Category Archives: Mexico

Trans women in Mexico say: “They’re killing us”

by Jim Hodgson

In Mexico, the new year began with a series of highly-publicized murders and beatings of Trans women. The violence, sadly, is not rare: Mexico follows only Brazil with the highest numbers of murders of LGBTQIA+ people each year. The fact that they’re being talked about at all is what’s unusual.

Two of the women who were killed were active in party politics. A woman beaten by her fiancé is a well-known social media “influencer,” Paola Suárez. The incidents are reminders of the breach between much-improved legal protection for LGBTQIA+ people in most of Latin America, and the harsh realities of day-to-day life where many men still hold to old ways. More on that below.

The assassination of Samantha Gómez Fonseca came the day before a planned march by Trans women in Mexico City.

Samantha Gómez Fonseca, 37, had launched a campaign for a seat in the national Senate as a member of the ruling MORENA (Movement for National Regeneration) party. She was shot and killed on Jan. 14 in the street after a prison visit in the Xochimilco area in the south end of Mexico City. 

Miriam Noemí Ríos, part of the Citizens’ Movement party (MC) in Michoacan state, was shot and killed Jan. 11 in Zamora, Michoacan. She was a candidate for the municipal council in nearby Jacona. 

Miriam Ríos (left) is remembered in Michoacán state. In Hidalgo, Gaby is remembered as the first Trans woman to come out in Ixmilquilpan more than 20 years ago.

“What is going on in Mexico?” demanded Salma Luévano Luna, a Trans woman who is a member of the national Chamber of Deputies for the MORENA. 

“Why do we have four violent deaths of Trans women already this year? They’re killing us.

“This is what I am talking about when I say that hate speech is the entry point for hate crimes. For this, I demand justice for Samantha and all of my sisters. Enough. Not one more.” 

Luévano had been in the news just days early after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had referred to her as “a man in a dress.” He apologized a day later, and she accepted the apology, but the incident still rankles among Trans activists. 

The words of the prophets are written on the walls of the National Palace: “Trans Lives Matter.” The graffiti was created during the Jan. 15 Trans mobilization.

Others killed in the first two weeks of the year included Gaby Ortiz, whose body was found beside a rural highway near Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo. In Coatzalcoalcos, Veracruz, the bodies of Vanessa, a Trans woman and her partner (whose name is not given) were found in their home. The Arcoiris organization points to two more: a Trans woman whose name is not known found shot in the back and dead Jan. 13 in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, and a person identified as 35-year-old Fabián Kenneth Trejo, who died Jan. 14 in the Álvaro Obregón area of Mexico City. 

“All of the victims, known and unknown, deserve justice,” said the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City in a statement Jan. 15. The commission called on authorities to investigate in ways that take seriously their gender identity and political activities “so that truth be known, leading to sanctions that are necessary for the transformation of the structural conditions that will allow LGBTTTIQA+ populations to live free from violence.”

From 2007 through 2022, a total of 590 Trans people were murdered in Mexico. That’s an average of 53 each year. 

Unfortunately, few violent crimes in Mexico result in criminal charges, especially if the victim is from a marginalised group. In July last year, Ulises Nava, the head of a sexual diversity unit at the University of Guerrero in Chilpancingo was shot and killed while attending a LGBTQIA+ conference in Aguascalientes. In November, Mexico’s first openly non-binary magistrate and prominent activist Ociel Baena was killed; the body of their partner, Dorian Herrera, was found at their side. Police have treated the crime as one of passion. But activists, including Salma Luévano, the member of the Chamber of Deputies cited above, are sceptical. 

“To be Trans is to transgress the social order,” say the authors of fascinating essay, International Borders and Gender Borders, about the experiences of Central American Trans people among the migrants who are passing northward through Mexico. Trans people, they write, “challenge the heteronormativity of social and religious ways of thinking and being,” with all of their patriarchal norms and values. That system imposes a “binary, heteronormative” set of rules that try to restrict “each person within parameters that dictate gender roles, sexual orientation, and the spaces and tasks that are designated for each biological sex.”

That essay brought to mind two writers whose work is available in English. Neither is Trans, but both helped to shape my own thinking about gender, borders and identities.

Borderlands (above); a portrait of Marcella Althaus-Reid by Scottish artist David Martin hangs in a classroom at New College School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh.

When I was living in Cuernavaca in the late 1990s, friends recommended the work of the Chicana lesbian writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942-2004), particularly Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Born in Texas, she lived her life across the U.S. southwest. Some of her gems, retrieved from the internet (as my copy of the book is in Canada and I am in Mexico):

“Culture is made by those in power- men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them.”

And:

“This land was Mexican once,

was Indian always, 

and is. 

And will be again.”

I would also suggest reading work by or about Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952-2009), who challenged the foundations of patriarchal Christian theology with her “indecent theology.” A hint: “All theology is sexual theology.” Here’s a good introduction from Kittredge Cherry. 

Transformation in Mexico: a work in progress

Zapatista leaders: Marcos and Moises in La Realidad, Chiapas, November 1996. Photo: Jim Hodgson

by Jim Hodgson

On Jan. 1, 1994, the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seized control of several cities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southern-most state.

Within a few days, it was clear that the group was Indigenous-led and that it had a charismatic spokesperson in Subcomandante Marcos. The movement also had expectations of social transformation that extended beyond the immediate goal of improving the lot of the Maya people of the Chiapas highlands.

From mountains of southeast Mexico, the Zapatistas put forward a vision of a world where there is respect for diverse ways of being human and of organizing political life, where there might be diverse expressions of truth in the face of supposedly universal truths like the one offered by business elites about the all-powerful “invisible hand” of the free market. They invited us to imagine a world with room for all – “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.”

Headlines on Jan. 1, 1994: “Uprising in Chiapas,” “EZLN takes 4 cities in Chiapas”

The Zapatistas pressed for new ways of thinking about power – that leaders should obey their communities – and rejected the hegemony of political parties. The vision had a big impact on those who created the World Social Forum series of encounters that in turn have helped to transform politics in Latin America over the past quarter-century.

Zapatista communities established autonomy from other levels of government, and set about ruling themselves. In the words of a chronicler of social movements in Latin America, Raúl Zibechi, these processes “modify” how people relate to each other as they manage health, education, production, justice, celebrations, sports and art: more mutual, less expert-client, relationships.

Competing posters: Bishop Samuel Ruiz was a man “wanted” for “treason;” EZLN says, “The world that we want is one with room for many worlds.”

“Disorganized crime” and “remilitarization”

Thirty years on, the communities say they have to re-organize themselves in the face of violence between rival drug cartels – “disorganized crime,” the EZLN called them in a recent statement – that now afflicts Indigenous territories near the border with Guatemala and indeed across most of Chiapas. 

Forced displacement, said the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre (known as Frayba), is among the most serious human rights violations in Chiapas today. In a new report launched in July, the San Cristóbal-based group said 16,755 people had been forced from their homes between 2010 and 2022. Frayba attributed the violence to actions by paramilitary groups that have afflicted the state for decades and to the newer criminal gangs, adding that the violence affects the Zapatista communities. At the same time, Frayba describes a “remilitarization” –more soldiers, more bases – in the area. 

Mexico’s Fourth Transformation

In 2018, Mexicans chose their new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on the same day as the people of Chiapas elected their new governor, Rutilio Escandón. Their party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), promotes a program of change they call the “Fourth Transformation” (4T), the previous three being the war of independence, the mid-19th-century liberal reforms of Benito Juárez, and the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1917 – or through 1940, if you include the massive land reform led by Lázaro Cárdenas in the mid and late 1930s).  The 4T includes a security component: “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not shootings), the idea being to ensure that people have viable economic possibilities so that they do not turn to lives of crime.

More than five years into their respective administrations (and six months before the next elections), reviews are mixed. The old conservative parties loathe AMLO – “socialist!” “Chavista!” A more responsible critique comes from Indigenous people and sectors of the left that reject “neo-developmentalist” approaches that emphasize resource extraction and mega-projects for the sake of job creation – but again mostly benefit the traditional elites. Those criticisms were also levelled at all of the so-called “pink tide” governments that produced some changes over the past 25 years, but did not transform the systems of dependence on the export of natural resources. (This problem afflicts Canada too and in the face of climate change, requires urgent action.)

Despite promises, Mexico’s 4T government has not tried to implement the San Andrés Sakamch’en Agreement that was achieved in negotiations among Indigenous peoples and the government in 1996. Those talks, sparked by the EZLN-led rebellion and moderated by Bishop Samuel Ruiz, marked the first (and only) time that the government has negotiated face-to-face with Indigenous peoples. It was not a comprehensive peace deal, but rather the first step in a planned process to address Indigenous rights in Chiapas and beyond.

On June 2, 2024, voters will elect a new president and a new governor for Chiapas. These will be the sixth since the EZLN uprising. Over the years, the Zapatistas have used a variety of strategies to have an impact on Mexico’s political culture. They won’t be silent in the coming months.

Guadalupe, Tonantzin and roses in December

by Jim Hodgson (from a text published on Dec. 11, 2011 in a previous version of this blog site)

One of the people that I used to visit in Cuernavaca was Doña Guadalupe, an elderly woman who lived with her many beautiful cats in the Patios de la Estación neighbourhood, near the former train station and Casino de la Selva hotel.

To make a living, she made tortilla cloths (including the one shown here) and other embroideries that she sold to visitors who came from the Cuernavaca Centre for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (CCIDD) where I worked in the mid and late 90s. This image shows the Virgin of Guadalupe, for whom our friend was named. (She died in July 2000, just before I returned to Canada.)

Tonight, six million people will fill the streets around Mexico City’s Guadalupe basilica (shown below). Many will have travelled on foot, by bicycle and in trucks and buses, to get there. Most sleep in the street. All expect to get in to the basilica to greet La Virgen on her feast day.

Inside, there will be a succession of Masses and celebrity stars in a televised variety show. What you don’t see on television is the flood of people whose focus is not on centre stage. And those who can’t get to Mexico City are celebrating across Mexico and increasingly, throughout the Americas and beyond.

It’s the confluence of different spiritualities around The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And there are different ways of telling the story. But let me give you a basic outline.

The Virgin Mary is believed to have appeared to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego, on three occasions in December 1531, 10 years after Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire. She encountered him on a hill known as Tepeyac, on the north edge of Mexico City—formerly Tenochtitlan, the Mexica (or Aztec) capital). The hillside was associated with the worship of Tonantzin, a mother of gods in the Mexica faith.

Mary spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs that is still spoken by about three million people in central Mexico. She addressed him with an honorific title and asked him to tell the bishop that she wanted a church built on the site. When the bishop later asked Juan Diego for proof that she had made this request, Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac. Mary told him to gather roses in his cloak and to take them to the bishop.

When Juan Diego unrolled his cloak to reveal the roses to the bishop, the cloak itself was emblazoned with the image of Mary, dressed as a dark-skinned Aztec princess, standing in front of the sun and on top of a crescent moon.

In the apparitions, Mary called herself Tecuatlaxopeuh, a Nahuatl word which means “one who drives away those who eat us.” The Spanish called her Guadalupe, after a popular devotion to Mary in Estremadura, Spain.

“Flowers of life in the crude winter”

The message was understood to be an affirmation of the Indigenous people in the midst of their defeat and oppression. It’s another one of those stories (like that of Jesus born in a stable in Bethlehem under Roman occupation) that tell of God’s action at the margins, among the poor, away from power.

The hillside where Mary appeared, Tepeyac, is the focal point of popular religiosity in Mexico and all of the Americas, wrote Fr. Miguel Concha of the Dominican religious order in Mexico. (Fr. Miguel passed away in January 2023.)

“There is no greater moral and religious strength that unites so many people precisely because of what she represents,” he wrote in La Jornada newspaper Jan. 23, 1999.

“She is a Marian symbol, it’s true, but she has connotations that go beyond what the institutional church holds forth in its doctrines. Guadalupe is the product of the synthesis that the poor developed from what Christianity offers, bringing that together with the essence of the oldest indigenous religious traditions,” wrote Concha.

“To come today to Tepeyac to proclaim from here the commitment of the church in the face of the third millenium is to assume the trajectory of those who, like Juan Diego, are the bearers of the few flowers of life which still survive in this crude winter which is imposed on humanity.”

Images on the church in Santa Marta, Cabañas department, El Salvador: Guadalupe and Saint Oscar Romero.

Development and the faith of the people

Why is a blog about development dealing with Latin American celebrations of the Virgin Mary? Aside from being in the midst of the Advent and Christmas season, when Mary’s central role in the Jesus story is celebrated, it seems to me that a lot of development activities are carried out as (apparently) benevolent foreign interventions. People come from some place else to build a school. Experts lead an agricultural project. Funds are shared from North to South in support of some cause or other.

At their best, these activities represent cross-cultural cooperation. Southern partners make the key decisions; Northern partners are but a supporting cast; solidarity grows.

At their worst, zealous to promote a better pig or construction technique, foreign development workers (like bad missionaries) feel no need to understand local cultures or practices.

One time, we accompanied Doña Guadalupe on a visit to her huesera, a healer of bones and their aches. In small barrels, the huesera had a spectacular collection of different varieties of beans, in all their many colours—seed varieties disparaged by the agro-industrialists with their monocrops.

A bit of time spent in friendship and solidarity with Guadalupe showed me vividly how Indigenous people and small farmers are the keepers of seeds and of the wisdom and knowledge that we will need to survive the warm decades to come.