By Andres Fernandez 
Photo Credit: Getty Images By Alfredo Estrella
Since a democratic Constitution was enacted in 1917, Mexico has had 22 Presidents, all of whom have been men. In the first 60 years of democracy in Mexico, no woman has been elected to any of the 32 governorship positions. As stated by The Na’atik Language and Culture Institute, educational sexism in the form of Machismo was originally used as a cultural tool to dominate women in Mexican society & keep them tied to “religion & domestic activities.” Machismo is a social and cultural set of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors related to male supremacy and the subjugation of women in Mexican society. “Machismo” seeks extreme adherence to traditional gender roles, the objectification of women, and the social need for hypermasculinity.
In 1922, just five years after the nation’s new constitution was implemented, Rosa Torres was the first woman elected into public office to serve as president of the Municipal Council of Merida. Later in 1952, the “Alliance for Mexican Women” offered their political support to presidential candidate Adolfo Ruiz in exchange for suffrage. They bargained as a group and achieved the right to vote in 1953. The feminist movement also: gained the right to divorce, fought for an expansion of abortion rights in the ’90s, protested for labor rights for women workers, and demanded legal equality for indigenous women. As the Na’atik Language and Culture Institute put it, the Mexican feminist movement “yielded multiple fruits for women.”
The Candidates: Claudia Sheinbaum
Now, for the first time, the Mexican presidential election will yield a female president, as both major political parties have nominated women as their candidates for the presidency. The two main parties in the upcoming election are Morena and The Broad Front for Mexico. Morena is the current ruling party, and they have put forward the Jewish, 63-year-old former Mexico City Mayor & Nobel Prize-winning Physicist, Claudia Sheinbaum, to represent their self-proclaimed left-wing, anti-neoliberal values and continue the legacy of President Manuel Lopez Obrador. As President Lopez Obrador wrote in the party’s declaration of values, “For the past 30 years, the neoliberal model has only benefitted a minority at the cost of the suffering & poverty of the majority.” In their declaration of values, the Morena Party also states that the party’s purpose is to bring an end to what they perceive to be Mexico’s pro-big business economy.
Sheinbaum was born in Mexico City and lived there throughout most of her life. There she received her degree in physics and became an engineering professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. After a career in education, she was appointed to serve as Mexico City’s environmental secretary in the early 2000s. She went on to win a Nobel prize in 2007 for her work in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Later, in the early 2010s, she joined President Manuel Lopez Obrador’s left-wing political movement, Morena, where she has worked as a close ally to the president as both secretary of the environment when he was the Mayor of Mexico City, as well as, his proposed Secretariat of Environment when he ran for president back in 2012.
As the party gained popularity in 2018, towards the end of President Peña Nieto’s term in office, Sheinbaum ran for Governor of Mexico City as a member of the Morena party and won. Throughout her term, she made a 7.4-billion-dollar investment to modernize the city’s infrastructure, with a focus on making the city greener and more walkable, which has been one of her publicly-stated motivations since she took office. During 2019’s Environmental Day, she unveiled her plan to reduce air pollution by 30% and plant 15 million trees around the city. She resigned in June 2023 to run for president. Although she left office with an approval rating of 66%, she did endure what her opponents and some news sources called political scandals. These were regarding a decrease in the efficiency of public transportation in the city and the collapse of an elementary school due to an earthquake that led to the death of 19 people. Currently, polls show Sheinbaum as the favorite, placing her ahead of her adversary by 8 to 10 points in the closest polls and up to 30 in others.
The Candidates: Xochitl Galvez
The Broad Front is the self-proclaimed moderate coalition of the second, third, and fourth biggest political parties in Mexico. A coalition is a group of political parties that join forces in an election to accomplish a shared goal. All the members of The Broad Front are united in their shared desire to end Morena’s rule. The coalition is putting forward the indigenous 60-year-old businesswoman and Senator, Xochitl Galvez. Xochitil is a moderate conservative on economic issues such as military spending & handling, and a liberal on social issues such as abortion and feminism. She belongs to the National Action Party, which claims to be a Christian conservative party that upholds family values, although she will be representing the moderate Broad Front coalition in the national election.
She was born in Tepatepec, Hidalgo but later moved to Mexico City to pursue an education in computer engineering. Throughout her early professional career, she worked for the Mexico City World Trade Center and The National Institute of Geography and Statistics. She also founded and worked as the CEO of a tech firm called “High Tech Services.” During her career in the private sector, she was named one of the 25 Latin America’s New Business Elite by Business Week magazine. Later in her career, she entered the political arena by campaigning for the National Action Party and by the early 2000s she was the head of the party’s Indigenous People Organization. She went on to serve as both the Mayor of Hidalgo and later Senator through the proportional representation system, meaning that her seat was given to her party based on their popular vote results from the 2018 election, and her party chose her to represent them in the Senate.
Xochitl represents the opposition coalition that is home to the previous President’s political party. The previous Mexican president left his term under a historic wave of unpopularity. According to NBC Polling, he had around 23% popular approval by the end of his term due to corruption scandals and a public perception of incompetence. Mexican Political Analyst Jorge Buendia described her situation by stating, “A formidable challenge for her will be to convince people to vote for the person and forget about the parties behind her candidacy.” As mentioned earlier, Xochitl is down in the polls, with some of them putting her 30 points below her adversary.