A few days ago, I was talking with my mom and, somewhere in the middle of one of those conversations that starts out light and ends up carrying more weight than you expected, I found myself asking a question I haven\u2019t been able to get out of my head: how much longer are we going to have to keep living like this? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Elections are coming. March 8 is coming. And there is something strange about the two coinciding, because while we think about taking to the streets, meeting up with friends, and once again naming what hurts, we also have to decide what kind of country we want to uphold with our vote. All of this is happening in a world that, time and again, shows us that power continues to find ways to protect itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We read about the Jeffrey Epstein files, and what emerges is not just the name of one man, but confirmation of something we already knew: money and the right connections continue to be a stronger shield than the truth of victims. We look at what is happening in Afghanistan and see how women\u2019s lives can be reduced, without hesitation, to a debate over permissions and prohibitions, as if simply existing were something granted to us. And here, in Latin America, we continue to wake up to news that no longer even surprises us: another woman murdered, another report ignored, another family shattered.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes what is most exhausting is not the violence itself, but how normal it has become for us to live with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is why I struggle to talk about March 8 as if it were merely a commemorative date. We do not all experience it in the same way, and it is important to say that without being afraid of making people uncomfortable. The idea of intersectionality, introduced by legal scholar Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw, gave us language to explain something many of us had already felt in our bodies: forms of oppression do not arrive one at a time. They intersect, overlap, and reinforce one another. Marching when your skin color, social class, or gender identity has protected you from certain forms of violence is not the same as marching when your body has historically been questioned, policed, and dehumanized. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes what is most exhausting is not the violence itself, but how normal it has become for us to live with it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>
I write this knowing that I, too, am shaped by contradictions. I am a fat, feminist, Latina woman; I have had access to spaces that others have not, and at the same time, I know what it means to have your body seen as something that needs to be corrected. That is where I speak from, not from some impossible place of neutrality. And perhaps that is why I allow myself to say something that can sometimes be difficult to admit out loud: I am tired. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tired of still having to explain that feminism is not hatred, that it is not about reversing hierarchies but dismantling them. Tired of watching every gain come with an attempt to roll it back, as if rights were temporary loans rather than basic guarantees. Tired of pain having to become a statistic before anyone takes it seriously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But exhaustion is not the same as defeat. If anything, it is a sign that we have been pushing against something that resists change. We are exhausted because we support one another, because we listen, because we sustain networks that so often take the place of the State, because we continue to believe that another way of organizing ourselves is possible even when everything around us insists otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps that is why this March 8 cannot be reduced to a march or a slogan. Voting is also a form of care. Not because the ballot box can solve everything, but because violence against women is neither a private matter nor a \"sector-specific issue\": it is a democratic problem. It means asking ourselves what kinds of leaders we are willing to support, what kinds of rhetoric we normalize, and which public policies we consider negotiable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The world has shown us clearly enough that nothing is guaranteed forever. That rights can be rolled back. That those who hold power rarely give it up without pressure. And yet, it has also shown us that profound transformations have almost always begun with women who refused to accept the place they had been assigned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few years ago, I decided to create No Se Aceptan Piropos because I understood that violence does not begin only with its most visible extremes, but in everyday life, in what many people call a \"compliment\" and others of us recognize as an intrusion. The project grew out of a desire to name what makes us uncomfortable and to remind ourselves that the personal has never been separate from the political. It did not come from resentment, as some people try to caricature it, but from a commitment to care and to the uncomfortable conversations that open up new possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps that is what I am trying to hold on to today: that anger is legitimate, but it is not the only thing that moves us. That we can be exhausted and still choose not to harden ourselves. That marching and voting on the same day can be a way of insisting that we do not want to survive halfway, but to live with our full dignity intact. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do not have a definitive answer to the question I asked my mom. I do not know how much longer we will have to keep insisting. What I do know is that giving up is not an easy option when you know that behind every statistic there is a real story, a name, an absence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps hope is not naive optimism, but a political decision. And perhaps, in times like these, choosing to keep going is itself an act of rebellion. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hace unos d\u00edas estaba hablando con mi mam\u00e1 y, en medio de esa conversaci\u00f3n que empieza ligera y termina pesando m\u00e1s de lo que una espera, me sali\u00f3 una pregunta que no he podido sacarme de la cabeza: \u00bfhasta cu\u00e1ndo vamos a tener que seguir viviendo as\u00ed? Se vienen elecciones. Se viene el 8 de…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1128,"template":"","class_list":["post-1125","altavoz","type-altavoz","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/altavoz\/1125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/altavoz"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/altavoz"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/altavoz\/1125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/altavoz\/1125\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nextgenc.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}