Tell us about your new book Ecografías
I am a writer and a feminist, and I always write about gender-related topics. I write about women and this is a book of poems titled “Ecografía” in Spanish (in English “Ultrasound”)
What I am trying to say with this is that this is a “check-up” that you do, to see what you have inside of yourself so the metaphor that I am trying to do here with the title is because it’s a way to see inside a woman but not literally. I’m talking more about the identity something a little more metaphysical.
When did you become a woman?
This is the question that guides the book. I live in Mexico, so we have this crisis where they kill nine women every day for just being women. It’s genocide for women. More than 60% have been raped or have suffered from sexual abuse.
As a Mexican woman, I have lived discriminations and violence’s and when you ask yourself why this happened, the context and feminism really start to make sense. My life and my story have sort of made me become feminist to understand a lot of the things that have happened to me.
Tell us about the queer scene in Mexico
I am from Monterrey, that’s in the north and it’s a really conservative place, the queer scene has not had a lot of visibility. It’s not seen that much, but something really interesting happened this year. I have an NGO called “Acoso en la U” (Harassmentthat at uni). We deal with sexual violence in the university, and we try to stop it. We do a lot of protests and we talk about it. In one protest, a friend of mine, Daniela del Rio, started “voguing” everyone. She was shouting and she started voguing on her own. She said “I am dancing for all the women that are not here anymore, I am dancing because they are dead, and you are not doing anything about it… They were raped and you are not doing anything about it” That really positioned as “voguing” because it’s a queer expression of dance. Voguing is really growing in Monterrey as a form of activism, so I think that is something interesting about the queer scene.