M8: International Women’s Day — Mexico City
Every year on March 8, tens of thousands of women march through Mexico City to mark International Women’s Day. They carry photographs of the disappeared. They paste images of abusers onto walls. They paint names across pavement, steel barriers, hotels, and statues of historical male figures. In front of government buildings, effigies burn.
The march is often framed by media as chaotic or dangerous. Before my first year photographing it, I was warned to hide my camera, to wear a helmet, to expect hostility—warnings that never materialized.
What I encountered instead was collective grief held in formation. Rage shaped into movement. Women marching not because it would bring anyone back, but because silence had already failed.
I am a man photographing a space shaped by violence committed by men. The deepest story here is not mine to tell. But the responsibility to oppose abuse and femicide cannot rest solely on women. It belongs equally to those who benefit from the systems that allow it to continue.
My work does not begin at the published meeting points or scheduled start times. It begins the night before, the morning of, and continues through the march and into its aftermath, when names are scrubbed from pavement and walls are repainted before the next business day.
Not all surfaces can be erased.
The blue steel barriers surrounding the Zócalo have accumulated years of memory: wheat-pasted photographs, spray-painted accusations, names of the dead and the names of their killers. Erected to protect buildings, they have become unintended sites of collective memory, carrying traces of multiple struggles that have passed through the same public space.
One photograph carries this forward. A young girl in a purple tutu moves toward the barrier while her mother watches nearby. The words on the child’s shirt read, I will not grow up afraid. Her mother’s reads, If I’m not here tomorrow, shout with her.
In 2025, the atmosphere shifted. It was the first march held under Mexico’s first female president, and the first year I did not see militarized police positioned throughout the city. The absence was noticeable. It changed how the street felt.
These color film photographs, made during the marches in 2023 and 2024, form a record of what solidarity can look like when approached with transparency rather than defensiveness—presence does not have to mean intrusion.
The violence I was warned about was already in the system.
The march is the response.
