A female president? Two Mexican women are torn between hope and skepticism

A female president in Mexico for the first time? A plumber and a carpenter are torn between hope and skepticism after the appointment of Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez as female candidates of the ruling party and the opposition.

Berenice, 32, and Victoria, 30, do not know each other but they have a lot in common. They suffered gender violence, a plague in this country where an average of ten women are murdered every day.

Challenging an entrenched sexist culture, they had to fight to raise their children by doing jobs previously considered men’s jobs: Berenice fixing pipes and Victoria making furniture.

In Mexico, women are gaining more and more prominence, to the point that for the first time two of them will face each other for the presidency in the elections on June 2.

The ruling left-wing party Morena on Wednesday designated as its standard-bearer the former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old physicist, who beat her five male opponents by a wide margin in five polls.

Meanwhile, center-right senator Xóchitl Gálvez, a 60-year-old businesswoman, was anointed last Sunday as a candidate for an opposition coalition, leaving behind another woman and two men.

For Berenice Aparicio, mother of a child and a teenager, the outlook is hopeful.

“There is still machismo in Mexico, so I think that perhaps a female president would think more like a woman, or (in) everything that a woman suffers and would make a change,” She comments wearing makeup and with her black hair tied up while changing a toilet in the center of the capital.

She lived for several years with a man who beat her out of jealousy and made her believe that she was alone. “I wasn’t going to be able to” survive, until he decided to dedicate himself to plumbing, a trade he learned as a teenager with his uncles.

In contrast, Victoria González, mother of two children and who prefers to be called Mallory Knox, believes that parties are taking advantage of the strength of feminist movements to win votes.

“I think it is a little convenient that right now, with all the rise of feminism, there is a female president,” Mallory says ironically, when polishing wooden surfaces in his father’s workshop in the rough neighborhood of Chalco, on the outskirts of the capital. Mallory also teaches the trade to other women so that they gain independence.

In the cabinet of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of 19 ministers, nine are women, among them Rosa Icela Rodríguez and Luisa María Alcalde, heads of the Secretariats of Public Security and the Interior (Interior).

Women represent 39% of all officials and managers in the public and private sectors in Mexico, including the president of the Supreme Court of Justice, Norma Piña, and that of the electoral body, Guadalupe Taddei.

But like drug violence, femicides do not stop. From January to June, 1,516 women were murdered, and of these cases, about 500 are being investigated as femicides, according to the government.

Utopia

Daughter of a domestic worker and a taquero who now runs her plumbing supplies business, Berenice is a member of Plomeras en Acción, an organization in which, in addition to updating herself on the trade, she learns to deal with daily acts of discrimination.

“Many people think that you have to use a lot of strength and that is why a woman would not be good for this job,” he comments in his small house, where he sleeps in a bunk bed with his children.

On one occasion a man challenged her on social networks to “a boxing fight”, telling him: “’If you can do plumbing, you can also fight’”says this soft-spoken woman.

Therefore, consider that a woman in the presidential chair would “to the country ahead.”

In her father’s carpentry workshop, Mallory listens to a song by Tri, an iconic rock band that strongly criticizes Mexican politics.

“I have lived through sexual violence” until “economic violence when I was married to a man”account.

“Now I have experienced violence already naming myself (ndlr, identifying myself) as a lesbian woman as a mother” and “discrimination” for being a carpenter for four years, she says.

For her, social change does not depend “whether it is a woman or a man” who governs

“It would be like a dream, very utopian, if a woman could change our steps (…) It is rather we who are changing everything in our path,” he remarks.

Source: AFP