The Feminist Movement in Mexico, Pt. 1

This is Class, the official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Education Committee. This is the first of a two-part conversation with Alina Herrera Fuentes about the feminist movement in Mexico. 

Alina is a lawyer, feminist, and Marxist. She is a member of Morena's National Institute for Political Formation, or INFP. Currently, Alina is the educational content coordinator for the comprehensive gender program run by INFP. In this episode, we talk about the history of Morena — Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional — and Morena's and Alina's vision for a more just and gender-equal Mexico. This interview is in Spanish. An English translation can be found by clicking the “transcript” option on Buzzsprout. 

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Transcript

Luke: What´s your background and political experience?

Alina: Hi Luke, thanks for the invitation, and hello to everyone listening. My name is Alina Herrera Fuentes. I am a 40-year-old Cuban lawyer, and have been living in Mexico for 13 years. I consider myself a feminist, an anti-racist, and a Marxist. Since arriving in Mexico in 2011, I have always looked for groups to join and ways to be an activist. When I first arrived, I studied with comrades in the Zapatista movement and looked for ways to adhere to the Zapatistas’ “Sexta Declaración de la Selva Lacandona.” 

Afterward, I moved through various civil organizations, feminist organizations, and organizations of women. We spent a period supporting victims of gender violence and campaigning with indigenous women around the question of racial identity as a common point between indigenous and black people, or Afro-descendants. I am a black woman, an Afro-Caribbean woman. After some time, through an invitation from my previous boss, I managed to join Morena’s National Institute for Political Formation (INFP) about four years ago. Right now, I am the educational content coordinator for the comprehensive gender program run by the INFP — that’s to say, the program that focuses on feminism within the INFP. 

I graduated with a law degree in Cuba. There, the schools offer an education through a Marxist and class-focused lens and a clear understanding of the struggle between classes. There’s a strong conception of militancy, of social and political praxis, and historical and geopolitical knowledge, particularly given the historical rivalry between the U.S. and Cuba. This is more or less my formation and where I come from. 

Luke: How would you describe Morena, or Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional? 

Alina: That’s a very good question. Morena is a party-movement, but what does that mean? Why do we say that we are a political party and a movement? To answer this question, it’s important to go back to the history of the origins of Morena (which stands for National Regeneration Movement). Let’s go back a little to 2012, when a series of coalitions and tensions existed between various left parties at the time — the PRD, the PT, and Convergencia. Then, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) belonged to the PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática). But by 2011, AMLO had a strong working-class base. Therefore, in the 2009 midterm elections, these Obradorist candidates were displaced by the coalition led by the PRD, which established alliances with the PAN, the Right-wing National Action Party. This was a clear example of the divergences that were beginning to emerge and the political boundaries of AMLO and his working-class base. 

However, we should go back even further, to 2005. This was a strong turning point in terms of the germination and formation of Morena. In that year, AMLO (then the jefa de gobierno of Mexico City) was attacked for his plan to run in the 2006 presidential elections. But the attempted impeachment process was seen by most citizens as electoral fraud before the elections, an attempt to stop AMLO from competing in 2006. It was also seen as an attack on Mexican democracy. The result was a movement of peaceful civil resistance throughout the country (with great intensity in the capital) and various actions of civil disobedience, including protests and even hunger strikes, in defense of democracy and particularly in support of AMLO. The slogan “We are all López” was popular and played an important part in the civil resistance actions. 

Therefore, we can say that Morena germinated in 2005 with the attempted impeachment of AMLO and consolidated in 2011 when AMLO called for the construction of a political and social movement that would defend the right to vote. This was at the time of the 2012 presidential elections. 

In 2011, Morena was registered as a civil association and truly consolidated itself as the movement we know. Morena germinated in an unorganized way, like all political and social movements, but was registered in 2011 as a movement because it was very strong throughout the country. Its focus at the time was the formation of committees to defend the right to vote. Elections have always been an important part of this movement. In 2014, Morena registered as a political party with the Federal Elections Institute. 

For this reason, Morena is a party-movement. It’s important to know this history because people still ask where Morena came from and how the movement could rise so quickly. Yes, Morena rose quickly. But we should keep in mind that it germinated from the huge injustice in 2005 and in the defense of Mexico’s electoral democracy. It arose from a very solid perspective that was conscious of the Mexican Left. 

Why do I think Morena is still a party-movement? Because this mobilization — in defense of voting rights, in defense of democracy, in defense of democracy that is popular, built from below, and built by the dispossessed — continues. Also, because there has been a revolution of consciousness that continues to guide the movement and the party, including its representatives and its community leaders. 

In addition, Morena is not only led by people affiliated with the party who exercise the right to vote every six years, but also because during every presidential term, we remain active doing political training, community work, and ideological development. This goes beyond low-intensity democracy (as sociologists in Latin America say) and beyond representative democracy. We promote a participatory and direct democracy that complements, in a critical way, the ideas of the Fourth Transformation put forward during AMLO’s presidency and continued during Claudia Sheinbaum’s current presidency. 

Morena complimented and continues to compliment the Fourth Transformation through militant activist support for its policies, but also by criticising the government as needed. This is what political and social movements are about: having demands that governments have a constitutional obligation to satisfy. 

For all of these reasons, Morena remains a movement even when it is an official political party. 

Luke: What is Morena’s vision, and yours as well, for a Mexico that is more just and equal in terms of gender? 

Alina: Well, this is another broad question. I want to be cautious with my response. I’ll start with the first part of the question. In the years before 2018, when AMLO won the presidency, Morena was making a tremendous push through the country as a Left-wing movement. At the same time, there was a strong feminist wave in the country that was connected to the global feminist wave that was born in 2015 with the “Me Too” movement and others like it in the U.S. These feminists movement took particular forms depending on the countries and the specific demands of the women in those countries, especially in the Global South, including Mexico. 

These two movements, both of them very strong, did not necessarily correspond in the years before 2018. When AMLO became president, there was still no indication that Morena was going to create a political agenda by, for, and with the women of Mexico. The combination of these movements was the result of the slow and small work of many people, not just of AMLO, but primarily of the feminists who joined Morena. This is another fact that shows us how Morena is not just a party, but a party-movement. Not everything is guided by one person. The push for a gender agenda came above all from the feminists within Morena. And not just from them, but also from sympathizers outside of the party.

Therefore, Morena’s vision — for a Mexico that’s more just and equal in terms of gender — has to do with the identification of who built this movement starting in 2018, of who said “yes,” Morena is going to be on the side of the women in Mexico, that Morena is not going to lie, or cheat, or commercialize women’s votes. Rather, Morena is going to think first and foremost about the poorest women. 

But this was a tremendous fight. We weren’t only fighting outside of Morena, but also inside the party. Even when the party’s statutes, documents, principles, etc., talked about non-discrimination and the fight for justice for all, we still had to fight hard to include the fight for gender justice. We argued that you can’t talk about a better Mexico if you aren’t also talking about gender justice, if you aren’t talking about gender inequality, if you aren’t talking about the fact that in 2018, Morena inherited a country in which ten women were assassinated every day just for being women. Not because of a robbery or accident — no. Only for being women. 

It took a lot of work to reach this level of consciousness — to achieve this revolution of consciousness — in which we realized that there would not be a more just Mexico only through the class struggle. We also needed to look at the struggles of women, including rural and indigenous women, who don’t have a voice or the power to vote because they live under the power of their husbands or their male children in the case that they become widows. These are women who have no land and no access to education or healthcare because that was all privatized during the neoliberal era. 

Therefore, Mexican humanism — one of the pillars of Morena — isn’t useful if we don’t think about the profound precarity of the poorest women in the country, of the people who labor in the home doing poorly paid or unpaid work, of the people who are still being racialized. Mexican humanism isn’t useful if we don’t think about the people from very humble origins, about the people doing informal labor.  If we don’t think about all of these things, we don’t have a Mexican humanism that embraces the whole country. 

We must think about the lack of access to justice or a fair trial, for example, because many women are indigenous or Afro-Mexican and don’t speak Spanish. We must think about women who can’t pay for legal representation because there are few public defenders, and many don’t have a feminist or intersectional perspective. 

For me, the vision for a more just and equal Mexico comes from the ideas in Mexican humanism, but better said, from a feminist Mexican humanism. We aren’t talking about feminism that breaks the glass ceiling. Rather, a Leftist feminism that considers all of the women I have mentioned, all of those who have historically been invisibilized. 

That is why Claudia Sheinbaum dedicated her first year in office to indigenous and racialized women. This is Mexican humanism through the lens of feminism, a Leftist feminism of the dispossessed and condemned of the earth, as Frantz Fanon said. This is the vision of a more just Mexico, and we had to work very hard inside and outside of Morena to construct it. We are looking to construct a more just society for everyone.