Alejandro Torres, a university student at UNAM, serves as a leader in the Morena party’s Youth Section.

“The murder of 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014 electrified young people of my generation and turned us from passive dissatisfaction into an activist social force. The Morena party formed in 2014 — and AMLO’s election in 2018 —gave young people for the first time in history the space to participate directly in politics, not just in social movements. Hope returned to us. I’m ready!” Read more.

Alejandra Morales Reynoso, the general secretary of the independent union SINTTIA, joined with her co-workers to pull off a historic win against an entrenched company union in 2022. Her union now represents 7,000 auto workers at the huge GM plant in the city of Silao.

“I’ve been working at GM since 2010 as a painter of the Sierra and Cheyenne trucks. Our pay amounts to US $2.00 an hour. We can’t afford cars. We know that US auto workers own cars. Why can’t we be paid enough to own a car? Some of us can’t even afford to live in houses with sewage services! Organizing for our union gives me strength.” Read more.

Verónica Cruz Sánchez founded the women’s rights organization Las Libres in Guanajuato. Her group now serves women in Texas who’ve lost their abortion right.
“When I found out that over 2,000 women nationwide were serving prison sentences for deciding to end an unwanted pregnancy, I felt enraged. Women were even getting imprisoned for miscarriages! Due to our work, in September 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled penalizing abortion unconstitutional. Our winning campaign messages separated ‘beliefs’ from ‘rights’ and ‘religious’ from ‘social.’” 
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The lives of Clemente Rodríguez Moreno and his family changed forever in 2014 when their son became one of 43 students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who suddenly disappeared.

“Students called to tell us our sons were missing. We wanted to go with clubs and machetes to defend our children. We went to the police, to the hospitals, to government offices. People we met said to us, ‘Ask the police.’ But we couldn’t get any information and we couldn’t find our sons. Through this ordeal, we all realized that criminal organizations worked together with the police.” Read more.

Rosalinda Guillen began working as a farmworker at the age of ten in the fields in Skagit County, Washington. She founded Community to Community to support rural people and sustainable agriculture policies.

“Like so many of us who come from a farming tradition, I am a person of the land. I loved picking strawberries. In the fields, you can feel beauty everywhere. But then, in the 1970s and 1980s, pesticides came into use. Workers got sick. Farm work has become so dangerous and exploitative that workers now hate what they once loved. The agriculture industry has beaten the desire to connect to the land out of us. We get chewed up and spit out.” Read more.

Writer, playwright, and freelance journalist Kurt Hackbarth works as a Mexican citizen based in Oaxaca.

“The Summit of the Americas” began in 1994 in the wake of NAFTA, as a vehicle to give the US a platform to proselytize the benefits of free trade. When AMLO refused go to the June 2022 Summit due to the US unilateral decision to exclude member governments, other nations either followed suit or publicly criticized the US at the Summit. AMLO has led Latin American nations to assert their sovereignty.” Read more.

Christina Heatherton, a professor of American studies and human rights at Trinity College, recently published Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 2022).

“Into the early 20th century, everything from colonial dispossession and imperial rule to military aggression and capitalist immiseration were constantly forcing people to move. There are astounding ways in which that movement produced unanticipated alliances and political formations. The Magon brothers had to flee México to the US. The party they formed played key roles in strikes leading up to the Mexican Revolution, but they also did significant organizing of US workers into the IWW.” Read more.

Vicky Hamlin edits our México Solidarity Bulletin cultural coverage. Her father, Marston Hamlin, spent time at the Taller Gráfica in México City.

“The Taller, founded in the 1930s, would become a hotbed for revolutionary-minded artists, supporters of the ideals of the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, then still recent events. Their art carried messages supporting social change that were accessible to all. It’s a Western elitist view that socialist artists produced ‘propaganda’ and not art. México had a different tradition. The Taller produced posters in the 1930s to help President Cárdenas promote his social programs. During the same period, artists in the US were similarly hired to promote FDR’s New Deal, and Mexican and US artists collaborated during those years.” Read more.

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, a Black-mestiza sociologist, has focused on "race” and racism in México and Latin America.

“México experienced centuries of mixing before colonial rule ended. After the Mexican Revolution in 1910, mestizo was adopted as the national identity and became a building block of the new nation, to supposedly create unity without racial distinctions. So the designation of mestizo and the promotion of mixing, mestizaje, was a conscious ideological and political project of national formation in the 19th and 20th centuries. But mestizaje has also been a basis for racism, an assimilation project that promotes whitening and cultural homogenizing while, at the same time, excluding the complex reality of the Indigenous and Black nations that ended up in what is now México.” Read more.

Anne Lewis makes media that creates opportunity for social change. She has documented the life of the radical labor organizer Emma Tenayuca.

“It was 1938. Pay was 6 cents a pound. When the company slashed the wage to 4 cents with no warning, the workers’ indignation boiled over. Some 10,000 Mexican@ men, women, and children went out on strike: It was a community uprising! Emma had joined the Communist Party and organized the unemployed. She became known, beloved even, for her fiery speeches and uncompromising defense of working people. Based on that reputation, she was elected by the pecan workers to lead their strike. She was all of 21.” Read more.

An auto worker for 28 years in Minnesota, Rob McKenzie wanted to find the truth about an attack on fellow Ford workers at a plant near México City in 1990. He shares that truth in his book, El Golpe: US Labor, the CIA, and the Coup at Ford in México.

“When Ford cut wages by 40 percent, workers threatened action. When they came to work, there found 300 thugs posing as ‘employees’ wearing Ford plant uniforms inside the facility. Nine workers were wounded by gun fire and one died. This was a massive operation, above and beyond what it would take to resolve a simple labor dispute. It seemed like an attempt to wipe out an entire movement, not just at Ford, but in all México. As I kept investigating, the shadowy forces behind the assault began to take more substantial shape in the form of the CIA.” Read more.