United States | News & Politics

There are worse ways to be conservative. Hollywood likes to portray us as simple machos with moustacho, but we are complex men, to say the least. You should look into our history to understand how conservative we are.

Hidalgo, our father founder abolished slavery in 1810. The first black president of Mexico was an independence hero, Vicente Guerrero, in 1829. Lost half the Mexican territory to a nascent hegemony in the 1840s, but we still hold our ground since then. Benito Juarez and his comrades separated the state from the catholic church in the 1850s. We also have fought for a republican state against monarchies and empires surely more times than I can recall. Got rid of two attempts to establish a local monarchy. The second attempt led to a ~30–year dictatorship which ended with a civil war -the Mexican revolution- won by a democratic armed movement that made us culturally adamant of the idea of reelections in the executive and legislative state branches.

In the past century, a new form of dictatorship found its roots in the government since the 1930s. This system was completely corrupt by the 1960s. Again, workers and students spearheaded movements against this "perfect dictatorship" through violent and nonviolent resistance that led to the "dirty war", which was the state disappearing, killing and convicting dissidents with the help of offices like the CIA, fighting in Mexico against Communism. In 1988, Mexico elected a progressive president, which was denied by an electoral fraud. In 1994, a declaration of war to the Mexican State by the EZLN called Mexicans, but mostly indigenous people, to arms.

Not many people publicly questioned the capacity of women to lead the country ten years ago, but the work to find eligible women in the political scene was only starting. Laws of parity in government existed but weren't fully implemented. In 2018 the so-called progressive president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), actively procured parity in the government, even outside the framework of the law. For example, the law didn't say he was required to have parity in his cabinet, but he did. Add to this the remarkable career of Claudia Sheinbaum as a politician and her loyalty to the movement she found. The feminist boom of the MeToo movement probably cemented the idea of a woman president close to AMLO.

Some people consider the current leftist, progressive government and movement the heir of all these fights. That's too recent to judge, in my opinion. But yeah, we fight. It's taken so much blood and lives to found Mexico, we know we aren't big in the world but our people have faced "big" names through its history (Spain, France, Austria, UK, USA, Germany...) and we are still around. A woman leading the country is not weird here. Weirdos are all those fuckers hitting and killing brothers and sisters all over the country. They'll pay, we'll remain.