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After a march (March 8th) and after a #daywithoutwomen (March 9th) in Mexico, the onslaught of mockery, belittling and offenses against women and the whole feminist movement are rampant on social media pages.
Yes, there are messages of support. Yet, I find it easier to see messages of negative kind, even when I'm not actively looking for them.
One of the most used subjects to villainaze the movement, THE PURPOSE of it, is the damage over the monuments and "symbols".
Well, I say "FUCK THAT!" and here is why. In English so everyone can read it.
The 6th stanza in our national anthem says:
"Antes, Patria, que inermes tus hijos
Bajo el yugo su cuello dobleguen,
Tus campiñas con sangre se rieguen,
Sobre sangre se estampe su pie.
Y tus templos, palacios y torres
Se derrumben con hórrido estruendo,
Y sus ruinas existan diciendo:
De mil héroes la patria aquí fue."
Which roughly translates to: 《Before, Oh Homeland, your unarmed / sons bend their necks under a rule of control, / your crops shall be watered by blood, / in blood the foot shall be stomped. /And your temples, palaces and towers / shall be brought down with a horrendous roar, / And their debris shall exist preaching: / Of thousand heroes the homeland was made. 》
Pretty awesome, right? This whole stanza is practically saying "Yo, we not going down without a fight, we gonna f*ck you up before looking down our feet", summing it up is a 'Death before being a mere servant' debacle. Which is pretty hard core (Our whole national anthem is like this! We telling "hey, if you ever cross a line, we fucking you up so hard, your next generation will feel it").
But, what I love the MOST of this stanza is the last part. The last four verses are quite powerful too and the reason we have the right to paint over and "vandalize" the monuments we fucking want.
It starts 《And your temples, palaces and towers / shall be brought down with a horrendous roar》. The symbols, images, the faces of our country, they all represent the ideology and the ideals of our society and government; they all should be brought down when their purpose is defeated or tainted. Before "bending the knee", before being dominated by false rulers, when blood has been spilled and injustice is rampant. We shall bring all this tainted ideals down, destroy all that represent it. With no fear, without apologies, at the point where we no longer agree with those ideas, we break them.
Then continues: 《And the debris shall exist preaching: / Of thousand heroes the Homeland was made.》. The 'destruction' of an idea is not the end, it should never be the end. After bringing down those monuments, those images, they should serve us as a a base to reconstruct a better ideal. We should change and evolve, so should our institutions.
Symbols are useless to a society when they have lost their meaning and their weight, they are hollow. And for us, all mexican women, all Mexicans, they have become empty images put on by a government that preaches peace when 10 women are murdered daily under gender violence, justice when rapist and murderers are freed or not even prosecuted.
So, no, we don't give a shit about the wall, the door, the statue; we give a shit about OUR safety and EVERYONE'S safety. We don't care how many images of the country we "damage", we will bring them down and demand the change of such archaic and useless methods/ideas.
We aim to change, move. Not to be stuck in place. We aim to build.
And in Spanish that translates to:
No bajes la mirada, no te dejes vencer, no te dejes subyugar. Pelea, Lucha. Tira, derrumba, elimina, destruye lo que tengas que destruir, no importa que sean los monumentos de un estado construido en ideas arcaicas. Construyan una patria a la que puedan amar, a la que puedan hacer crecer en vez de estancar