The Guadalajara Reporter

One Mexican citizen’s unstifled outrage, despite a climate of fear, and amid family warnings to trim an incorrigibly bold nature

Micaela (“Mica”) Garcia Martinez voted for a candidate whose party she loathed: Josefina Vazquez Mota. She was the first female to run as a presidential candidate for a major Mexican political party. Yet, Mica detests Vazquez Mota’s party, the presently ruling pro-church, pro-business National Action Party (PAN). That’s because she judged the last two local PAN presidentes de municipales to be worse than the normal run of thieves and liars, but, she said bitterly, because they were responsible for deaths of people she knew well. As for the party that “won” last Sunday, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), she lived too much of her life under its corrupt and brutal rule, she declared, and wanted nothing to do with that “vile armada”.

“I voted for the woman candidate,” she said when people asked why she favored Vazquez Mota. “Because even if she couldn’t win, that chance probably won’t happen again soon.”

Mica’s outspokenness could offend some people, but she was never a metiche, a meddler. She simply spoke up about things that concerned her, or directly and exceptionally pleased or displeased her.

Mica is a cerro woman, brought up planting and harvesting mountain milpas (corn fields), maintaining barbed wire fencing, cutting spiny huisache bushes to gingerly lace branches through strands of wire, stacking rocks along the base.

Mica was bold even as a child, yet absorbed her parents’ instructions on how Mexico believed females should act — in town and in the countryside. And she seemed instinctively to sense how to step along that thin line. Though as she got older she didn’t always follow it. Her gaze was direct and probing, for instance, which stirred frowns from some officials and others who believed they ran the pueblo. She had strong hands, well muscled arms and legs, and a straight-backed posture. Mica married young, and when her husband hit her a second time, she knocked him down with her cattle prod — a back-yard guaje limb. Swearing, he jumped up and lunged at her. She knocked him down again and slammed the knob-end of the guaje limb into his leg. When he left for the border two weeks later, he still limped. Mica knew people would gossip and criticize her about what she’d done, so she carried the guaje staff wherever she went.

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