Originally published on It’s Going Down, this is an extended interview with an unnamed feminist-anarchist affinity group based in Mexico City that I conducted and translated last year. An edited version of this text appears in the newly released anthology Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice, edited by Cindy Barukh Milstein and published by Pluto Press. In that anthology I also have another translation of an incredible piece, “Communitarian Kitchens: Stoking the Flames of Memory and Rebellion,” written by Vilma Almendra. I encourage folks to pick up a copy if you’re able!

Lee la entrevista en español.

IGD: How would you like to introduce yourselves?

We should start by saying that we aren’t a collective or formal group. We see ourselves more as a small group of women and nonconforming folks who are united by love, friendship, and the struggle for freedom, autonomy, mutual aid, and life against the dynamics of the current patriarchal state.

We have known each other for several years and, amidst those, we have on several occasions been part of collectives or working groups, but we haven’t seen ourselves as needing to create a group as such. We come from different anarchist positions and we understand things differently in many cases, but we come together to do things jointly based on trust and the need to support our existence. We live in different parts of Mexico City where we carry out most of our struggles.

IGD: Can you elaborate on how you came to your anarcha-feminist positions, how you found one another, and how you decided to form an affinity group?

Not all of us conceive of ourselves as anarcha-feminists. We are all anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and anti-patriarchal, so we have never arrived at having a joint identity. We have come together based on the recognition that our own experiences have provided. We are a group that ranges from 20 to 40 years old. As such, we do not all have the same paths, trajectories, or positions.

All our stories are individual ones and each one took its time. For some, what was important was the break with those men who we believed to be compañeros and who betrayed, hurt, or snitched on us. With that we saw the crumbling of a discourse that was just that, a discourse. It did not delve deeply into how patriarchy runs through us. For others of us, the reality of being women and feminized bodies was always present, how we weren’t listened to or were made invisible in political anarchist spaces; that only masculine voices were respected, and that even when we sustained various activities and a large part of the anarchist movement in the city, we continued to be relegated and unheard. So we assumed a position of defense and necessary confrontation within the movement, which was exhausting, but that helped us to be in this place today, together.