Oaxaca feminist gathering nurtures collective power

Women in Oaxaca joined the national protest following the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas in Mexico City in February of 2020. Photo © Naxhielli Arreola.

Opinion • September 5, 2025 • Comité Organizador del I Encuentro de mujeres que luchan, sostienen y crean • Leer en castellano

In July, a group of women active in publishing, academic, and feminist spaces in Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City launched a call for a gathering, inspired by the vital need to come together. 

We called for shared discussion about current forms of expropriation and the disregard for our work and contributions. 

Our call highlighted the importance of acknowledging our individual and collective strengths. Despite the injustices we face, we are not victims, nor do we want to proceed only from a place of complaint, focussing exclusively on shortcomings or deficiencies.

Rather, our goal was to connect with one another, drawing on our strengths, and engaging in an exercise of mutual recognition.

Our shared concern about crucial issues in Mexico today nurtured our desire to discuss these issues in a broader setting. On August 8, in the city of Oaxaca, more than 80 women gathered in a comfortable space made available by the Institute of Education Sciences at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca (ICE-UABJO).

Fight, support, create

The first Encuentro de mujeres que luchan, sostienen y crean (Gathering of Women who Fight, Support, and Create) took place in a well-ventilated auditorium as the university prepared to welcome back students at the start of the school year. We decided that the gathering would be trans-inclusive, even though the word “women” was used in the initial call for participants. 

The invitation was shared widely on social media. Perhaps the questions being raised, and the fact that the authors of the call were left purposefully vague, were what sparked curiosity.

Each participating comrade shared the call with their own communities of practice and struggle. 

Women in Oaxaca joined the national protest following the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas in Mexico City in February of 2020. Photo © Naxhielli Arreola.

Mexico is experiencing a difficult period of ambiguity: violence in its many forms is expanding in a manner that facilitates dispossession and theft, amid a rhetoric of political transformation. As far as women are concerned, this appears as an accelerated process of co-optation of resistance.

This creates conditions ripe for the breakdown and weakening of community weavings. Practices of daily sustenance and reproduction are under attack, and transformative potential has been hampered. 

We also shared our outrage at the genocide in Gaza, and the failure—so far—to end it.

Seek and you shall find each other

After an opening plenary, we divided into three round tables, in which we explored similar questions from different angles.

The first thread of analysis was a detailed reflection on the immense quantity of work we constantly contribute that remains unrecognized and unpaid. Our unpaid labor requires vital energy, but it is made invisible even as it sustains life in its entirety on a daily basis.

A second track involved examining the difficulties in building mutual trust among different and diverse people, and trying to understand how divisions that are imposed on us.

The third consisted of collectively exploring our desires, so as to imagine how to disrupt the status quo and rebuild our everyday lives.

The debates were organized using various methodologies, all of which proved fruitful. 

We encouraged everyone to reflect from their own perspectives, and did self-awareness exercises. But we were clear about the key principle we set as our guide: sharing and analyzing our grievances, while never losing sight of our individual and collective capacity to sustain, create, and fight for our rights.

The gathering began with guidance from compañeras who had already thought through each of the issues raised. This encouraged a process of self-reflection that could be used to theorize, test for generalizations, and develop critical analysis.

Women in Oaxaca joined the national protest following the femicide of Ingrid Escamilla Vargas in Mexico City in February of 2020. Photo © Naxhielli Arreola.

We talked about the importance of taking time for ourselves and nurturing joy in order to sustain our desires and needs amid precarity. An interesting distinction was made between dignified time and enslaving time. 

We had an intense debate about female authority and the myriad ways in which it is ignored and denied. We also touched on fatigue, anxiety, and the importance of remembering the struggles of those who came before us.

We learned together. We created a space for an exercise in knowledge creation, balancing analysis of individual experiences of hardship in public and private spaces with the development of explanations and paths to transform each situation.

No rushing to conclusions

As organizers, we collectively decided to resist the urge to rush to conclusions. The rest of the participants agreed with our approach.

We kept that in mind towards the end of the gathering, when we reconvened in a plenary session, reminding ourselves that we did not need to force a formal agreement, which we knew would fail to reflect the diversity that brought us together.

Nor did we feel any urgency to present and discuss a plan for how to proceed. Nor did we have such a plan, to be frank, though we believe it would be feasible to put one together in good time.

The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the present moment and how we are experiencing it. Towards the end, we once again raised the question of whether it would be worthwhile to do more together, for which there was a great deal of enthusiasm among those who had attended.

We want to get to know each other better, to listen and talk to each other in an effort to support one another, to cultivate the bonds that have been forged. 

We wish to open ourselves up—slowly and without pressure—to the possibilities of new ideas and struggles, building on the knowledge that we can join forces toward shared goals.