Elections 2018. Fight of cultural meanings of power

Abstract

María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, a popular spokeswoman for the CNI-EZLN questioning the sexist, racist structures and patriarchal violence of electoral democracy in Mexico. Interview with the Mexican decolonial feminist Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo. Mexico will elect in 2018 the institutional representative of the Republic of Mexiana. A democratic festival that includes the political participation of the First Indigenous Woman promoted by an Indigenous Government Council of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (CNI-EZLN). After the most important indigenous movement that Mexico has experienced at the end of the 20th century, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy), of Nahua origin, brings together the social needs of the most diverse popular organizations in the country. Faced with a sexist, racist and classist institutional structure, the corporal visibility of the Human Rights defender will take on an importance in destabilizing the political imaginary in electoral democracy. Taking into consideration that Mexico is going through one of the critical blocks in terms of violence, territorial dispossession, the irruption of drug trafficking and multinationals in electoral campaigns, which has weakened the socio-community fabric in urban and rural spaces. In conversation with the academic expert and activist of the “Other Campaign”, the feminist anthropologist Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, shared the challenges that the CNI-EZLN spokesperson must face in the electoral process of registering her candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic of 2018: the bureaucratic nightmare of gathering 800 thousand digitized signatures.