Sheinbaum, the princess of the left

Doctor Claudia Sheinbaum wants to be president of the Republic. To achieve this, she must win the nomination, through a poll, as a candidate for Morena. The survey will measure, among other things, the level of recognition (fame) of the different individuals included in the quantitative exercise. I suppose that in order to increase said percentage of popularity, even if it is negative, her advisors recommend that she release strident phrases, that attract attention, that they give her headlines and become trending topics on social networks, that they talk about her, well.

Then, you can always back down, but the noise is made, the blow has been delivered. How else can it be explained that, just before March 8, the head of government released the following on her tour of Morelia: “The women who do not want it (install the replica of the young woman from Amajac where the statue was before de Colón) deep down they are profoundly racist and classist.” Although she backed down, it sounded like she was referring to all the women who make up the collectives that have given new meaning to the Colón roundabout, as the women who fight. In this same newspaper, yesterday, Tuesday, March 7, Lucía Melgar exposed a central point in this regard: “Such an accusation, coupled with the desire to impose the statue of ‘the young woman from Amajac’, overlooks the fact that the symbol of the woman who fights it lacks ethnic or class traits: it is a purple female silhouette, a color associated with feminism, nothing more. It disqualifies indigenous women who, last year at a meeting in the Glorieta, affirmed that they do not identify with that stony figure because it represents a princess who lived “in cloths of gold.” She cunningly stigmatizes mothers, relatives of victims and survivors who consider this an emblematic place of the current, live resistance against violence and impunity”. Sheinbaum thinks, like President López Obrador, that any fight that is not against economic poverty is a fifi fight. In this sense, the feminist struggle is fifi because it seeks the recognition of social rights that do not necessarily go through the fight against poverty (you need to read Nussbaum’s “Women and human development”: women’s freedom triggers economic development ).

There is no doubt that Mexico is a hostile and oppressive place against the original peoples. It has been so, at least, since the arrival of Columbus (let us not forget that the Mexicas subjugated a good part of Mesoamerica and that, to some extent, thanks to said violence, Cortés added to his side many of the peoples he encountered on the way to Veracruz to Tenochtitlan). In this sense, I can understand the Sheinbaumista discourse of replacing the oppressive European with the free indigenous woman. In addition, that move is the sister with the Latin American left among which Morena feels most comfortable: the Bolivarian. Left that often seems little concerned about people’s rights, that it seems to prefer great speeches than the palpable struggle to end, among other things, femicide violence. Left of dead monuments and not of living monuments. If we look at it correctly, Sheinbaum wants to remove a minion to put a princess, the princess on the left.

Twitter: @munozoliveira