Grassroots and Global?: Defending Lesbian Rights As Human Rights in Mexico

Grassroots and Global?: Defending Lesbian Rights as Human Rights in Mexico

Throughout the late 1980s Mexican lesbians participated in and held leadership roles within international organizing for lesbian and gay rights, attending International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), International Lesbian Information Secretariat (ILIS), and regional Latin American conferences. Latin American participants at these conferences, many women from Mexico, proposed and effectively enacted resolutions for the ILGA to actively support broad based struggles for democracy and the defense of human rights in Latin America. By 1991, at the annual ILGA conference held in Mexico, Latin American participants also successfully transformed the structure of ILGA to become more regionally focused and controlled.

During this time Mexican lesbian activists also increased participation in national debates on human rights initiated by President Salinas, elected in 1988. Whereas in the late 1970s through the early 1980s the politics of most lesbian and gay groups focused on liberation from the authoritarian Mexican state versus acceptance within it, beginning in the late 1980s the use of international human rights discourses became central to groups like the autonomous lesbian group Patlatonalli and other lesbian and feminist organizations’ platforms of demands on the state. This paper will argue that Mexican lesbian activists’ appeal to human rights discourses was rooted in recent histories of human rights struggles in Latin America, as well as influenced by their own understanding of themselves as part of an international lesbian and gay movement. Thus, different than in many countries of the global north, Mexican lesbian activists used human rights rhetoric not only to defend individual rights to liberty, but in order to unite with other marginalized groups working to democratize authoritarian states in Latin America.