay with justice, no more impunity!” The suggestion is that a controversial judicial reform —shaped during López Obrador’s term and passed by both chambers of Congress during Sheinbaum’s first month in office— will remedy rampant impunity and corruption in the justice system.
Shoes representing some of the over 200 pairs found at an extermination camp in Teuchitlán, Jalisco in early March are laid in Mexico City’s Zócalo on March 15, 2025. Photo © Erika Lozano / @erika.kuru.
Days later, the discovery of human remains and hundreds of pairs of used shoes indicating mass exterminations took place at a ranch in Teuchitlán, outside of Guadalajara in Jalisco State, began to circulate in the media. Sheinbaum’s response to growing outrage was hardened and austere, suggesting an investigation needed to take place before jumping to conclusions. It soon emerged the National Guard and state authorities had previously searched the same area, showing state complicity and inaction in the context of crimes against humanity.
Outrage grew, and dozens of vigils were convened around the country for March 15. “Madame President, do you see us now? 124,000+” read a message painted onto Mexico City’s Zócalo during the protest that evening.
