Rivers of purple flood the streets of Mexico
Photo by Dawn Marie Paley, photo edition by Ojalá.
From north to south, hundreds of thousands of feminists are strengthening resistance to all violences and weaving a national and international struggle.
Reportage • Dawn Marie Paley, March 11 2023 • Leer en castellano
In the video, shot from the terrace of a hotel on the corner of Mexico City’s Zocalo, you can hear drums and chants as a wave of people walks towards the central square. The camera swings towards the Zocalo, and shows the massive square filled with people, many wearing purple bandanas or waving purple flags.
Experts say around 200,000 people can fit in the Zocalo and surrounding streets. Mexico City authorities said there were 90,000 of us in the streets on March 8, 2023.
When I first saw the video, it gave me goosebumps.
From inside the march, I could feel that it was huge. But when I climbed up on blocks or anywhere I could to get a better view, the streets were filled with women as far as I could see. It wasn’t until I saw the video, recorded on a cellphone, that I realized how many of us there were. From below, it felt different.
At 1:30 in the afternoon I caught the last Metrobús going south from Buenavista station on Insurgentes Avenue, a major artery in Mexico City. “This is the last bus. It will go to Plaza de la República, no further. That’s it,” announced a middle aged, short haired woman in a black t-shirt to those still on the platform.
She wasn’t a security guard or a cop, rather she was part of the invisible logistics required to coordinate the take over of the largest city in the hemisphere by women and disidencias (dissidents is a flexible term used to refer to queer and trans people). Women worked to close access to Reforma, a four lane boulevard with four secondary lanes that crosses the heart of the city.
The bus advanced three stations, and everyone got off. At the entry to the station, a man and a woman were selling purple bandanas stamped with “Ni una menos” (Not one more woman killed), raised fists, and other feminist symbols.
The march wasn’t scheduled to start for hours. Groups of normalistas (young women studying to become teachers) were already rehearsing their songs and marching in compact rows. Others were looking for their friends, or writing on their protest signs. Earlier, a tendedero (literally a laundry line, where written denunciations of abusers are hung) had been set up at the Monument to Women in Struggle.
A friend and I went to power up with a bowl of pozole, a typical soup of hominy and pork served with salad. Inside the restaurant, there was purple everywhere. It was barely three o’clock when we arrived back at Reforma, and the wide avenue was already full of people.
An abundance of resistances were immediately visible: women weed smokers sitting in the street, smoking joints. An anti-prisons contingent demanding freedom for prisoners. Groups of students from different colleges. Women survivors of cancer. The aroma of copal floated through the air, and the sun was heavy on our shoulders. More and more women from different neighborhoods, who had organized to march together, continued to arrive.
There was a flood of young women with signs repudiating violence, and affirming the trans-inclusive character of the march, which was a massive pedagogical action, as the youngest women felt what it means to be in the streets with thousands and thousands of others, chanting and enjoying being together.
A group of women in masks played brass instruments and drums, setting the vibe. Others were escrachando (making public the identities of their abusers), wheatpasting papers with the names and photos of abusive men to posts and walls. I heard slogans against violence, and others expressing sadness and rage. Others yet declared the desire to live freely and fully, and to continue struggling together.
Women in the black bloc would appear every now and then. Masked up, they spray painted walls and buildings. Along the edge of the march I saw male photojournalists running around, dressed as if they were covering a war.
Decentralized movement, national mobilization
In 2023, the feminist movement is putting in practice a new way of protesting and resisting, of convening and showing up in huge numbers with no central action. Women and dissidents marched throughout the country, and we were able to catch up with a few to get a sense of the energy and the differences between one place and another.
In Mexicali, the border city that’s the capital of Baja California state, feminists marched in a context of ongoing threats against the movement and those who participate in it.
“For me, the march this year was really powerful, it was peaceful, there were more than 2,000 of us demanding justice,” said René from the Bici Jainas Collective, which closed roads and ensured the marches were safe. They experienced aggressions on the part of motorists, who on numerous occasions “tried to drive right through us.”
“We’re not one, we’re not 10, pinche government, count us properly,” participants chanted in Ciudad Juarez, where a record 5,000 women marched to the border bridge.
“We marched along the streets of downtown to the street where Isabel Cabanillas was killed,” one of the women who participated in the march told Ojalá (she asked to remain anonymous). “The march is—still—focused on disappearances and killings of women.”
“Every day and every year our numbers grow, there are more morras (slang for young women) marching and taking back public spaces that violence has been systematically taken away from us,” said Laura Hernández Esquivel, who marched in Torreón, Coahuila. “We estimate around 8,000 women marched, I think that’s the most morras there’s ever been in a march.”
It’s election year in Coahuila, and exercising their right to protest was important for those who went out on the eighth.
“Every time there’s more police, fences and protection around monuments, and this government’s motto is ‘order and respect’” said Hernández Esquivel, who collaborates with Acompañantes Laguna (an autonomous collective that helps pregnant people access abortion with pills) and INCIDE Femme. “That means that movements, including the feminist movement, are threatened and persecuted,” she said. She mentioned that before the march, feminist collectives received intimidating messages.
In the city of Puebla, in central Mexico, the march surpassed expectations of the organizers. “There were many groups that convened contingents to the march, which is a little unusual in Puebla, because normally there are two or three, and I think this time it was more like five or six,” activist Itzel Sánchez told Ojalá.
The first march was called by the Voice of the Disappeared Collective at six in the morning at the state attorney general’s office. Even at that early hour, the march was well attended by family members and supporters of the collective.
That evening, thousands of women marched through the city center. “A lot of artists took to the streets to protest, I don’t think Puebla has been covered in this much graffiti in a long time,” said Sánchez. “We wanted to dance, we wanted to scream.”
“In the two marches I attended, there was no hate speech, no messages against anybody,” she said. “I’m so happy with how it went.”
In cities from the north to the south of the republic, hundreds of thousands of women marched, smashing previous turnouts.
In San Luis Potosí, police sprayed chemicals to disperse women and children, and in Cuernavaca there were shock troops operating inside the march. In Tlaxcala City, water tanks were used to disperse demonstrators.
Anti-trans feminists mobilize, but lose hegemony
In Mexico City, even though there were many trans-inclusive signs and banners, there was at least one attack on a transgendered woman documented during the march. In some places, the well known tensions between conservative, institutional and anti-rights feminism and the autonomous currents sustained by hundreds of thousands of young women reappeared.
Photo by Dawn Marie Paley.
In Monterrey, Nuevo León, approximately 50,000 women took the Macroplaza in the center of the city, which is the largest in Mexico’s north. It had been decided that the pace of the march would be established by women with disabilities, who would be followed by pregnant women and children, and families of victims of disappearance and femicide.
But it didn’t go as planned. “The march was interrupted by morras who arrived spewing biological and conservative discourses that put sexual dissidents at particular risk,” said one woman who marched in the city, who also asked to remain anonymous.
“From the outset there were a lot of police present, women and men cops lined government buildings,” she said. “It was like a wall of police.”
As they marched, cell service went down, making communication difficult. Night fell, and a man on a motorcycle tried to drive through the march. A Subway, a hotel and other buildings had their windows smashed. Some women lit the front of the cathedral and the door of the State Congress on fire.
After 10pm, as marchers dispersed, the police began to snatch and detain individuals. “The authorities are trying to justify the arrests by saying that demonstrations must end by 10pm. There were 16 people arrested, four of them were minors,” she said. “Of the 12 adults arrested, almost all of them were women, there were only two men, one of whom was disabled.”
By March 10th, thanks to coordination by collectives and activists supported by civil society organizations and some officials in Monterrey, all 16 of those detained during the march were released.
In the city of Guadalajara, it was estimated that 70,000 women marched; 50,000 of them against all violences.
“There were three marches, two of them were anti-trans, and the third was convened by the #YoVoy8demarzo network, which fortunately was by far the largest,” said Lirba Cano of Cuerpos Parlantes, a social center and bookstore in the city.
In Toluca, the capital of Mexico State, thousands marched in a historic show of feminist power. The march was divided and the so-called “subject of feminist struggle” was again debated in the weeks before 8M. “The only thing that worries me is that [younger organizers are] going back to discussions that those of us who are older have already worked through,” said Daniela, a feminist in the city.
“The question of whether trans women should march with us or not came up again, as did the question of allowing the parents of women who have lived through violence or been killed to participate, as well as the debate around vandalism during the march.”
It’s clear that a movement of this size will have divisions. This year there was a concerted effort to make it explicit that anti-trans (TERF) contingents are part of the same violence we’re struggling against. In Mexico State, for example, we have documented the links between trans-exclusive feminists and political groups from the powerful Party of the Institutional Revolution.
One of the main tasks ahead is to try and share the most important things that have been learned about violent, anti-trans and separatist feminism over previous years with a younger generation of activists.
“I think we need to start thinking about the theory and communitarian memory of the feminist explosion of the last few years, so that those who are just starting out don’t start from zero the way we did,” said Daniela. “So that they don’t need to struggle along paths that are already well trodden, so that they have tools to avoid making the same mistakes, and so that feminism grows strong roots in this country that is so conservative.”
On March 8th, a historic number of women and dissidents took to the streets throughout Mexico against all forms of violence, and turned their pain into struggle. Their struggles are rooted in specific places, and weave a national struggle, which is connected to similar uprisings further south and in other countries of Europe.
