Breathe
By Consuelo Sáizar de la Fuente
To Ana Olabuenaga, whose steps always allow me to accompany her.
This March 8 will be different from all those we have experienced before. And all those to come. It will be the last one in which we will arrive at the Zócalo and the National Palace will be inhabited by a president.
On March 8, 2025, Mexico will be presided over by a woman.
Tomorrow, as we walk, we will know that it is the twilight of a time in which our greatest merit was to break glass ceilings, and that from October 1 we will be living in a new time, of fulfilled hopes and unprecedented conditions for all of us.
Today we will march with the imprint of two female presidential candidates, and with the memory of what they have built throughout their lives.
That historic march of 2020, in the prelude to the black time of the pandemic, began on March 7 with a human chain and concluded on March 9 with a call for silence, for all those who could no longer speak to them.
We dressed in pink and purple, we met at the monument to the Revolution, we held hands and full of rage and sadness, of impotence and anxiety, we began to sing "Canción sin miedo" (Song without fear), by Vivir Quintana.
That unprecedented crowd of women of various ages snatched from President Andrés Manuel López Obrador the monopoly he had held over public space since 2018, when he took office.
Since that unforgettable day, the differences between the two women who are now competing for the presidency have been marked.
One, Claudia - powerful and insensitive head of government - insisted on closing the Zócalo to our demands, set up fences to imprison us and impede our advance, and sent her security teams to gas us; someone who will arrive at the election with the image of an inconceivable struggle with her running mate, a woman of struggles and of the masses, Clara Brugada.
The other, Xóchitl, a woman without a party, always on the side of civil society, is accompanied in her campaign by three former presidential candidates (Cecilia Soto, in 1994; Josefina Vázquez Mota, 2012; and Margarita Zavala, 2018) with whom she has established a relationship of mutual respect and admiration. Xóchitl has always marched knowing what adversity is for a woman who inhabited the periphery, who defied the center, and who lives in the flesh the adversity of someone of her blood.
Those of us who will march tomorrow are aware that it will be the last march with a male president in the Palace; but we also know that we are contemporaries of the first woman president of Mexico.
We are the ones who will accompany Xóchitl in her passage through that long corridor of power that only men have traveled until now.
And in the manner of Marguerite Yourcenar, who, when she entered the French Academy, mentioned that she arrived accompanied by the shadows of women who should have entered before her; or like Cristina Rivera Garza, whose admission to the Colegio Nacional was accompanied by the memories of Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, Beatriz Ramírez de la Fuente, and the presence of Sara Uribe and Denise Dresser, Xóchitl will be accompanied by the memory of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón, Marcela Lombardo Toledano, and all those pioneers of democracy, whose first struggle was for women to be able to vote.
Xochitl will be the first Mexican woman president. And she will open, accompanied by everyone, the doors of the National Palace.
Today, we will begin to celebrate the most brilliant page in the history of Mexican women, and on October 1 we will sing the national anthem like never before.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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