By Carmen Rioja
Although the feminine strength and proactivity of women in times of crisis has surprised the whole community, few people remember what the Revolution of the Jacarandas meant in 2020 for Mexico, when hundreds of women pushed by a wave of femicides and impunity by a highly bureaucratic system, took to the streets in a march dressed in the purple color of the spring flowers that the Japanese Tatsugoro Matsumoto planted in the avenues of the capital around 1900 by order of then President Porfirio Diaz. The day after the march the women agreed to a day of silence and a day without work. The women of Mexico –the country with the highest rate of unpaid female labor according to the portal Our world in data–, watched over their victims with a resounding silence.
However, in Mexico, as in the rest of the world, the celebration of March 8 as International Women’s Day serves more as a reminder of the pending agenda in terms of gender equality, economic opportunities and health care, than as a celebration. For the moment, we can speak of a day to mark what is important and to remember those who die fighting. As every day, good intentions are diluted among the shadows, the fiercest in 2022 are a war in Ukraine, global migrations due to humanitarian emergencies and extreme hunger as a result of the economic crisis and pandemic among other conflicts; terrible is that they are more the result of the ambition of authoritarian groups and indifferent to the future of families. The violence being suffered by thousands of Ukrainian women who have seen their lives and those of their families threatened, has nothing to do with the imperious and unilateral decision of military attacks dictated by the patriarchal power that seeks to perpetuate its political format.
To counteract the disinformation and manipulation exercised by the official media over the masses; to give visibility and create humanitarian awareness, women are looking for ways to support their fellow women. Such is the case of the Ukrainian Miss Universe, Ansatasiia Lena, who decided to leave the ball gown and the Queen’s crown for the military uniform and weapons –at least as an image in Tik Tok and as a symbol of sorority with the women soldiers who are suffering the decomposition of their environment and have lost the peace and security to protect their families. Anastasiia’s photograph has gone around the world to change the paradigm.
In Querétaro, it is not only women in the streets who have joined hands. A group of plastic artists of high academic level also joined trajectories in an exhibition curated by Rosi Zorrilla, rarely is so much talent and rescue of ancestral techniques brought together: Women Interwoven, is an exhibition of consolidated artists with access to material and social resources who decided to highlight the threads that unite us beyond the superfluous through their works. And with a marked guideline to revalue the origins and women as the fabric that sustains and gives strength to society. Be sure to visit this collection and other rooms in the Art Museum of Queretaro during the month of March and take advantage of the car rides in this magnificent Historic Center.
The feminine force is communicating more and more every day, weaving and tending bonds with other women and with childhood, old age, migration, among many other humanitarian causes that had been neglected by the pandemic emergency. It was groups of citizens organized thanks to the strength of women who acted on various occasions, either with collections through the Red Cross, food banks for migrants, or collection of blankets for the mountains.
And although it is known that there is still a long way to go, women are always surprising for their resilience. Each one from her own trench, women from all over the world, unite again in this spring 2022, as on that day of the Jacaranda Revolution.
Let us celebrate all of them, in any condition, let us celebrate life and all that is feminine that protects and propitiates new life, let us celebrate that which provides care and protection to the small, the fragile. It is there where we can regenerate and restore the ecological balance.
