In Conversation with Ojalá

In June, when Mexican voters chose Claudia Sheinbaum, most U.S. media outlets celebrated  “Mexico’s first female president.” The analysis pretty much stopped there. At Ojalá.mx, a bilingual digital weekly co-founded by activists and journalists Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Dawn Marie Paley, you could learn more simply from their headline: “Sheinbaum will be Mexico’s next president, but the military holds the reins.”

Ojalá is feminist at its core, but they were not ready to uncritically celebrate Scheinbaum. “We don’t want to be circumscribed to women’s issues,” Gutiérrez Aguilar told me, “when in fact all of the world’s issues are women’s problems.” On their site, I’ve read up on water millionaires in the Mexican desert, mass evictions in Chile, wildfires in Bolivia. 

Last month, I spoke with Paley and Gutiérrez Aguilar about Sheinbaum, feminist media, and more. I encourage Lux readers to subscribe to Ojalá’s newsletter — there’s a whole world of Latin American news and feminism that Anglophone readers only get a tiny slice of, and thankfully Ojalá is making that slice bigger. —Cora Currier

CORA CURRIER Tell me about Ojalá, why you founded it, and what hole it fills in coverage of Latin America.

RAQUEL GUTIERREZ AGUILAR Dawn and I founded Ojalá at the beginning of 2023. We wanted to circulate ideas and points of view from our networks in Latin America, to gather all those voices and to do the important work of translation, because most of our discussions are not known to the English-speaking world. 

Our main idea is to organize a “common sense of dissent.” Our perspective is feminist. It is based on the struggles taking place in recent years. We wanted to be able to show how community and popular struggles organize to fight for transformation on a daily basis. We work with journalists, writers, artists and photographers in different countries throughout the region.

CC It’s great work. I’ve really enjoyed reading it. We’re doing this interview just a week after the Mexican presidential election. What does Sheinbaum’s election mean for feminist movements in Mexico? What was her relationship to grassroots feminism and activism in Mexico City when she was mayor?

RGA It’s a very, very problematic relationship. While she was mayor, the government in Mexico City persecuted and even jailed feminists suspected of direct actions, including vandalism and occupations.

One example was the occupation of an important government building during the pandemic, which was led by mothers of victims of femicides who were seeking justice together with anarchist feminists in Mexico. The Mexico City government tried to weaken the movement, and then it eventually created a pretext to evict the occupiers. That example reflects the disgust Claudia Sheinbaum has for the strength of women’s organizing, which has flowed into the streets. These actions express how fed up women are, in Mexico City and elsewhere, with the current state of affairs. 

We have all these powerful women occupying the most important posts in the government: Claudia is going to be president, Clara Brugada is going to be mayor of Mexico City, and most of the states surrounding Mexico City are also going to be governed by women. 

The main issue we see is the power of the armed forces that have been so pampered by the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador [known as AMLO]. The Army has always been powerful, but in the last six years its power has dramatically increased. It’s going to be very difficult for Sheinbaum to find an independent position from which to deal with that. The women who will formally govern the republic will be constrained or circumscribed by military power as well as by all the pre-existing agreements with foreign and national investors. It is already very confusing, because it is important that women have (to use the canonical expression) broken a glass ceiling which is really hard and rigid in Mexico. But in living memory, the generals have never had more power.

DAWN MARIE PALEY Raquel and I marched in Mexico City on March 8, International Women’s Day. There were probably over half a million women marching that day, just in Mexico City. People marched all over the country, but Claudia Sheinbaum did not march. She knew it was not a space to go and campaign. Feminists in Mexico City did not roll out the welcome mat for the presidential candidate because they know that she is involved in the same violent structures that are constantly victimizing and re-victimizing women.

RGA The only mention Claudia has made about supporting women is not about the women’s movement at all, but about increasing pensions to include women who are between 60 and 64 years old (that includes me). So Claudia directs some money at a narrow set of women, as progressive governments have often done when they’re in power. That’s not a bad thing on its own terms. But it’s very dangerous because it distracts, it confuses, and it doesn’t solve anything. It makes it more difficult to continue figuring out all the ways we can transform many of the public policies and of the things that are happening. It’s something they do to contain, not to support — to neutralize the feminist movement. 

CC In so much coverage of Mexico and the region, including Lux’s own, the issue of femicide and violence against women tends to just dominate the conversation. How do you manage, both as activists and in an editorial sense, this overwhelming nature of the crisis of gender-based violence? Where do you look also for hope beyond that crisis?

RGA  I think that we should pay attention to all the education efforts that are underway by very different groups. There are a lot of autonomous schools focused on feminist education and on discussing and organizing debate as well as on feminist self defense.

Feminists are participating in wider struggles for justice that include the fight for fairness in child support payments, for example. There are struggles (commonly referred to as escraches) against the perpetrators of violent attacks as well as against judges, prosecutors, and officials that don’t respond to sexual violence according to law.

Seeking justice in Mexico is thick with meaning. We are constructing another justice in schools, in universities and beyond. There is a kind of cultural change going on that is very, very deep. 

There are feminists involved in land defense, struggling for water, working with the families of the disappeared, against militarization, against the genocide in Palestine, and more. There is a real crisis, a very silent crisis, of traditional organizations, which is to say gender-mixed organizations that are in reality patriarchal. And that’s important because it means something new is being born.

CC What are you all reading lately? Can you recommend some work in translation?

DP Ha, my favorite question ever. I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend a new, book-length translation of Raquel’s work, titled In Defense of Common Life. Verónica Gago’s Feminist International is a very good introduction to feminist movement in Latin America. And I just finished Silky Shah’s excellent Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. [Ed. Note: Shah will appear in Lux’s fall issue]. 

I read a lot of fiction. Mariana Enriquez’  Nuestra parte de noche (Our Share of the Night) is a beautiful and disturbing 1970s Argentine horror story. Itamar Veira Jr’s Crooked Plow is another powerful novel available in translation that I highly recommend. Oh and it’s not a translation, but Miranda July’s All Fours. I’d love to read a Lux take on that!