"Don't wish me a Happy Women's Day": why women in Mexico don't celebrate IWD

By Natalia Albin

While in some places International Women’s Day is primarily a day of celebrating and empowering the women in our lives, there’s another side to it. Natalia, part of The Hearth team, who grew up in Mexico, tells us about what it’s like for women in Latin America. 

Trigger warning: sexual assault and violence against women.

Image: Cuartoscuro, 2022

People in the UK tend to tell me what they think about Mexico a lot. “It’s so colourful,” they say, “so full of life.” It’s the latter that’s interesting to me. Because I understand where it comes from, and most of the time I would like to believe it to be true, yet Mexico is also a country where 10 women and girls die at the hands of a man every day. In Latin America, the number rises to 12. These are known as femicides: the killing of a woman or girl by a man on account of her gender. To put it into perspective, in the UK there were 110 femicides in 2020 (approximately one every three days, a staggering number), in Mexico there were 3,723 (one every two and a half hours).  International Women’s Day is not a day of celebration in Mexico or Latin America.

Instead, International Women’s Day has become a day of protest and commemoration. Last year, Mexico City alone saw 75,000 women take to the streets in chants condemning the patriarchal violence that permeates the country. From femicides to rapes, kidnappings, and lack of basic rights for women. It’s not only about a change in the misogynistic cultural landscape, it’s about systems rigged against women and the reign of impunity. 56.6% of (reported) femicides go unpunished, while only 5 in 100 rapes are prosecuted. Forbes reports that impunity in Mexico is at 94.8%. 

I was 14 the first time I was sexually assaulted. I was on my way to my teacher’s house for some extra credit or other. It was 5 minutes away from my mum’s so I decided to walk. When a car started following me, I kept my head up and my fists tight. Surely, he couldn’t take me, we were on a high street. But he stopped his car next to me - in the middle of the busy road -  and, despite my fast walk, caught up to me quickly. I remember the feeling of his fingers gripping my bum so tight it hurt. He ran back to his car, laughing. I realised, almost matter-of-factly, that he could have taken me if he’d wanted because nobody would have stopped him. I ran the rest of the way and plastered on a smile for my teacher and classmates for the rest of the afternoon. 

While I was growing up, feminist was a dirty, radical word. I was a little girl growing up in a deeply misogynistic society rooted in catholicism, I didn’t want to be radical. Going out to protest was unthinkable, and the women who did it were painted as promiscuous and dangerous. Thanks to social media, slowly, as it did for most women of my generation in the western world, feminism lost its mysticism, and stigma around the word started to fade. Women in Mexico started being more vocal about their experiences, and while impunity still reigned, 2017 and #MeToo arrived in Mexico with a reckoning akin to the rest of the world. 

In 2017, I tweeted “#MeToo”. That simple, now historic hashtag made me feel free. And in Mexico, we noticed #MeToo extended to not only hundreds of thousands of first-hand experiences, but to mothers who had lost daughters, sisters who had lost sisters, and friends who had lost friends. Violence Against Women wasn’t just everywhere, it was rampant. 

Image: Andrea Murcia, March 8 2021

Women started taking to the streets in unprecedented numbers, with no fear of labels or worries about what conservatives would say. We were angry, and for the first time in a long time, we were angry together. The 8th of March has recorded some of the most widely attended protests in Latin America in history. 

This hasn’t been without pushback. For years, there have been organized attempts to trample the rising feminist movement. Despite changes in government (2018 saw one of the most radical elections in the country’s history), one thread has stayed the same: the unjustified misogyny that calls to silence women. Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, assured in a press conference that the increasing numbers in domestic violence during the pandemic were a plot against his administration, stating “I don’t mean to say there’s no violence against women, but 90% of the registered emergency calls are false.” There is, of course, no evidence of this. 

First, the women protesting on International Women’s Day were called violent. When some protesting groups used graffiti on monuments and fire on the streets, they were told “that wasn’t the way” and “violence won’t defeat violence”. The movement was rendered “a mess filled with people being paid by the opposition”. So they were justified in blocking their access, and nobody in the mainstream complained. “Due to their violent ways,” monuments and government buildings were boarded up and riot police were sent to track the protest. The message was clear: we protect our monuments, but we don’t protect our women. The narrative was changing: it was the women who were violent, they were perpetrators, not victims.

Women are furious, but they should not be the ones on trial. We are tired of holding scissors like knives when we order a taxi, we are afraid of walking down the street in broad daylight, we are exhausted of constantly worrying about the women in our lives, we are angry about being re-victimized and blamed, we are irritated over the lack of government action, we are worn out from sending text messages consistently to let our loved ones know we’re okay. We are furious over the rising levels of femicide with little to no government action to protect us. Ten men kill a woman every day, yet the threat to the government and media seems to still be the women.

Image: Santiago Arau (March 8, 2020)

At its heart, the feminist movement in Mexico is a movement of peace. Despite everything, despite the anger and frustration, despite friends, sisters, daughters and mothers disappearing every single day, the overwhelming feeling of being in the middle of all these angry women on an 8th of March, is peace. “It’s the one time I feel safe walking in the streets of Mexico. We protect each other,” my friend told me recently. 

The last couple of years, women have used the boards “protecting” government buildings to write names of the girls and women who had been killed or disappeared, surrounding them with purple flowers to remember them. Riot police were also given flowers, with a group of female police officers eventually joining the protestors, lifting their fists in the air and walking alongside them. 

Image: Nayeli Cruz, El Pais (March 8, 2021)

Of course, women have an overwhelming amount of inequality issues in the country. They spend an average of 43 hours a week on unpaid house labour, while men only spend 16, and 8 out of 10 women live in poverty or economically dangerous situations. Right now, Mexican women just want to stop being murdered.

It would be remiss not to acknowledge that while this problem is exacerbated in certain countries, it’s still present everywhere. Stories like Sarah Everard’s, Sabina Nessa’s and Carol Hart’s are more common than they should be. An average of 124 women are killed in the UK every year.  While in most cases the murderers are taken to trial, in 48% of cases, there was a known history of abuse. These deaths are preventable, and systems are failing women everywhere. So we protest, we educate, we demand, and, like so many have before us, we create change.