Understanding the presidential campaign of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, known as Marichuy, for the 2018 presidential elections - the first indigenous woman candidate in Mexico - is only possible if the traditional way of understanding electoral politics is completely abandoned.
"We are going to walk in the style of indigenous peoples, with the support of the people," the Nahua candidate announced to a group of followers in Mexico City in mid-2017, in front of the government institution where she had to register her name as an independent candidate. .
“We are not going to receive any weight from the National Electoral Institute.
Our proposal is different, it is a collective proposal. "
Marichuy had been elected that year in Chiapas as the presidential candidate of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which had decided the previous year to expand their struggle to the electoral field.
The official title would not be "presidential candidate" but Spokesperson for the National Indigenous Government Council, a position of honor that would respond to a group of 71 councilors.
La Vocera
is also the title of a new documentary on Marichuy directed by Luciana Kaplan that debuted this week at the Guadalajara Film Festival and which will be available to the public in early 2021. The film is the opportunity to travel with Marichuy to the towns and cities that the candidate visited during the campaign and listen to her reflections between beautiful or desolate landscapes in the country that was not ready to choose her presidential agenda.
"If destruction and death is progress, then we are against it," says his voiceover in the first minutes of the documentary.
"I think that the most important message of the documentary is to show that she, in addition to being a woman and indigenous, spoke about issues that no other candidate was really putting on the table: the dispossession of the territory or how to find another way to govern ourselves," she explained Kaplan told EL PAÍS, who also directed the documentary
La revolucion de los alcatraces
(2010), about an indigenous woman who was denied the possibility of being a representative of her community.
In her new job, on the other hand, Marichuy begins with all the support of the communities but with a difficult road ahead among the non-indigenous of the country.
"Did you wake up one day wanting to be president?", "Is that communism?", "Did your commander Galeano give you instructions?" Are some of the questions that the spokesperson must answer before the news.
“What I don't like is the label: I am indigenous.
That is to say: I come to seek the presidency of the republic because I am Catholic, or because I am heterosexual.
[But] we are Mexicans, ”another commentator claims.
Marichuy - and perhaps this is the best personality trait that the documentary portrays - is not the type of presidential candidate who explodes in anger at an ignorant question or comment, or makes a condescending speech.
Refute the interviewer by speaking short, to the point, firmly without losing your cool.
"Not only is it going to be for indigenous peoples but it is going to be for Mexico, and Mexico includes everyone," he replied, barely raising his eyebrows.
Catholic or heterosexual men have not been excluded from politics, they have dominated it.
If power is handed over to an excluded woman like Marichuy, power is not limited but rather expands, to everyone.
"She is very sure of who she is, she has no need to show and prove who she is, she is very well planted in her convictions, in her struggle," says Kaplan.
Unlike any traditional candidate, Marichuy is discreet: she does not like cameras and only agreed to be the protagonist of the documentary after the CNI gave its approval.
"It is working with an anti-leading protagonist, with an anti-leader leader, with a candidate who is not a candidate, but a spokesperson," said Carolina Coppel, producer of the documentary and former director of the Ambulante Más Allá film school.
Once with access, Marichuy talks more about "us" than about "me", and does not want to reveal both his personal history and the political history of the peoples.
“She taught us all the time that in this process she is not a candidate, she is not a leader like us Westerners: we are so in need of creating these characters through which everything turns, that we set the course for all decisions in a single figure ”, explains Coppel.
Marichuy was not the documentary's editor, but her political style ended up determining the film's narration.
She knew that this electoral experiment was above all an instrument for two objectives of the CNI: to make discrimination against indigenous peoples visible, and to improve communication between them.
The documentary, like the campaign, blends Marichuy's journey with the stories of the dozens of communities she visits - from Mayan groups in Yucatán in the south to Yaquis in northern Sonora.
Some denounce the dispossession by solar panels, others by a gas pipeline, others by the tourism industry.
“I wanted to make a portrait of the country through the spoil, the land, the mega-projects, and a little through the eyes of Marichuy,” says Kaplan.
Marichuy did not obtain the necessary signatures to be a candidate for the presidential elections.
Many who wanted to support her did not have access to electricity or the internet to register their electronic signature.
Two years later, he feels that the campaign was an achievement.
“It was something very new for the peoples and for the CNI, who previously went along another line of not participating in these processes because the parties have divided the communities, '' explains Marichuy to EL PAÍS.
"But then we already achieved the purpose: we had to take that step so that the peoples were seen with their real problems, not only with folklore."
Marichuy hopes she will never be a presidential candidate again - she says she was only so in 2017 because she was appointed to that role after a process of internal consultations, but she acknowledges that her role as spokesperson transformed her life bringing new responsibilities.
"I am a more visible person," he says.
"When we go and visit a community, people already know me, and feel confident that if we are proposing something it is because it is good for the communities."
In any case, she remains convinced that her candidacy showed, even for a few months, that there is another way of being political and of doing politics in Mexico.
"Why not think of something new?" He asks.
"This was already a novelty, another different way of doing politics, another way of inviting us to organize ourselves using tools that we have for now, and turn them into something different."
In the parallel world in which Marichuy won the presidency in 2018,
La Vocera
is the window to imagine which problems in Yucatán or Sonora would be in the first row of priorities in his office.