Reportage • Madeleine Wattenbarger • August 15, 2024 • Leer en español

The nickname Cariño—which means “care” or “dear”—suited Carolina Espinosa Caballero well, not only because of the play on words with her name, but also because she treated kindness as a political commitment. Four years ago, in the early hours of August 1, 2020, the singer, popular educator and activist was cycling home from a rehearsal with the group Sonora Criminal when a drunk driver hit her on Puente la Morena and Avenida Patriotismo in Mexico City. The driver, Miguel Angel Cisneros Aquino, killed her. She was 36 years old.

On August 1, 2024, four years after Espinosa Caballero’s murder, dozens of people took part in a bicycle ride in her memory. While the criminal proceedings against her killer remain stalled, Cariño’s community is mobilizing to seek justice for her and other victims of collisions.

The first collective ride took place a week after her death. Espinosa Caballero’s cousin, Alejandra Ocaña, recalls that the idea was born in the Gayosso funeral parlor, where friends from many activist organizations gathered. They gathered on the stairs and agreed to create a memorial to her at the intersection where she was killed. And despite restrictions on meetings due to the Covid-19 pandemic, dozens of people joined in a massive bike ride. “There were a lot of people, there was no count of participants but my experience was looking back at the crowd on the street and seeing tons of heads,” said Ocaña. On a pole on the corner where Espinosa Caballero was killed, her friends mounted a white bicycle that reads “tenderness, cumbia and revolution.”

It took almost a year for the capital city prosecutor's office to reclassify the case from manslaughter to murder. Once the reclassification was made the driver fled, and to this day, criminal proceedings are stalled.

In 2023, after the third memorial and protest rally, Espinosa Caballero's friends and comrades in struggle, among them the collectives Resiste Pedal, Chingona Sound and Voces Afectivas, got together and founded the August 1st Organization. Later they were joined by members of the Enchúlame la Bici (Trick out my bike) workshop and the Todas queremos llegar a casa (We all want to get home) feminist cycling collective. In addition to seeking the enforcement of the arrest warrant for Espinosa Caballero’s murderer, they are turning to Cariño’s memory as a means to rethink justice.

A collective movement

On the afternoon of Thursday August 1, 2024, some 30 people on bicycles gathered under cloudy skies at the Glorieta of Women in Struggle on Reforma Avenue in central Mexico City. Cecilia Vega, Espinosa Caballero’s colleague from the Latin American Feminist Network, was attending for the fourth time. “It is important for us to be present here, to keep her heart beating, because now she is one of our ancestors,” said Vega. “We keep her presence and her activism in our memory, justice has not been done and her murderer is still free.”

In death as in life, Espinosa Caballero is part of a process of collective struggle that is bigger than her. Erandi Villavicencio, her friend and comadre and also a member of Sonora Criminal and the Latin American Feminist Network, recalls her unique way of approaching people. “The bonds, the complicity that she managed to create among organizers was really special,” said Villavicencio from Ecuador during a virtual interview with other members of the August 1st Organization on July 29. “It's about seeing politics from a different perspective, as a place where you can talk about the things that hurt you, that affect you, without falling into a discourse around how you should act; of always being attentive, of sharing but also thinking critically.”

Espinosa Caballero took that tenderness to many spaces, often getting up early in the morning to cycle across the city for her various activities. In addition to studying art and history, she taught at a popular high school in the north of the city, where she infused her English lessons with a critical perspective. She spent the last months of her life with the feminist collective Voces Afectivas accompanying mothers searching for their disappeared children as they protested in Mexico City’s central square. As the lead singer of Sonora Criminal and Valentina Conde y la Voluntad, both cumbia groups that sang protest songs, Espinosa Caballero took the stage with fervour, her voice a howl that channelled the pain and rage of victims of femicide and disappearance.

Sonora Criminal disbanded following Espinosa Caballero’s murder. “Now Caro is what unites us,” said MaFe Carrillo, who played the güiro in the group and contributed her thoughts from Medellín, Colombia. “All of this activism for the rights of pedestrians and cyclists is one of the seeds she left behind.”

Memory against killings in the streets

That voice of protest echoed in the cries of the rolling protesters, who set off in the sporadic rain to the chorus of “Cariño Lives! The struggle continues!” 

For a few minutes they took Bucareli street, outside the Ministry of the Interior, in the face of insults from motorists. They announced that the following day they would deliver a list of demands for a series of measures to put an end to killings of pedestrians and cyclists.

Among their demands is a call to improve pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, to reduce speeding in urban areas and to require a written exam and driving test to obtain a motor vehicle license. They are also demanding the withdrawal of public transport concessions to private companies, which would impact companies such as MetroBus, which is implicated in several cases of cyclists being run over.

It is the memory of Espinosa Caballero that led her friends to extend their vision of justice to other victims. “At some point we were very angry, we thought: we have to find the guy, we have to burn him alive. It was always the question her mother asked, what would Caro do? Caro would have forgiven him, her mother said,” said Villavicencio. “We had to think about what forgiveness is, it is not the same as forgetting, or the same as impunity. That led to a rethinking on the part of the organization.”

Hector, a member of cycling collectives and the August 1 Organization, joined the fight after being asked to support Espinosa Caballero in one of the first rallies. “Even though I never met her, I feel she is a kind of catalyst of unity, of creating coalitions to make things happen powered by our internal fire, by love, by empathy,’ he said during the collective online interview. “She left a legacy that brought us together to prevent this from happening again, to prevent more deaths. It's not just justice for Cariño but a kind of justice as Cariño would do it, from Cariño's perspective.”

“Justice with care [cariño],” added Villavicencio.

Cariño in the streets

Their voices united singing slogans against killings of cyclists and pedestrians, the protest on wheels pushed through rush hour traffic, taking the major artery of Insurgentes amid honking. Upon reaching Puente de la Morena and Patriotismo streets, where the white bike is still displayed, protesters spread out across the road, set their bikes in front of vehicles waiting to cross. They unfurled a banner made of election propaganda tarps across the intersection and closed the street.

This intersection is a hotspot for road deaths in Mexico City. Members of the August 1st Organization calculate that from 2000 to date, 20 people have been killed at Patriotismo and Puente de la Morena. (the figure includes pedestrians who were run over, a femicide and three workers who fell from a building because they did not have safety equipment). As the cyclists faced aggressions on the part of motorcyclists, commuters and truck drivers who tried to bypass the protest, members of the Chingona Sound collective set up a tent in the middle of the intersection, connected a generator and set up a sound system. By nightfall, the rhythm of reggae resounded on Patriotismo Avenue with music by Jimena Luna Negra and Sonora Mulata.

It was after eleven at night when the sit-in and the last of the bicycles were removed. Before the traffic began to flow again on the avenue, a mobile phone played a cumbia: nunca, pero nunca, me abandones, Cariñito [Never, ever leave me, Cariñito].