How Young Women in Mexico Resist Violence Beyond the Marches

“There are worse problems in the family,” Isabela’s cousin told her.

Isabela had just turned fifteen when men involved in criminal activity began abusing her—abuse she could not report without risking her safety and the safety of her family. When she eventually confided in a female relative she trusted, the response silenced her for years.

There would be no police report and no legal recourse. “I thought, ‘If my own family doesn’t see it as serious, then I must be the one making it bigger than it is,’” Isabela told me when I interviewed her in April 2025.

She carried the experience alone for years, telling her mother nearly a decade later.

Isabela is one of ten young women I interviewed across Mexico in early 2025. During the 124 days between February and June 2025 that I spent researching forms of resistance to gender-based violence among Mexican university students, 1,240 women were murdered across Mexico because of their gender. 

Mexico ranks 147th out of 181 countries in the 2023/2024 Georgetown Women, Peace and Security Index, and the World Health Organization has identified it as one of the most dangerous places in Latin America to be a woman. Yet the violence many women experience is not always visible.

Across my interviews with young women aged 19 to 25 in seven Mexican states — Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Estado de México, Querétaro, and Puebla — one theme surfaced again and again: la minimización, the constant diminishing of women. Not only by men, families, or the society, but by other women, too.

Camila, a student from Yucatán, told me this form of belittlement begins early — often enforced most heavily by friends, family, and trusted community members — and can inhibit young women from seeing their full potential. 

“We’re taught from a young age to make ourselves smaller through comments and remarks. Because of that, we never get to see our full potential; it’s taken from us over and over again,” she said. 

When I interviewed Sofía, a 22-year-old finance student in Guadalajara, she described how professors in her male-dominated classes often applauded her contributions more enthusiastically than those of her male classmates. At first, the attention sounded encouraging. But Sofía saw something more complicated beneath it.

“It feels good to be applauded, but at the same time I think, ‘What did I do to deserve it?’” she said. “I do the same as my male classmates, but they are expected to be smart. With me, it feels more like, ‘Oh, you’ve exceeded the abilities of a normal woman,’ so you get extra applause.”

Despite Mexico projecting an image of progress, with a female president who has publicly adopted a “feminist foreign policy,” inequity persists in everyday life. Research by Equal Measures 2030 shows that gains in education and legal rights frequently coexist with gaps in women’s economic security, unpaid care burdens, and gender-based violence. And despite women’s rising educational attainment, they continue to hold only a small share of corporate leadership and board positions nationwide.

The patterns my interviewees described — low gender-equality rankings, early belittlement, and the treatment of women’s success as unusual — do not always register as violence. Yet the young women I spoke with said their very ordinariness is what gives them power. As Sofía put it, violence against women in Mexico is la norma, the norm.

Many young women I interviewed seemed to bear this out without realizing it. They began their stories with denial. 

“Nothing has ever happened to me,” Alejandra, 23, said at first. Later in the interview, she would reveal that a male colleague had forced her to drink a shot at a work party — an experience she described as “violating.” Near the end of our conversation, she reflected: “Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I didn’t mention it earlier,” she said. When pain has long been minimized, it becomes difficult to name.

Many of these stories of gender-based violence happen in spaces considered “safe” or “progressive”: universities. Researcher Daniela Cerva-Cerna calls this a double-anchoring — universities are spaces where feminist knowledge is cultivated, yet the knowledge rarely translates into policy or protection.

From my interviews at both public and private universities, young women spoke of professors making sexist jokes and of tendederos — clotheslines hung by students in public spaces on campus displaying testimonies of harassment and the names of aggressors as a form of collective denunciation — being taken down by university authorities. Many of these accounts came from students at Universidad Anáhuac campuses in different states, pointing to a broader institutional pattern rather than isolated incidents. 

Some women I interviewed minimized not only their experiences, but also the ways they resisted. Sofía spoke proudly about the philosophical essays she publishes on Instagram, yet said almost nothing about her weekly volunteer work at a shelter for survivors of abuse. She mentioned it only at the end of our conversation—and even then, she brushed it aside. “I go there once a week,” she said. “It’s just for an hour.”

An hour each week supporting women who have survived violence was, in her view, hardly worth mentioning.

Or take Alejandra, who told me she had once quit her job “for no particular reason.” Only later did it become clear she left after months witnessing a series of incidents and revelations about her boss’ sexual misconduct toward multiple women at work — and after experiencing a workplace culture that made her feel unsafe. 

These young women told me they do not see their actions as resistance because Mexican society does not either. 

For years, women across Mexico have mobilized against gender-based violence and institutional impunity through mass protests and marches. Yet across my interviews, resistance appeared just as consistently in quieter, less visible forms. Isabela told me how she shields her friends on buses and other forms of public transport by standing between them and men.

“I wouldn’t do it for myself,” she said. “But for other women, yes. It’s like, as long as I’m there, nothing happens — and if it does, it happens to both of us.” She also made a conscious decision to continue sharing her experience of gendered violence on social media despite her fear of not being believed. “Use what happened to you to help other women.”

Camila, 19, had dreams of studying film, but growing up watching her mother — who never finished her studies or worked professionally — depend financially on her father changed her path. Her mother stressed the importance of being financially independent. So Camila chose finance: not out of passion, but out of a refusal to be economically dependent on anyone.

These acts may seem small beside mass protests, but they reflect the same refusal to accept violence as inevitable. Resistance to gender-based violence is found not only in banners and marches, but also in the care, knowledge, and solidarity women draw on each day to protect one another.

The stories in this article are based on in-depth interviews with ten Mexican students across seven Mexican states — Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, Estado de México, Querétaro, and Puebla — conducted between February and June 2025. The names of participants have been changed to protect their privacy.