Las Malinches and Indigenous Women’s Movements in Twenty-First-Century Mexico

Organized by UNAM’s Institute for Social Research on 8 March 2021, this conversation brings together Indigenous and Afro-Mexican women involved in movements, organizations and community processes. Aida Hernández Castillo moderates a panel with Georgina Méndez, Yolanda Camacho Calleja, Rocío Moreno, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy), Liliana Vianey Vargas, Nana Adelaida Cucué, Patricia Torres Sandoval and Rosy Castro. The composition matters: this is not a lecture that distills “the Indigenous experience,” but a collective space whose knowledge and trajectories should not be collapsed into one voice.

The title foregrounds “Las Malinches,” a name that invokes colonial memory and its contested interpretations. Read alongside the institutional event description—which frames the meeting as a conversation about Indigenous and Afro-Mexican women’s movements in twenty-first-century Mexico—the title invites questions about who controls political memory and how women reinterpret symbols through which they have been judged. That resonance should not be turned into a position shared by every participant. The plural format leaves differences about history, identity, community and strategy open.

At more than two hours, the gathering works differently from a short keynote. Questions move from representation toward the conditions of organizing and participation; politics appears connected to territory, community relations and struggles over recognition. The point is not to extract one list of demands. “Indigenous women” and “Afro-Mexican women” name positions shaped by distinct histories, peoples and projects. A category can help build alliances, yet it can also erase difference when treated as a homogeneous identity.

For FemRes, the panel offers a way to encounter situated political knowledge in conversation, rather than only translated into academic categories. University mediation makes the recording publicly accessible, but it does not replace the work of organizations or make this exchange an exhaustive representation of diverse movements. Pair it with the regional report on Indigenous women in Latin America, noticing the distance between statistical synthesis and the panel’s political voices, and with Feminisms in Movement, which situates these struggles within plural continental genealogies.

Panel and participants

• Recording from IIS-UNAM
• UNAM Coordination for Gender Equality event page