Breathe
By Claudia Pérez Atamoros
What now, don't I vote?
I simply cannot not do it. I must cast my vote. I will. What I don't know yet is whether I will be convinced by the information I manage to get (https://candidaturaspoderjudicial.ine.mx/) and enough knowledge to vote for those who appear on those ballots and have the size to balance, for example, a Court that will include three of the least exemplary women jurists. Don't think I don't know. They are pitiful, and not just pitiful. If they don't make it, I will throw them all out. I will cancel my vote.
I will not join the abstentionists. I will not turn my back on those women who for decades fought from their trenches for women to be considered with full voting rights. There are absurdities that hurt more than injustice: comfortable foolishness, apathy disguised as skepticism, the "it's useless" as a shield for not exercising the most expensive right we ever had to conquer. Today I want to talk about that: about the absurd foolishness of not voting, especially among us women.
Vote. I invite you to do so. If you think that this election is a close call, do it with all the more reason. If you are "lazy" to analyze the profiles because you do not even know how or where to get information, go to the polls, annul your vote, but please! do not annul a right that cost so much to achieve.
This is not a sermon or anything like that. It is about memory.
Mexico was the last country in Latin America to recognize women's suffrage. This was not for lack of brilliant, committed women -there were, there are, there will be- but because the State and society denied them, decade after decade, the quality of citizenship.
The vote for Mexican women was not a gracious concession of the governments of the 20th century. It was the consequence of courageous voices such as those of Elvia Carrillo Puerto, Hermila Galindo or Gloria Salas de Calderón, women who raised their voices when doing so cost them stigma, contempt, even civil death.
They had to write, march, organize congresses, publish their ideas, occupy tribunes made to silence them. They opened the door to the vote with their hands bloodied from pushing history so hard.
In 1916 the First Feminist Congress was held in Mérida, a key moment that formalized demands such as the right to vote, education and labor equality. Despite the discursive advances in the 1917 Constitution, women's suffrage was systematically postponed.
As if I were there, in the front row, I hear and see Elvira Vargas, pioneer of Mexican journalism; with her expression of disenchantment and her voice with an absolute tone of disgust.
- Excuse me, Elvira, won't you ask me today about women's vote? asked General Lázaro Cárdenas -Why, Mr. President, it is a subject on which you have not wanted to risk making a decision , answered the questioned woman.
One two three for you and for all those who won the right to vote.
And now, what do we do? Do we surrender to cynicism? Do we sit back and watch others decide our present and our future? Are we really going to allow their struggle to end in abstention?
The right to vote also includes the right to cancel. Yes, voting is not always a choice. Sometimes, to vote is to go to the polls and throw away. To annul your ballot consciously, as a cry of fed-upness that is registered. Because not going is not the same as saying "enough! It is not the same to stay at home than to walk decisively to exercise a right that was ripped away from history with pain, rage and conviction.
This year, the elections for positions in the Judicial Branch challenge us in a different way. They are the elections that can redraw the balance of powers, the access to justice, the counterweights. They are elections where the vote is worth more than we think... even if we decide not to give it to anyone.
To annul is legitimate. But not turning out, not voting, not demonstrating, is like spitting on the graves of those who fought for that right.
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