Antimonumentas and Antimonumentos in Mexico City, Mexico

Considering that Mexican cities have been ranked among the ones with highest homicide rates, a large number of massacres committed by organized crime groups as well as human rights violations by authorities, the last century or so has been rough for Mexico. In this context, the country's civilian population has often taken matters into their own hands regarding self-defense and demands towards the government. This is where the multitude of antimonuments mainly found in the capital come in. Unlike a monument intended to celebrate a particular event, the antimonumentos aim to confront the powers that be (and even the society at large) for failures in the rule of law, corruption, negligence, among others. From the 1968 state-sponsored Tlatelolco Massacre in the eve of the Mexico City Olympics, to the similar Halconazo of 1971 and the 2021 removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus, the antimonuments represent more than half a century of struggle. The former Glorieta de Colón (Columbus Roundabout) represents one of the best examples of how antimonumentos and specifially, their feminist antimonumenta counterparts, come to be. After the Columbus statue was toppled during a protest against Mexico's shocking rate of femicides and gender-based violence, a purple metal cutout of a woman with a raised fist was installed in its place, and the unofficial renaming to Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (Roundabout of Fighting Women). Given that Spanish uses grammatical gender for nouns, almost any object in the language will be considered as either male or female. "Monumento" (monument) is male for example, but debates around feminism and gender identity in the 21st century have lead to plenty of cases of male genders being "feminized" as a form of language activism, with examples like "monumenta" and "colectiva". This gives us a clue as to why Mexico (Mexico City in particular) is home to a large number of not only antimonumentos but also antimonumentas. A common style of these antimonuments features the plus sign followed by a number. Generally speaking, these intend to represent the number of victims in an incident, and the aim to not only see them as losses or casualties, but as human beings that should've ideally remained as part of society. Examples include the +43 honoring the teaching students that were forcibly disappeared near Ayotzinapa in 2014, +72 for the migrants that were transiting through Mexico on the way to the U.S. border and were massacred by Los Zetas Cartel in 2010; and the +65 representing the number of workers who died in the Pasta de Conchos mining incident caused by unsafe work conditions in 2006.

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