In August 2019, thousands of women took to the streets of Mexico City in two massive demonstrations to protest the growing wave of gender-based violence washing across the country. What characterised the protests was rage, expressed in raucous mass mobilisations, chants and signs, and widespread destruction of property. Marching along the city's main avenues, the overwhelmingly women protesters set fire to an empty police station, shattered bus-stop windows, tore down billboards, and covered several monuments with graffiti, including the iconic Monument of Independence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mainstream media, politicians and even renowned left-leaning public intellectuals responded to these events by condemning the protesters for their anger – unbecoming, and especially unbecoming of women – and for the widespread vandalism of public property and national patrimony.
But while the protests did not immediately garner widespread public support, they won crucial backers across the city and country, including – seemingly paradoxically – a group of art restorers and conservators tasked with restoring and beautifying the very public property that the protesters had graffitied. Art restorers are often overlooked in the social sciences, but they are nonetheless important political actors because their job is to repair, care for and shape discourses about the objects and monuments that keep national narratives alive. But so too did members of Mexico's restoration guild itself, despite the political importance of their job, historically see themselves as indifferent to politics. And, despite being constituted mostly of women, the guild had been unattached to and, for the most part, unconcerned with feminist political movements. Prior to the August protests, most restorers had no history of political organisation and were not involved with any social movement or political cause in any significant way. Many did not even identify as feminists. In response to the protests, however, they came together to form the Restauradoras con Glitter (Restorers with Glitter, hereafter abbreviated as Restauradoras), a collective that defended the protesters and refused to restore the defaced monuments, withholding their labour and their ostensible duty to the state and to the nation. Within a few weeks of beginning to mobilise, the collective became one of the most visible faces of the feminist movement in Mexico.Footnote 1
While scholars have written extensively on the myriad reasons why people, including specifically workers, mobilise politically and how they go about doing so, the ways in which people's professional expertise can become a key driver of their political mobilisation has seldom been analysed.Footnote 2 This article argues that people's labour and professional expertise can play a significant role in helping explain why they mobilise politically and how they go about doing so. To bear out this argument, I present a case study of the Restauradoras’ political journey, which began as a series of expert and technical discussions that sought to contest what, in their eyes, were mistaken claims about the alleged damage caused by protesters. When they first began to organise to contest these claims, many of the restorers did not yet identify themselves individually or collectively as feminists, they had not reflected on many of the broader claims that the feminist movement was making, nor did they interpret many of their individual grievances as political grievances tied to feminist concerns. Prior to the protests, in other words, the restorers collectively identified as restorers and as women but theirs was not a political collective identity. During the process of making their voice heard as restoration workers and experts, they came to reflect on the links between the political and technical aspects of their work, including the ways in which their work was constantly being gendered. These experiences paved the way for many restorers to support broader claims being made by feminist movements in the region and to identify as feminists.
In what follows, I first talk about my research methods, then proceed with a section outlining the article's conceptual framework where I discuss what I consider to be its novel contribution to the literature and the stakes of this contribution. The third section contextualises the case by offering a brief account of the August 2019 protests. The fourth section provides an overview of the field of restoration in Mexico and highlights the reasons why the profession has historically been gendered and depoliticised. The last two sections contain the core of the argument and provide a detailed account of how the Restauradoras collective was formed and how many of its members became politically active and came to identify as feminists.
Methods
The bulk of the research for this article is based on a detailed discursive analysis of the vast coverage of the 2019 feminist protests and of the Restauradoras in newspapers, magazines, blogs, television and radio shows, and art exhibitions during the first three years of the collective's existence. I consulted every major Mexican newspaper,Footnote 3 as well as print and online magazines, including those that specialise in architecture and restoration.Footnote 4 I also analysed dozens of publicly available interviews of members of the collective, as well as their social media presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.Footnote 5 I attended a handful of in-person events, including protests, talks and workshops, where the collective presented work and ideas. While I did not conduct ethnographic research – for instance, by sitting in on the collective's meetings – I have, as part of my larger research project, conducted participant observation and interviews with feminist artists and activists in Mexico and have also spent time in restoration schools and studios. This work, together with my familiarity with the country's contemporary political moment, helped me interpret the written and audiovisual material that I consulted, particularly with regard to the way restorers positioned themselves vis-à-vis feminist activism and how they spoke about different political issues following the constitution of the collective in September 2019.
To complement this analysis, I conducted ten open-ended interviews with restorers who graduated from restoration school and worked as professional restorers in different public and private institutions.Footnote 6 All of them identified as women and their ages ranged from their mid-twenties to their mid-sixties.Footnote 7 I tried to contact as varied a group as I could, which included interviewing restorers who were not part of the collective.Footnote 8 Additionally, I conducted a focus group with six representatives of the national restorers’ union, which is unaffiliated with the collective. This experience enabled me to witness several power dynamics at play between restorers of different age groups. While all the interviews were unstructured and open-ended, I introduced specific topics of conversation, including their experience in restoration school and working for different institutions, their relationships with other professional restorers, and their political views, including on feminist issues.
Labour as Political Mobilisation
Mobilisation, following Charles Tilly's classic definition, is ‘the process by which a group goes from being a passive collection of individuals to an active participant in public life’.Footnote 9 Scholars have written extensively on why people mobilise politically, including those who do not have access to traditional political resources and who were previously alienated from or indifferent to politics. Some of the more common reasons for people to mobilise include contextual factors, such as political opportunities, organisational resources, and framing processes.Footnote 10 The increase in grievances and the existence of political threats have also been found to trigger mobilisation.Footnote 11 Experiencing or witnessing civil or uncivil acts of disobedience, including events like protests and demonstrations, have also been shown to incentivise mobilisation because such experiences can generate novel ‘schemas of perceptions, ways of understanding the world, sentiments – habitus – that dispose participants to question the status quo and to engage in specific forms of activism’.Footnote 12 Indeed, scholars stress the importance of emotions rather than simply rational judgements when trying to understand why people mobilise,Footnote 13 and argue that what helps explain why people mobilise are aspects of their personal histories, including ‘culture’,Footnote 14 and primary interaction around ‘family, friends, the dinner table, and the coffee shop’.Footnote 15
Many of these factors certainly help explain why the Restauradoras mobilised. For instance, the fact that restoration is a guild mostly populated by people who self-identify as women helps explain why many of its members were more aware of the increase in gender-based violence and more open to the claims made by feminists during the August protests. But for many of them, as I found when learning more about the Restauradoras’ story, neither identifying as women nor having experienced or being aware of gender-based violence had been sufficient causes to push them to mobilise. It was not until they began to contest what, in their view as professional restorers, were wrong claims made by the press and politicians about damaged monuments and national heritage, coupled with the backlash they experienced when they began to speak publicly about these issues, that they were pushed to actively support and organise around feminist ideas.Footnote 16
The case of the Restauradoras brings into stark relief a factor that remains under-theorised in the social movement literature: the way people's labour, occupation and professional expertise become key drivers of and gateways into their political mobilisation. While labour, occupation and professional expertise are by no means synonymous,Footnote 17 for the purposes of this article, I use these terms interchangeably because my point is to invite scholars to pay attention to how these factors might help explain both the reasons why people choose to mobilise politically and the way they do so.Footnote 18 What people do for a living (both their paid and unpaid labour),Footnote 19 is a crucial aspect of their daily actions, one that shapes their values, social ties and subjectivities. People's occupation is, in other words, a technique of governance that, even when it might be a source of dignity, also disciplines them in specific ways.Footnote 20 Kathleen Millar puts it best when she argues that labour is ‘fundamentally an experience that shapes inner life processes and modes of inhabiting the world […] experiences of work do work on the self – reshaping bodily sensations, daily rhythms, and ways of being in the world’.Footnote 21
Work and professional expertise, moreover, are gendered, meaning that these are sites where specific gender norms and expectations are ‘enforced, performed, and recreated’.Footnote 22 Certain forms of labour, which, like restoration, consist of caring and maintenance, tend to be considered invisible and uncreative and are often performed by women.Footnote 23 In the words of political theorist Joan Tronto, ‘To say that care is women's work is not to make an essentialist claim that “women give birth and therefore they are naturally better caregivers” […] It is, however, to say that the current constructions of masculinity and femininity permit men to avoid having to take or to think much about the responsibilities for the caring tasks assigned to women.’Footnote 24
In this article I argue that political mobilisation can be rooted in people's labour and professional expertise rather than in previous political or identity allegiances (e.g. identifying as ‘feminists’, ‘leftists’, ‘women’ or ‘working class’). While the argument that I am making is causal, it is not based on statistical inference logic and does not presume that people's profession operates as a variable – let alone an isolated one – that can be neatly measured and plugged into an equation. Instead, I follow other interpretivist scholars who contend that political mobilisation is a causally complex unfolding process that ‘is ill-suited to the type of variable-oriented analysis’.Footnote 25 For this reason, I do not presume that one's profession is a necessary or sufficient condition for mobilisation. The group of women about whom I write in this article are not blank canvasses who became politicised simply because of their labour. That they self-identify as women and, in some cases, had experienced gender-based violence first-hand, is likely to have made many of them more open to the claims made by the feminist movement and more willing to mobilise.
Given the complexity of political mobilisation, an in-depth and detailed case study of the political mobilisation of this group of restorers is an ideal way to understand the reasons why and the mechanisms through which labour and professional expertise can help explain why political mobilisation happens.Footnote 26 The goal of this article is not to provide a list of conditions under which professional expertise is most (or least) likely to become a reason for mobilisation. However, the case of the Restauradoras points to certain aspects of people's labour that are likely to appear and might help explain why political mobilisation happens and what it looks like in other cases. For example, like the Restauradoras, people might more clearly or fervently perceive a political threat or grievance when it is related to their work rather than to other aspects of their lives, thereby pushing them to mobilise.Footnote 27 One's profession can also mean that one is part of a community in which ideas are shared and discussed. Conversations that are related to the technical aspects of one's work can, as the restorers’ case shows, morph into other more politically oriented conversations. People's labour can also influence the way in which they mobilise, including by striking and choosing how and in what contexts to deploy their expertise.
Protests and Backlash
On average every day in 2019 in Mexico, 10.5 women were killed and 360 were raped.Footnote 28 Institutions and laws have been created to try to address this violence, but little has changed in practice.Footnote 29 Crimes against women are rarely reported and even more rarely investigated.Footnote 30 Women, however, continue to organise to address this violence, including by engaging in lobbying efforts to change laws and create new institutions to help victims, as well as by organising demonstrations to raise awareness about these issues.
This organisation came into its most visible direct conflict with the authorities on 12 August 2019, when hundreds of protesters gathered around the Attorney General's Office in Mexico City, calling for justice in the name of a teenager who had recently accused four police officers of raping her. In an attempt to appease the protesters, the city's police chief, Jesús Orta, met the crowd in front of the building, where he was received by an unappeased crowd that cried ‘Justice! Justice!’ Amid the growing chaos, a protester threw pink glitter onto his hair. Seeing Orta stunned, silenced and covered in glitter roused the already enraged crowd. Some protesters threw red paint on the police officers guarding the building. Others shattered the floor-to-ceiling windows of the building's foyer, showering the floor with glass, and forced themselves inside, where they spray-painted the walls and smashed the furniture. Images of the shattered glass, graffiti, and of Orta with his perfectly sculpted haircut covered in pink glitter, made the rounds on the internet and in the mass media. The demonstration was quickly dubbed ‘The Glitter Protest’.
Four days later, in the face of ongoing intransigence on the part of the authorities in investigating the alleged rape, 3,000 protesters assembled in the Glorieta de Insurgentes, a large public plaza with subway and metrobús stops.Footnote 31 They proceeded to spray-paint the concrete walls of the Glorieta and to cover the plaza with pink glitter. A handful of participants who were carrying metal pipes also shattered the glass walls that mark the entrance to the metrobús station, while others set fire to billboards, covering the plaza with smoke and the acrid smell of molten plastic. Fuelled by rumours that the police had arrested a handful of protesters and taken them to a police station nearby, a segment of the demonstrators made their way towards the station. Once there, and having realised that the building was, in fact, empty, they proceeded to set it on fire. But it was the protesters’ last stop that led to the iconic image that will forever be associated with the August protests: the base of the famous Monument of Independence, normally white and pristine, was splattered with paint and completely covered with colourful graffiti, ranging from the quintessential A for anarchy and Venus symbols to all kinds of phrases that alluded to gender-based violence and police brutality, including one in massive pink letters that read ‘México Feminicida’.
The coverage of the protests in the Mexican media was overwhelmingly negative. Headlines in the following days read ‘Protests yes, but not like this’,Footnote 32 ‘Violence cannot be protested with more violence’,Footnote 33 and ‘Out-of-control march ends in violence’.Footnote 34 In addition to the usual suspects like conservative media and vocal enemies of the feminist movement, the protest's critics also included many ostensibly left-leaning public intellectuals.Footnote 35 Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (also known by his initials AMLO), lamented that the demonstrations had not been carried out ‘in a responsible manner, without violence, without affecting citizens and taking care of Mexico's cultural and artistic patrimony’.Footnote 36 And, much to the surprise of many of the protesters, Mexico City's mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum – the first woman ever elected as mayor of Mexico's capital – also condemned the protests as a ‘provocation’ by ‘chicas vandalizadoras’ (‘girl vandals’).Footnote 37
Tampering with the country's most iconic monument was seen by many as an attack on the nation itself. Built in 1910 to commemorate the country's independence from Spain and located amid corporate buildings in downtown Mexico City, the Monument of Independence is an important national symbol and a bastion of public space. It is one of the few places in the capital city were members of different social classes gather to celebrate both individual milestones and historical commemorations, including the victory of the national soccer team, quinceañeras and graduations. Because the figure at the top looks like a cherub, the monument is colloquially known as ‘El Ángel’. However, feminists refer to it as ‘Victoria Alada’ (‘Winged Victory’) because the monument is in fact a representation of the Greek goddess of victory Niké, who is usually depicted as having wings. That the Victoria Alada was covered in graffiti certainly helps explain the criticisms against the protesters. After all, this was not the first protest in which feminists graffitied the capital's monuments, but it was the first one that affected the Victoria Alada.Footnote 38 In addition to the monument that was being tampered with, the fact that the culprits were predominantly women also helps explain the backlash. As scholars have repeatedly noted, women and men are judged very differently when displaying emotions like anger and rage, and the former are usually encouraged and expected to be docile and discouraged from being disruptive.Footnote 39 Unsurprisingly, both the media and the government framed the protests as unjustifiably violent, highlighting the destruction of property and isolated acts of aggression during the protests rather than the violence against women that had incited the protests in the first place.
That the protesters were described as vicious, dangerous and unpatriotic seems to confirm arguments common in the social movement literature which maintain that in cases where demonstrations involve protester-initiated violence, protesters will lose support from the media, politicians and the public at large.Footnote 40 A problem with these arguments, however, is that they assume a fixed definition of violence. But, as many other scholars have shown, whether or not a tactic is violent is itself a matter of interpretation and it is not uncommon for certain tactics, like rioting and looting, to be defined as violent when they are deployed by certain groups but not by others, including when they are deployed by women rather than men.Footnote 41 Negative coverage of protests, moreover, will not necessarily turn public opinion against protesters or be counter-productive to their goals. Judging the success (or failure) of protesters’ tactics based on how the mainstream media receives them misses the way that protests can and do change people's worldviews despite – and at times precisely because of – negative media coverage. As political theorist Clarissa Hayward argues, disruptive forms of politics ‘can move public opinion, even without winning widespread public sympathy and support […] They put issues on the political agenda that previously were off [and] prompt some members of the public […] to attend to problems that they are motivated to ignore.’Footnote 42 The success (or failure) of protests should, therefore, not be measured solely in terms of the number of people they help convince (or dissuade). It is equally if not more important to pay attention to who these groups of people are.
The rest of the article argues that Mexico City's 2019 protests led to the politicisation of a group of art restorers. Because a restorer's job entails preserving and beautifying national patrimony and monuments, restorers might have been expected to be particularly receptive to the media's negative framing of the protests. Instead, it was precisely because of such framing that the restorers felt the urge to deploy their professional knowledge to challenge media narratives and, eventually, organise in favour of women's rights.
Restoration: A Political Context
Restorers and conservators work to repair and preserve monuments and other objects that have been ‘adversely affected by negligence, wilful damage, or, more usually, the inevitable decay caused by the effects of time and human use on the materials of which they are made’.Footnote 43 Much of the work performed by restorers consists of making sure that objects remain the same or, at least, give the impression that they do so. ‘[E]verybody would readily acknowledge that conservation is essential to keep monuments and art alive. And yet, it is a practice that is ultimately deemed to be inconsequential because it does not introduce any significant difference into the narrative of art or the nation as it just produces “the same”.’Footnote 44 Unlike the work of artists, for instance, which tends to be connected to specific individuals and praised for its novelty, the work of restorers is praised specifically because it cannot be seen or, rather, because they make it seem like nothing has changed.
Restoration, again like other forms of care work, is a profession that is mostly performed by women. In Mexico, approximately 85 per cent of restorers self-identify as women.Footnote 45 Many of my interviewees explained to me that these statistics are rarely a topic of discussion: the gender disparity in the profession is so stark that, while everybody is aware of it, no one talks about it. A senior restorer and one of the pioneers in the field told me that this disparity dates back to the 1970s, when restoration first became a professional career: ‘Restoration was immediately regarded as the ideal career for housewives. We learn how to do all kinds of repairs and crafty things, which always comes in handy at home. But we also learn about art history, which is a great topic of conversation at any cocktail party.’Footnote 46 She explained that at a time when women attending college was frowned upon by large segments of the population, restoration school was an ideal compromise. Over the years, the reasons why restoration was first regarded as a popular career for women came to matter less than the fact that it had already become one. To this day, professors continue to argue that because many works of restoration require ‘small hands and a lot of patience’, it is work best done by women.Footnote 47 This is reinforced by members of the profession through the use of stereotypes, jokes and tropes in casual conversation and also through subtle acts like assigning different restoration tasks to different people based on their perceived gender.Footnote 48
In Mexico, the field of restoration and the state are tightly linked, not least because private art and antique markets are relatively scarce and there is simply not enough work available for restorers in the private sector. Mexico, moreover, is a country where a wide range of objects, buildings and monuments are officially classified as national cultural patrimony, meaning that they officially belong to the Mexican nation and the state is responsible for their upkeep and restoration. The most common career path for professional restorers in Mexico is to work for the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History, INAH), the state entity responsible for researching, preserving, and educating citizens about the country's archaeological, anthropological, historical and palaeontological patrimony, and which explicitly aims to ‘strengthen society's [national] identity and memory’.Footnote 49 Being a restorer and working for the state is so common that one of my interviewees told me that ‘our guild is not simply of the state, we are the state’.Footnote 50 In addition to being the main source of employment for restorers, the state is also the one most invested in their education. The first restoration school in the country and the world, and currently the best-regarded in Latin America, the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía (National School for Conservation, Restoration and Museography, ENCRyM), is a public school, founded and managed by the state.Footnote 51 Tellingly, some of the restorers that I interviewed maintained that knowing that your education is being paid for by the state fuelled a sense of duty to the nation.Footnote 52
From the very first semesters, students at the ENCRyM learn how to become restorers by working on real field sites and with objects that have been deemed national patrimony. But while they are pushed from the start of their careers to intervene in these objects, students are not encouraged to reflect on the meaning of the nation or on the political implications of preserving national monuments.Footnote 53 Despite, for instance, taking a handful of courses in Mexican and art history with the purpose of learning about and reflecting on the socio-political context of the objects that are classified as national patrimony, the semesters at the university are not structured around political themes or even historical periods but around materials (e.g. a semester on ceramics, one on textiles, one on easel paintings, and so on). Several ENCRyM alumni that I interviewed explained that because the job of a restorer is ‘object-oriented’, they are encouraged to focus on the technical and scientific aspects of their work. Even as they perform important political work, they are not necessarily encouraged to see it this way or to see themselves as political agents.
Restorers are also rarely invited to critically engage with or question national ideologies, including the specific narratives and imaginaries of community that are reproduced through the objects that they are summoned to preserve.Footnote 54 In other words, despite the profound political effects of their job – including helping to preserve certain narratives of community and citizenship – their training rarely includes spaces to reflect on these, including what it might mean to have their individual labour and economic wellbeing directly tied to the state. Many of the restorers I interviewed were unable to recall a single discussion at school about what it meant to preserve objects that had been commissioned by governments that had not been democratically elected (Mexico did not ‘transition’ to formal electoral democracy until 2000) and had, by choosing to preserve certain objects rather than others, erased specific communities’ histories from the country's official history.Footnote 55
Scholars have documented the myriad ways in which gender stereotypes are reproduced in Mexican national myths and narratives via artworks, monuments, memorials and objects, which link ideas of femininity with maternity, domesticity and submissiveness.Footnote 56 And yet, these stereotypes are rarely discussed or questioned in Mexico's restoration field.Footnote 57 One of my interlocutors claimed, ‘I have never heard anyone deploy an argument about gender equality to justify a restoration. Our justifications are very different: they have to do with the material, with preserving the object's function or seeking aesthetic uniformity.’Footnote 58
All this helps explain why the field of restoration has a reputation among students in the humanities and social sciences in Mexico of being one that attracts people who are neither well versed in nor particularly care about politics, meaning that they rarely participate in political rallies or protests and tend not to be affiliated with any political party or social movement.Footnote 59 Restorers are widely described by archaeologists and anthropologists who work at the INAH as being ‘fresas’ (preppy) and ‘well behaved’.Footnote 60 They are also not a particularly visible guild. As a restorer told me during an interview, ‘No one really pays attention to us, let alone consults us for our opinion. They consider us restorers tepalcates [i.e. useless objects].’Footnote 61
Restorers have also not been at the forefront of fighting for women's rights. Even as many senior restorers joined labour rights struggles in the 1990s and fought for equal pay for men and women, the two senior restorers that I interviewed insisted that these organising efforts be described as ‘leftist’ but not ‘feminist’. While the reticence to be labelled as ‘feminists’ might be due to the term's association with bourgeoisie feminism, including one produced in the United States, that they do not want to be associated with, the point is that even organising around general political issues was minimal. For instance, it was not until September 2019 that the restorers working for the INAH formed their own union (Sindicato Nacional de Restauradoras del INAH).Footnote 62 Previously they had been under other unions and, according to some of the restorers that I interviewed, they rarely participated in the meetings and even more rarely took leadership roles.Footnote 63 That 83 per cent of the 183 members of the restorers’ union are women and that many of them have faced sexism at work – ‘every time we (restorers) come into a union meeting, someone always mocks us and says things like “the girls have arrived”’Footnote 64 – have not been strong enough incentives for them to organise around feminist issues.Footnote 65 In fact, several union representatives repeatedly told me during an interview that the union was not feminist because ‘it is meant to represent everyone, not just some of us’.Footnote 66 In short, restorers were unlikely candidates to support the August protests. That they did so nonetheless caught everyone, including many of the restorers themselves, by surprise.
A Collective Is Formed
On 18 August, less than 48 hours after the Victoria Alada was covered in graffiti during the protest, two restorer friends – both ENCRyM alumni from cohorts that were more than ten years apart – became alarmed by the misinformation that had been circulating about the effects of the graffiti on the monument and created a private Facebook group with the purpose of discussing the issue with fellow restorers. In a matter of hours, over 50 restorers had joined the group, and in the days that followed the number of members kept growing. Most of those who joined participated enthusiastically, eagerly discussing news about the protest and the graffitied monument and giving their expert opinion as restorers on the matter.Footnote 67 Because many of the conversations were online, restorers who did not reside in Mexico City, work full-time or have family obligations were able to participate. A few days after it was first created, the Facebook group began calling itself a collective and adopted the name Restauradoras con Glitter, referring to the pink glitter used in both protests. The name also explicitly uses particular gendered pronouns that indicate that it is women who belong in the group. This issue was put up for a vote and the majority opted for excluding all cis-gendered men from the collective.Footnote 68
During the online discussions, perhaps unsurprisingly given that their job is precisely to care for the wellbeing of monuments, many of them voiced ambivalence about the way the protests had developed and some of them even condemned the shattering of the metrobús station's windows and the burning of the police station. Even so, everyone in the group sympathised with the protesters and agreed that the allegations against them for ‘damaging’ the Victoria Alada were based on selective reporting and the twisting of facts. They noticed two key issues. First, that the graffiti on the monuments was easy to remove and would leave no permanent damage. Second, that other incidents which had led to permanent damages to monuments over the years had barely been covered by the media. This led them to agree through their discussions that this time the overwhelming concern had more to do with the fact that the alleged damage had been done by a group of women attempting to raise awareness about gender-based violence than with the monument itself.Footnote 69 Some of the members of the group suggested that, in an act of solidarity with the protesters, they should all volunteer their services as restorers to clean up the monument. Doing so would not only disprove the claim that the monument had been permanently damaged, but it would also erase all traces of what, in the eyes of some restorers, had indeed been a violent protest.Footnote 70 But a few members of the group challenged this suggestion by noting that erasing the graffiti was an act of censorship that, while perhaps silencing the protesters’ critics, would also silence the protesters themselves. If anything, they argued, they needed to stand behind the protesters and call for the graffiti to be kept in place.Footnote 71
The first public act that the restorers performed as a collective was to write and circulate a letter in which they voiced their support for the protests by expressing their views as experts. The letter, which was written collaboratively on Facebook, was addressed to AMLO, Mayor Sheinbaum, Mexican society at large, and the feminist organisations who had been at the forefront of the fight against gender-based violence. It was signed collectively by the group, who explicitly identified themselves in the letter as ‘women experts in conservation and restoration of cultural patrimony’.Footnote 72 The letter began by recalling UNESCO's definition of cultural patrimony as ‘a product and process that provides societies with a plethora of resources that are inherited from the past, created in the present, and transmitted to future generations’ and explaining that patrimony is meant not simply to be preserved but also to be ‘experienced, used, reflected, [and] enjoyed’.Footnote 73 In short, the letter emphasised that patrimony, rather than a static medium, is one that changes constantly to reflect new worldviews, and that the job of a restorer is precisely to assure that patrimony reflects these changes.
The letter clarified that while they were not advocating the use of graffiti on monuments or anywhere else, they had come to the conclusion that the use of graffiti during the August protests was ‘a desperate cry for help’ and a symptom of a much broader problem: gender-based violence. They therefore called for the graffiti to be documented and to be kept in place until gender-based violence was eradicated, and called for ‘all professionals in the field of conservation’ to refuse to remove the graffiti.Footnote 74 In other words, the members of the newfound collective publicly explained that they would not be doing the work that they were trained and appointed to do.Footnote 75
Withdrawing one's labour is one of the most important forms of exerting political power held by those segments of the population who, like the restorers, do not have access to traditional political resources.Footnote 76 Social movements are particularly well positioned to mobilise this kind of disruptive power.Footnote 77 Following this, one could interpret the restorers’ refusal to perform their work as a conscious way to advance feminist ideas through refusal alone. However, many of the Restauradoras who began to organise and speak publicly in favour of the protests did not, at first, understand themselves as engaging in any form of political activism. Instead, they interpreted what they were doing merely as an extension of their ‘technical’ work as restorers, namely making what to them were basic statements about the malleability of the meaning of national patrimony and the ease with which spray paint can be removed from marble. In other words, the restorers refused to erase the graffiti neither to demand better working conditionsFootnote 78 nor to make the point that their work itself is undervalued,Footnote 79 but rather to defend their right to define their work. They deployed their expertise as restorers to justify why they were refusing to erase the graffiti but continued in all their other professional tasks, thereby resignifying the meaning of their labour. And, as I show in the following section, it is through this resignification rooted in their professional expertise that they made a public political statement supporting feminism.
The letter circulated widely and, eventually, over 700 women signed it. The collective decided to allow any Mexican woman (or any foreign woman residing in Mexico) whose work was in any way related to national patrimony to sign the letter. In addition to restorers, anthropologists, archaeologists, curators and other professionals signed the letter.Footnote 80 The press, in turn, reproduced the letter and ran stories about the collective and interviews with its members.Footnote 81 As one of the restorers recalled with excitement, ‘I felt that for the first time in my life our job was on everyone's lips [en boca de todos]!’Footnote 82 Within a few weeks of constituting the collective, they were already being hailed as one of the most important faces of the feminist movement in Mexico, garnering attention not only from the national press, but also from media around the world.
While their expertise as restorers is crucial to understand why the media was willing to consider and take seriously their opinion about cultural patrimony, most members of the collective had no experience giving real-time interviews in front of thousands of anonymous viewers and listeners, and knew very little about feminist ideas, including those that had motivated the organisers of the protests. It was one thing to talk amongst each other and criticise the media coverage of the protests in a virtual, private and safe space. But it was much more challenging to do so publicly and to have to field questions on the fly posed by interviewers, most of them men who were ignorant about feminist ideas. It was also easier to talk about topics they were well versed in, such as the technicalities of restoration and the meaning of national patrimony, but to talk about women's rights and gender-based violence proved to be incredibly difficult. This was, in large part, because most members of the collective had yet to connect these two sets of topics or to examine their professional work with a gender perspective. It was not, moreover, that members of the collective had never experienced gender-based violence or were unaware of it. However, even though many restorers had experienced such violence or been the victims of misogyny, few had reflected on how these individual experiences were tied or how this violence could be collectively tackled. In short, they did not see these incidents as political grievances that required them to organise themselves collectively to address them.
Now, despite not being experts on these issues, they were being treated as such by the press. This meant that they had to learn on the fly about a wide range of topics on the feminist agenda. Crucially, this experience was not always easy. Some of the restorers who participated told me that they would often step into interviews feeling proud and excited to have been invited but would leave feeling deflated and ashamed. For instance, one of them recalled how in one of her first interviews, the host asked her to provide concrete steps that could be taken to fight gender-based violence. She had never really thought about specific and practical solutions and had no idea how to respond. She had to mumble her way through an answer and move onto the next question, all while feeling embarrassed not only because she was unable to articulate her views with clarity but because she did not have clear views to begin with. Another member of the collective recalled how she too returned from a radio interview feeling ‘unprepared and improvised’ because she was unable to discuss the broader demands put forth by the feminist groups who had been at the forefront of the protests. Even though she was one of the leading organisers of the Restauradoras, she told me that she felt unfit to speak in the name of feminist groups with whom she had no previous interaction. Experiences like hers were not uncommon and members of the collective have since spoken publicly about them.Footnote 83
Meanwhile, the restorers also faced pushback from within their profession. Not everyone in the restoration community supported the collective or endorsed the letter, and some openly critiqued them, including a handful of ENCRyM professors who allegedly told students, ‘If you step through the doors of the ENCRyM, you need to leave the glitter outside.’Footnote 84 Critics maintained that even as cultural patrimony needed to reflect changing political dynamics, there was a ‘correct way’ of doing so and, in the words of a senior restorer, ‘anything that can harm a monument is an incorrect way of keeping it alive’.Footnote 85 Two senior restorers that I interviewed agreed that the act of graffitiing was no different from any other form of vandalism and, echoing the expressions that had been used by the media, maintained that gender-based violence would not be reduced by attacking monuments. During interviews, they also repeatedly reminded me that the Restauradoras’ position was in no way representative of the whole guild.Footnote 86 Their criticisms towards the collective would often be directed towards the protesters, maintaining that ‘monuments belong to everyone, not just women’, or that ‘no one has the right to destroy something that isn't theirs. Destroying monuments is destroying someone else's memory.’Footnote 87
Some of these senior restorers were more understanding of the plight of the protesters, but they ultimately dismissed the ways they communicated their grievances: ‘Sure I understand why the protesters were so angry, but why take out their anger on a monument? To graffiti and break things was a bit too much for me. I'm not that mad, fortunately life has treated me very well, I'm not that angry.’Footnote 88 A senior restorer also maintained that ‘when you're an expert in a field, well you have certain principles, you carry that profession with you everywhere you go, you're a restorer in every aspect of life … and I just can't accept the destruction of monuments, it's that simple’.Footnote 89 There seemed to be a consensus among all the restorers that I interviewed that there was a generational divide between the younger cohorts who publicly spoke in favour of the protests and joined the collective in larger numbers and older cohorts who were either more reserved in their support or openly criticised the way the protests had developed.
From Refusal to Remaking
The restoration guild in Mexico has a reputation for not being a particularly collegial field. Several of the restorers that I interviewed described it as competitive, characterised by rampant rivalries, jealousies and backstabbing. That the guild is small and constituted mainly by women exacerbated, in the eyes of many of my interviewees, the competition for grades, jobs and even partners. Following the creation of the collective, however, many of those restorers who joined told me that they began to experience unprecedented levels of solidarity and support and to trust and rely on one another.
The group became a platform for learning about politics and feminist theories, and a space where they shared the challenges of being thrust into the limelight, of contesting the views of senior restorers, and of the unspoken hierarchical rules of their guild.Footnote 90 Some of their activities included going over the questions that had been posed to them during interviews with the media. These conversations helped them learn about topics related to the feminist movement and be better prepared for the next round of media appearances. As weeks and months went by, even as the enthusiasm which had initially characterised the Facebook group discussions began to wane, many in the group continued to come together both virtually and in person to discuss and debate issues related to gender-based violence and gender norms. They also shared readings and other sources about feminism with the rest of the group. Some members of the collective even began to attend workshops, seminars and talks about feminist issues and would often report back to the group.
Their awareness and understanding of these issues were immediately reflected on their different social media platforms, where they began to advertise events, documentaries and reading material about all kinds of issues taken up by feminist movements. They posted information about missing women as well as information about support centres and legal resources to help victims of gender-based violence, and shared messages of solidarity with other communities fighting for a wide range of political causes, including LGBTQ rights and Indigenous land rights. By looking at the timeline of their collective and individual social media accounts, it became clear that as the months went by, their posts became broader in terms of the issues that they were concerned with but also increasingly combative and confrontational; the collective began to pronounce themselves in favour of more militant forms of activism, including those about which many of its members had initially been on the fence. They also began using their social media accounts and other platforms to give voice to more experienced feminist activists and even to family members of victims of femicides. These new ways of engagement created a backlash from certain people in the restoration field. For instance, a senior restorer who had signed the letter and joined the collective's mailing list and Facebook group told me that she distanced herself from the collective as soon as they began to ‘saturate [her] WhatsApp, and Facebook, and Instagram with dozens of daily posts, some of which were very aggressive’.Footnote 91
But while these acts of online activism alienated some people, they had the opposite effect on many others, and became essential in getting some restorers to reflect on and engage in discussions about political issues that they had not given much thought to. ‘Before the collective was formed, my usual response to politics would be to yawn and roll my eyes’, one of my interlocutors told me, ‘but being part of the collective and being exposed to everything that my colleagues share makes me feel like I also have things to say. I might not understand everything, but I find myself wanting to learn and talk about all kinds of political issues.’Footnote 92 At times, these discussions – which took place both online and in person, and in private and public settings – also led to more generalised conversations about the meaning and political implications of restoration and the ways in which the profession is implicated in shaping top-down national narratives. According to one of my interviewees:
[W]e began to reflect more seriously on the meaning of national patrimony but also on how we were going to speak to the public about it. I think many of us had so far been assuming that the public did not understand the meaning of patrimony, but if the discussions with the collective have shown me anything it's that I need to look again and that the public most certainly has an opinion about many things, including the meaning of patrimony.Footnote 93
In other words, some restorers began to think about and question their own attachments to nationalist, hierarchical, elitist and patriarchal views of patrimony and, crucially, to the ways in which they themselves reproduced them. This was evident, among other things, in how they changed their language and concepts. For example, rather than calling the graffiti ‘vandalism’ or ‘pintas’, both of which have derogatory connotations, and which they used widely during their first media appearances and social media posts, they eventually began referring to the graffiti as a ‘denuncia’ (‘denouncement’). Given how entangled the language of patrimony is to patriarchy – the word means ‘goods inherited from one's father’ – many restorers also began to advocate to stop using the word patrimonio, which they had deployed in their first public letter, and to switch to the term herencia cultural (cultural inheritance or heritage).Footnote 94 They also began to deliberately switch from using he/him/his pronouns to she/her/hers or they/them/theirs pronouns. This included referring to the collective as a ‘colectiva’ rather than a ‘colectivo’. These are all subtle but poignant examples of how this group of restorers began to understand their expertise and labour as political.
In the months following the protests, many members of the collective also became more aware of the violence and micro-aggressions that they themselves were subjected to and those they themselves inflicted on others in their everyday lives. ‘I've come to realise just how much I myself reproduce machismo, even in the way I speak and the terms I use … but I'm more aware now, and try to change every day’, one of my interviewees told me.Footnote 95 For some of them, the conversations that they had with other members of the collective about different forms of gender-based violence helped them recognise certain interactions with family and friends as violent and, in some cases, pushed them to have ‘uncomfortable conversations’ with their spouses and other members of their families. Members of the collective also recalled how these discussions were the first of their kind and, together with the material that circulated, opened their eyes to a wide range of issues on the feminist agenda and prompted them to further reflect on the protests and on their own practice. A restorer who works for the INAH told me:
When I first saw the images of the graffiti on the monument, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. As a restorer it pained me to see the monument that way. But after reading the letter and everyone's comments on Facebook, I realised that the graffiti was a cry for help […] Now, when I see images of the graffiti, I still feel a bit uncomfortable [laughs], but I think the discomfort has more to do with the violence that women suffer than with the graffiti itself.Footnote 96
It was only a matter of time until the restorers began to address the misogyny underlying their profession. In collaboration with other workers at the INAH and ENCRyM, they helped to create gender-violence protocols in their institutions. The ENCRyM allegedly did not have one due to the generalised assumption that because the school was mainly populated by women, this kind of protocol was unnecessary.Footnote 97 They also helped to implement different mechanisms to formally and informally denounce sexual harassment inside the school, including the ‘tendedero’ (‘clothes line’), which is a literal clothes line on which people are invited to anonymously post the names of alleged sexual harassers and the description of their attacks.Footnote 98 Workshops and talks about topics that include gender-based violence and toxic masculinities were also organised at different institutions where restorers work and study.Footnote 99
The members of the collective also began to attend protests as a group and to share strategies for organising, often in solidarity with other feminist collectives, whom they began to contact and plan meetings with to find ways to collaborate. For instance, for the protest dubbed the Jacaranda Revolution, held on International Women's Day on 8 March 2020, and deemed to be the biggest feminist protest in Mexico's history, the collective developed an app that fellow restorers joining the protest could download on their phones so that everyone in the group could be in touch and keep tabs on each other. For many restorers, this was the first protest they had attended, and doing so together, knowing that they could count on their peers if any violent incident were to happen, helped to appease their anxiety and incentivised them to attend. While none of these actions and efforts can be attributed exclusively to the collective, it is safe to assume that the visibility that their field acquired following the publication of the letter did have an impact on the organising efforts that began to take place in different spaces connected to the field.
The work that the Restauradoras are doing is also helping to change the public narratives about the August protests and the way these will be remembered. The collective has documented the graffiti with the explicit purpose of preserving the evidence so that the story of this national monument will henceforth include a chapter on how it became a site of feminist struggles. As a result, a handful of prominent museums, including the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC) and the Museo de Mujeres Artistas Mexicanas (Museum of Mexican Women Artists, MUMA) in Mexico City, as well as the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, have asked the restorers to share both their documentation of the graffitied monument and stories of their collective's trajectory so that these can be exhibited and included in their archives. Since the 2019 August protests took place, members of the collective have given hundreds of talks and participated in all kinds of events in which they talk about the Glitter Protests and the feminist movement in ways that challenge the way the mainstream media and state representatives like AMLO and Sheinbaum framed the protests. That many of the restorers continue to work for the state and are therefore state agents themselves is not only proof that the state is not a monolithic entity but also an invitation for scholars to pay attention to the work that less prominent and less visible state actors are performing. While political scientists have focused on the study of state bureaucrats and congressional leaders, there are others whose work is not taken seriously as political work but who are, as I have shown in this article, doing the work of both reproducing and contesting many of the most important political narratives of our times.
As this section has shown, while the restorers refused to clean the monument and perform the labour that was expected of them, they documented the graffitied monument, engaged in discussions about patrimony and patriarchy, organised to change the field of restoration, and joined feminist struggles more broadly. Refusing to perform particular forms of work was precisely what helped to open time and space to rethink and explore alternative forms of work and of political life. Their story, therefore, also shows how refusal to conduct one's labour is not synonymous with passivity,Footnote 100 and can actually be conducive to novel and creative ways of changing the world.Footnote 101 In other words, refusal is merely a step to achieve a transformative experience.Footnote 102 As the restorers’ story clearly shows, refusal can comprise ‘at once a movement of exit and a process of invention’.Footnote 103
Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I would like to highlight two ways in which the ongoing story of the Restauradoras helps us theorise politicisation. First, this story points to the importance of paying attention to people's labour and professional background when trying to understand why and how they mobilise politically. It shows how labour shapes people through forms of expertise, skills and the practices that they are required to perform on a daily basis in order to do their jobs. It demonstrates how political mobilisation can, at times, be traced to these forms of expertise and emerge out of or be shaped by those everyday practices. Following the 2019 August protests, a group of art restorers tasked with protecting national heritage became politicised in ways that not only led them to change the kind of work they do and the ways they go about it – including, for instance, what they chose to restore and how they worked together – but also pushed them to become active supporters of the feminist movement, including by attending and organising feminist events and protests that were not directly related to their work as restorers. In short, analysing the relationship between work and politicisation requires not simply focusing on how people's working conditions and spaces are shaped by politics – although this also matters! – but how political ideas, events and causes get differently interpreted and experienced based on what people's professional background is and on what they do for a living.
Second, the restorers’ case also demonstrates the kind of ripple effects that events like protests can have on communities and groups of people who did not participate in them. This case is a reminder that analysing protests entails going beyond the immediate moment in which people gather together to chant slogans or spray-paint walls. Treating protests as single eruptive events omits not simply their antecedents but also their longer-term effects. Protests and other contentious forms of mobilisation, including the 2019 feminist protests in Mexico, often generate immediate backlash and censorship, potentially making it seem like their effect was null or counter-productive. However, in many cases the changes generated by these mobilising events can take time to materialise and to become evident. Moreover, as this article has argued, the effects of protests should not simply be measured in terms of the number of people they help convince about a cause. Equally important is to pay attention to who these people are, because even when they, much like the restorers, are neither part of the masses, nor traditional political actors, they might nonetheless bring about substantial political change.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paloma Checa-Gismero, Jan Dutkiewicz, Boram Jeong, Yasmeen Mekawy, Agnes Mondragón-Celis, Sergio Galaz García, Chad Shomura and Juan Wang, as well as members of the ÉRIGAL research group in Montreal for their helpful feedback on previous versions of this paper. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and incisive comments.
Open access
