When I was growing up, my mom and I would spend New Year’s Eve at the free concerts hosted at El Angel de la Independencia. Waves of people of all ages sway, jump, and party for hours around the gigantic statue.

On the last dusk of 2024, my mom and I returned to our tradition in the company of very dear friends and the bright music of the 80s: electrocumbias. But the Angel looked different to the one from my childhood memories. It's been different for years now.

In 1902 Porfirio Diaz commissioned the piece during his dictatorship as a commemorative symbol for the centennial  year of Mexico's independence. He looked to Europe for cultural legitimacy, nurtured an obsession with France and French architecture, and somewhat fittingly was buried in Paris. A lot of Mexico City's buildings now considered historical patrimony, for example El Palacio de Bellas Artes and El Palacio Nacional, were built during his rule. He was inspired by Roman art and architecture, not least for its use as imperial propaganda. You need to build buildings when you're in power: smart politicians learn this much at least from the Romans. You may die, you may be overthrown, but isn't that a beautiful building? Don’t the streets of the city make Mexico beautiful? Aren't we proud of the woman in the Angel that represents the stability and strength of our city, government and country?   

It is gold, the color of wealth. She's a half-naked woman, her torso exposed, showing her figure half draped in a tunic from the hips down. She's a reified version of Plykleitos'* idealized human form, which has been fetishized for centuries. The statue stands at the very top of a column in contraposta–common in classical Grecian  sculpture–while her delicate left foot lifts off as if she were about to fly with her long, tall angel wings. Cherubs and angels aren’t commonly associated with Mexican spirituality, but more so related to the Christian faith and pagan Greek and Roman mythology. Our angel holds her right arm high over her head, a laurel crown in hand; the Grecian symbol for victory. The crown was later adopted by the Roman Empire—like much of Ancient Greek art—and resurfaced during the Renaissance in Europe. During this epoque, antiquity became trendy once again and artists longed for a "greater past". This symbol most likely  reached Mexico through Spanish colonialism. Her hair is wavy and pulled up in a bun, which highlights her slim, firm facial structure. The figure does not clearly reflect either aesthetically or culturally, the women who participated in the Mexican Revolution. Then, why is she a symbol of Mexican liberation and freedom?

The structure is made of stone and rises 25 meters from the ground. It is reminiscent of Greek ionic columns, of the Trojan Column in Rome, of the pillars seen in national banks and city parliaments, of the architecture used in political contexts to project an image of triumphal power.

Near the top of the column, close to the angel’s feet, so far up only a drone can really make it out, there’s a relief sculpture of an eagle holding a snake between its teeth. This is the sigil of the Mexican flag designed in the early 1800s, but long before that represented the founding of Tenochtitlan. The story of the snake is part of a collective oral tradition built from the ground up, from the people to the city. It seems at once wrong and ironically fitting that such a symbol is not at our level but high up, almost out of sight, at the feet of a towering foreign angel.

The column has significant details all through the length of it, many of which bore me.

The base of the column itself is squared, on the front face of it there's a plaque that reads: La nación a los héroes de la independencia, (The nation to the heroes of the independence). 

Four additional female figures are part of the monument, one on each corner of the base. Like the angel above, they possess distinctly European features, projecting a white, classical image of femininity that has little resemblance to many Mexican women. They do, however, look like Phidea's Athena, or Delacroix’s La Marianne in La Liberté Guidant le Peuple. Each woman adorns the column of our independence; one for history, another for justice, one for law and the last for the homeland.

It's crucial to consider that these statues are part of a greater European lineage, one that has been used countless times to oppress, impose and "otherize" cultures. This monument has become part of Mexican culture, but we must acknowledge the historical implications which lead to Mexican women not always resonating with this sort of art. These white women are mere symbols representing important notions of the Mexican nation –Freedom, Justice, etc, yet women in this country are historically invisible and violenced. This country doesn't see women, the law is not for them, and the homeland does all but protect our freedom. Why should the government call for respect upon the very objects which are historically used to oppress us, passively manipulate us to think that the fake European statue deserves more care than our un-named corpses. It’s an ignorant hypocrisy we refuse to subscribe to.

The statue oscillates, unwillingly, between barred and unbarred, Justified in the name of its so called "saftey". The wooden fences stage a disorienting separation of "elegant" and "orderly" structured Roman monument vs. illegal, "disordered" "disruptive" graffiti; two styles socially impossible to reconcile. These walls prevent us from "ruining" art. Ever since, the wooden fences became our canvases.

Mexican women have grown restive in the arts. They've brought us to question what it is we value in "beauty," what that beauty fetishizes, the values and images it sees as deserving protection and the lives it does not. There's a world where we can normalize a co-existence where no art is superior to the other.

We drive, bike, and walk on Paseo de la Reforma almost weekly; it’s practically impossible not to linger one’s gaze on these walls of confinement. My heart always grows heavy for the resistance, las madres buscadoras**, the dead, and the living.

Shameful,  murderous, Mexico. The faces of evil merge into a singular patriarchal entity we’ve spent years silently/loudly, violently/peacefully, actively/passively, ideologically/materially defeating, or at least trying to. Their faces line the wooden fences, sometimes their names are spelled in uppercase followed by “assesino” or “violador,” often “assesino y violador.” There are so many photos. There  are so many names. But most of all there is the strength that goes into pasting photos of your abuser on the margins of a tourist attraction. Could you?

I couldn’t. It’s too painful of a memory.

But they've spared me the pain of speaking; these women paint for the ones who lost their voices to their job, their family or their social status. They paint for the ones who are long gone now; for those girls who fight in spirit from beyond the grave–if they had the privilege to be found and buried in the first place. Women paint in protest for all of us who can't.  

Mexico has a long history of avoidance and erasure. It’s been years since women have been actively protesting for their lives. Not for equality or voting rights, but existence. Every March 8th women take the streets of Mexico's Centro Histórico and swim in a gigantic sea of purple. On March 8th we refuse to be celebrated for our sex because everyday we are victims of hate crimes for being women. In our struggle we see South Asian women who suffer the same systematic violence, we see Palestinian mothers and daughters who consistently resist genocide, we see the women in Congo hung for resisting, the girls in Sudan, the Iranian female resistance, indigenous women in USA and Canada who are systematically silenced; even the white women who still have much to learn outside their own reality. We salute you and we applaud you, not in classical kitsch but in the nasty, tacky, messy purple spray paint on the walls of colonialism.

In March, when jacarandas are raining purple over all of Mexico City, when the color of resistance is unwashable, unavoidable, it's like the land itself is fighting with us.






* Polykleitos was a Greek sculptor, responsible for what we call "Polykleitos' cannon", which follows a system of perfection relating to symmetry, even if the result is far from realistically human. His Influence in art and sculpting has been massive, particularly in European art.

** Madres buscadoras is the term referring to the mothers who have lost their daughters or sons due to violence. Usually they form collectives where they actively search for their kids because the government neglects their case or deems it a lost cause. These women dig up unmarked graves and go through bags of human remains, to be sure if their children are dead, to say goodbye, to give them a proper burial.