Tag Archives: Estefania Camacho

San Miguel de Allende

Between Names: Yásnaya Aguilar on Being Mixe and the ‘Latino’ Moment

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By Estefanía Camacho—

Latin American pride is rooted in a colonial and undeniably hierarchical category. This is how ayuujk (mixe) writer, linguist, and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (1981) described it in an interview during the San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival in February 2026.

“If we were to arbitrarily mark the history of our peoples with the domestication of maize 10,000 years ago, we would have spent 10,000 years being Zapotec, Mixe, or Nahua, and of those 10,000 years, 500 as Indians and 200 as Indigenous. So where does ‘Latino’ come from?” questions Yásnaya, with her long, straight black hair, wearing black-framed glasses with a small cat-ear-like detail at the top.

She explains that “Latino” is a label that originated in France in the 19th century, coined to distinguish between two types of colonization in this part of the continent: Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America.

“’Latina’ has to do with the fact that we were oppressed (…) it is a category produced by a colonialist process. Therefore, there are peoples who have not been fully Latinized,” she explains, referring to the different Indigenous populations across the territory, who continue to keep languages alive outside Spanish and their own roots.

“Latino” in Spanish—not to be confused with how it is used in the United States—is a category that has not only regained relevance but has also gained strength in response to racist actions, especially in that country, primarily against Spanish-speaking migrants or racially profiled Americans.

Yásnaya, translator too, also understands the nuance of “Latino” as a “weapon of resistance,” but she asks that it should not be used as a folklorizing essentialization of something that comes from a violent process such as colonization, and that it remains as an external label.

The category of “Latino” and that of “Indigenous”
Yásnaya says that when she travels to other regions, she is invariably categorized as Latina, regardless of the fact that she is ayuujk and—if anything—identifies as Indigenous.

“In Europe I was Mexican, in Mexico I am Oaxacan, in Oaxaca I am Mixe, in the sierra I am usually from Ayutla. At some point I am Indigenous, but that was something I was told or intuited through contrast before the name even arrived. During an extraterrestrial attack, I will surely be an Earthling, and I will be so with passion,” she wrote in her first book “Ää: manifiestos sobre la diversidad lingüística” (Almadía, 2023).

She has frequently pointed out in her research and columns that patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist systems seek to turn “the other” as a mechanism into a homogeneous, monolithic entity in order to oppress them.

Just as with the category “Latina,” the same happens in Mexico when the category “Indigenous” is adopted as a whole, without mentioning the 68 Indigenous peoples who live in the country, including Afro-Mexicans, who represent at least 10% of the total population.
“Indigenous is a category created by a system of oppression; it is not an essence of our peoples. It is a political moment in our history. We were not always Indigenous,” Yásnaya said. “In the end, in the future, hopefully we can be Mixe without being Indigenous. Because that has already happened. That would mean there is no longer oppression,” the writer proposes.

She explained during her keynote lecture at the literary conference that in Mexico there are 11 Indo-American language families within the 68 groupings of languages, and these in turn belong to 365 distinct linguistic systems, according to the National Catalog of Indigenous Languages. “What generalization can be made about such diversity? None. What exists is a diversity of traditions and poetic mechanisms,” she added.

Now everyone wants to be Latino?
“Now everyone wants to be Latino, but they lack flavor,” sang the world’s most famous musician, Bad Bunny, in his song “El Apagón” during the halftime show of the 2026 Super Bowl.

The surge in pride around the “Latino” category was especially visible during this event in the United States, but it was also observed across much of the world. The Puerto Rican singer went on a global tour in 2025, although he skipped performing in the US out of concern that anti-immigrant raids could be organized at his concerts. The Super Bowl was the only performance he gave there, and the performance was loaded with symbolism, alluding to an independent Puerto Rico and America as a continent and not merely as the “country.”

However, Yásnaya questioned the emotional weight and sense of pride attached to the label “latino” in the days following the event: “That America that continues to resist the effects of colonization is not even America; it is Abya Yala,” she wrote a few days after the Super Bowl in her El País column titled “¿América Latina o América latinizada?. Xëëmo’oy”

There is still resistance to European colonization from the territory, just as there is today from communities resisting other processes driven by contemporary imperialism.

Spanish, its defense, and shifting contexts
In a context where speaking Spanish can be a risk in a country like the United States, or where it was fiercely defended once it was announced that Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl halftime show, Yásnaya explains that it is not a hegemonic language.
“I had always seen Spanish as an enemy because it is erasing my language, right? The first time I went to Los Angeles and spoke with migrant communities, I realized that their experiences were the same as mine in school and with discrimination. So Spanish is not always hegemonic; in reality, we cannot see it only as English versus Spanish and Spanish versus Indigenous languages. There are many layers of complexity,” she said.

During the interview, she also mentioned that as a linguist, she is aware that due to structural asymmetry, she cannot have something as basic as a Mixe dictionary. “Something that is so basic for another language,” she says, “you can go to a bookstore and buy books in Spanish and buy a dictionary where the words are in Spanish and the definitions are also in Spanish. I cannot have a dictionary in Mixe where the definitions are in Mixe. At best, they are bilingual.”
However, she does not see it as far off that a Mixe dictionary with definitions in Mixe could exist.

Defending diversity and multidiversity
“In short, I would not have learned about myself, about what I speak of, through the lens, the eyes, the language of others,” she also wrote in her 2023 book.

Yásnaya has been an activist for linguistic rights, Indigenous autonomy, and the revitalization of indigenous languages, while also consistently advocating against climate change and for the defense of land and resources.

She also writes about celebrating otherness and plurality, as she believes that at this moment in history there are too many “ideological political monocultures” threatening the world, as she warned during the conference.

“Let us remember that monolingual utopias, or futures designed in a monolingual way, are characteristic of the far right.”

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.

San Miguel de Allende

SMA Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival: Holding the Megaphone

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By Estefanía Camacho

The writer Margaret Atwood (1939), widely recognized for her work in speculative fiction and for her dystopian novel turned into a film and television series, The Handmaid’s Tale, said she has never quite understood why Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX, is making so much money. “You’re not ever going to live on Mars. I’m here to tell you,” the Canadian author said, prompting laughter during the closing keynote of the 21st San Miguel Writers’ Conference & Literary Festival.

Approximately 1,750 people attended the event, about 250 more than in 2025, enjoying four days of stimulating talks alongside morning yoga and writing sessions. From February 11 to 15, participants learned how to write memoir, poetry, short stories, crime fiction, and how to give voice to characters, guided by internationally renowned speakers such as Jennifer Clement, Elizabeth Santiago, Susan Brown, and Sandra Cisneros, the multi-award-winning recipient of the PEN America Literary Award. Sessions were held in tents spread across the grounds of the Hotel Real de Minas, a six-minute walk from the warm, radiant historic center of San Miguel de Allende.

Maira Kalman, Sandra Cisneros, and Yásnaya Aguilar
The acclaimed keynote lectures were among the most anticipated moments of the afternoon, with the conference opening on Wednesday, February 11, led by Abraham Verghese. At certain times, other roundtable discussions opened space for dialogue on a range of topics, with artificial intelligence emerging as a particularly popular theme.

On the second day, Maira Kalman (1949) spoke about her book Women Holding Things (2022). She explained how the project began during the pandemic. “What do women hold? The home and the family and the children and the food, the friendships, the work, the work of the world and the work of being human, the memories and the troubles and the sorrows and the triumphs and the love. Men do as well, but…” she recited emotionally. Kalman reflected on care, beauty, and the quiet persistence of daily work, arguing that in moments of collective anxiety, the most radical acts may simply be to keep working, notice beauty, and help those who need it.

Later that afternoon, Sandra Cisneros and Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, the Mixe writer from Oaxaca, led a close conversation in Spanish with a small group of attendees. Cisneros confessed how she thought she’d speak more with Mexicans since the first time she attended the festival, but realized it was mainly for English language speakers. “So we want these programs to include the Mexican community, to decolonize it, but we have to figure out a way for them to be free, truly free for the Mexican public,” she said, although this year some workshops were held in Spanish and offered to teenagers as well.

Yásnaya reflected on the panel’s theme of activism and literature, emphasizing that activism does not always look like constant resistance. Sometimes, she said, it looks like resting –and that does not mean abandoning the struggle. “When my community appointed me as a spokesperson in defense of water, I had my grandmother and many others who would have coffee and food waiting for me when I returned from assemblies. There is no such thing as heroic individual activism. It is sustained by the work of many.”

Cisneros also addressed the fact that right-wing religious groups have called for her book The House on Mango Street –now 42 years since its publication– to be removed from school programs. “They haven’t targeted my book specifically. It’s not that they chose only me,” she said, switching seamlessly between English and Spanish. “So I don’t take it personally. And I’m sure they haven’t read my book. The good thing is, they give me great publicity.”

Rebecca Kuang: A Call to Let Go of Nostalgia
As the afternoon progressed, excitement built for another highly anticipated keynote. The room erupted into thunderous applause as New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Kuang (1996), better known as R.F. Kuang took the stage. Young, with a soft, slightly high-pitched voice, she delivered a message in a tone so gentle it felt hypnotic.

Speaking about her novel Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution which draws parallels between a fantastic world and the reality of pursuing an academic degree. Kuang argued that one must break the illusion.

She went on to discuss the three myths that we cling to about the university: first, that academia is a pathway to upward socioeconomic mobility; second, that it is meritocratic; and third, that it is a site of free speech and political resistance. “I’ll argue all of these myths are false. They don’t describe any American university that exists. Indeed, they don’t even describe any university that existed in the past. We’re defending a nostalgic vision of that which never was.”

The audience listened, stunned, but engaged. With no guarantee that a college degree will lead to a well-paying job, she added, “These kids do not have the leisure to read Homer because they need that perfect transcript.” suggested Kuang and asked to extend more empathy toward students navigating precarity, including those who turn to AI out of desperation rather than laziness. The line earned vigorous applause.

Kuang did not leave the audience without answers. She proposed honoring forms of knowledge-sharing outside formal degree programs, just as much as we honor twelve sleepy undergrads. She praised adult learners as some of the best students and explained that she also offers a creative writing workshop for her community much like the one she teaches at Yale, with the costs partially contributing to a fund for children in Palestine. The audience rose in a standing ovation.

Day 3: Oral Tradition and the Written Word
The following day, Yásnaya Aguilar opened her lecture first in Mixe and then in Spanish, with interpretation provided for some attendees. She explained that literature is only one of the many possibilities encompassed by the poetic function of language. For her, it is not a problem that Mixe oral narratives are not validated as “literature,” since that label applies specifically to works produced within the Western tradition. “Mixe oral tradition narratives are not literature, and that’s not a bad thing. They are, however, a clear example of how the poetic function is exercised in this language.”
She emphasized that a community’s tradition of memory is collective, likening it to jazz. “While there is a shared structure, each performer of the memory tradition will execute it differently.”

That same afternoon, the lecture by Argentine writer Andrés Neuman (1977) felt like a direct dialogue with Yásnaya’s talk. With hints of stand-up comedy despite the seriousness of his ideas, Neuman demonstrated that the universal language of laughter requires no translation. He recalled how his grandmother kept to herself the fact that she used to be a translator from Yiddish into Spanish. Then he also spoke tenderly about documenting his child’s first words and early sentences. “We don’t remember, astonishingly, learning how to speak. And I suspect literature exists because of that gap. Poetry, in particular, exists as an attempt to remember that once we didn’t know how to speak, and we tried.”

Neuman also described his fascination with the life of María Moliner, the avant-garde librarian who single-handedly produced the most comprehensive dictionary of Spanish, which inspired his novel Until It Begins to Shine (2025).

That evening, three teenage writers were recognized among 70 students from Guanajuato who had attended workshops to write short stories. The moment deeply moved Neuman, who sees this kind of care as central to his idea of literature: caring for thought, and thinking about care. “That’s what festivals like this do,” he said.

Day 5: Margaret Atwood, Memory, and Times of Turmoil
The festival closed with Margaret Atwood, who reflected on memory, protest, and political instability following the publication of her 2025 memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. In a conversational keynote, Atwood revisited moments, repeating an interesting advice she provides in her book to “hang on to the megaphone” recounting how she once went for a walk with a friend then joined an anti–Vietnam War march. “We marched to the Boston Common, where the American Nazi Party took away our megaphone… So hang on to the megaphone. Don’t let them Nazis take it away from you.”

She also recalled a public event in Montreal where, during a Q&A session, someone asked whether The Handmaid’s Tale was autobiographical. “And I said, ‘No, it isn’t.’ And he said, ‘Yes it is.’ And I said, ‘No, it isn’t, it’s set in the future.’ And he said, ‘That’s no excuse.’ In a way, he was right, because anything you write goes through your head. Of course, the experiences you’ve had, the people you’ve met, the places you’ve lived: all of that comes in handy one way or another.”

Finally, and after questioning Musk’s wealth, despite acknowledging a time of turmoil and change that is not entirely under our control yet deeply affects us, Atwood expressed hope. She argued that while this may not be the worst moment in history, it does make us more aware of what we once took for granted, including a supposed Pax Americana, that seems to be crumbling. “We have to make it clear that this is not a problem of peoples; it’s a problem with an administration,” she said, touching her pacemaker to tell the audience to “Keep your nerve, and keep good relations wherever you can.”

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.

http://www.sanmiguelwritersconference.org

 

Huatulco, San Miguel de Allende

Sanjuaneros: Up to a Month Away from Home, with a Promise to See the Virgin

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By Estefanía Camacho—-

Cihualpilli, also known as the Virgin Mary in her invocation of the Immaculate Conception, whose image is housed in the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos in Jalisco, receives up to seven million pilgrims each year. In this representation, the Virgin “condenses the meaning that precedes motherhood,” as Felipe Gaytán Alcalá explains in his book Las semánticas de lo sagrado (The Semantics of the Sacred).

To get there, the so-called sanjuaneros (believers who set out from the Bajío region toward San Juan de los Lagos) walk approximately 80 kilometers over a period of nine to twelve days. Some depart from the Parish of Saint Anthony of Padua in San Miguel de Allende, others from Querétaro or San Luis Potosí, and those coming from farther away leave from Aguascalientes, adding up to a total distance of 200 kilometers or more.

They set out in late January. In 2026, they departed on January 21 from the well-known “Y,” an intersection formed by a famous roundabout in León, through which other pilgrims from nearby cities also pass. “I’m leaving from the Y,” they notify one another in a Facebook group of nearly 84,000 members, where they share everything from announcements to form departure groups in their hometowns to photos from the journey, weather advice, and, above all, blessings for the road.

In 2026, the passage of approximately 350,000 travellers through the state of Guanajuato is expected, a place referred to as “pilgrim transit territory,” according to Luis Antonio Güereca Pérez, the state coordinator of Civil Protection for the Secretariat of Security and Peace of the State of Guanajuato. These figures have been repeated over the past two winters, although the number, he says, has been declining.

“I should tell you that before 2020, before the pandemic, the number of pilgrims was much higher: around 450,000 to nearly 500,000 people passing through the state. However, when the pandemic hit and all this type of activity was suspended, something happened: the rhythm or the motivation was lost. We don’t know exactly what occurred, but we haven’t been able to recover the large numbers we used to have,” he tells me in an interview.

Not everyone stopped during the pandemic. That is the case of Paty, a 44-year-old woman who lives in León. She has made this pilgrimage for 30 years. The first time she went, she was 14. She kept going and never interrupted her visits after one of her children fell ill frequently and she asked the Virgin for his health. “Since then, he hasn’t gotten sick,” she says. That was 17 years ago.

“I promised that if my son didn’t get sick again, I would never stop going.” So, during one of the pandemic years, when there were very few pilgrims, she went with her daughter, without many supplies, because there was no one selling food or lighting the way at night with flashlights. They got lost.

“My daughter’s feet started bleeding halfway along the route. We stopped, and we got lost. Then the coyotes showed up. One of them was about to attack us. My daughter lit the way with her cellphone so I could throw a stone, but there wasn’t just one. There were about ten.”

They had to jump into a ditch. “The little Virgin is very miraculous,” she recalls, describing how they were able to see a military barracks nearby. From there, some personnel fired at the coyotes to scare them off and helped Paty and her daughter out of the ditch.

“Sometimes people don’t even have money for bus fare,” the matriarch of the Quiroz Aguilar family tells me. She has been a devotee for approximately 50 years, but now she offers food to pilgrims passing through on the night of January 23. She recalls that when she first began making the pilgrimage, people endured many hardships — cold, hunger, sleep deprivation, and exhaustion, and it was difficult to find water or food. That is why she wanted to offer some relief.

She offers her home —“tu casa,” as Mexicans say when we speak of our own home and offer it to a stranger— as a place of rest for approximately 40 people.

“They bathe here, we make hot chocolate at night so they can fall asleep, and for food, well, we give them carnitas, salsa, beans, rice, noodles, potatoes. I mean, everything we can, whatever we’re able to help with.”

In addition to offering her home as a place to spend the night, they also go out onto the route in a pickup truck to transport food. So that pilgrims do not have to stop and lose time, they prepare bagged lunches and hand them out to those who pass by. “Sometimes more people come, sometimes fewer, but everything gets eaten,” she explains, referring to the roughly 50 kilograms of food she prepares, not counting the 40 liters of salsa she cooks with the help of her grown children and now her daughters-in-law.

Throughout the year, they save together to be able to give away this food, which amounts to an expense of approximately 15,000 pesos, she confides.

Her altruistic work has brought her public recognition, to the point that she has appeared in television interviews, although María Concepción Quiroz (her full name) does not like to boast about her efforts.

According to the state coordinator of Civil Protection for the Secretariat of Security, the issues they pay closest attention to include traffic accidents on the highway, food poisoning, people who become lost, occasional fights, and elderly pilgrims.

This time, Civil Protection officially launched the coordinated operation among authorities from Friday, January 9, through February 5, when travellers stop passing through Guanajuato. Personnel from the Guanajuato Ministry of Health, the Red Cross (through its local chapters), state firefighters, and the National Guard are also present.

On January 20, 2026, the eve of the departure of most believers, the forecast indicated that the lowest temperature would occur at seven in the morning on the 21st, dropping to 9 degrees Celsius.
This January, pilgrims walked illuminated by lamps that provided enough light along the path, they crossed train tracks, sometimes alongside a stationary train, detoured around fields of maguey that lengthened the route, and walked for long stretches next to high-speed roads, where freight trucks sped past, often in blind spots. Some travelers coming from the State of Mexico spent up to a month away from home, according to television reports.

Arrival in San Juan de los Lagos
Ideally, pilgrims arrive on February 2, which coincides with the celebration of Candlemas. The Candelaria is a popular religious celebration that commemorates the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, the Virgin’s purification after childbirth, and the Virgin of Candelaria, another Marian devotion. Tradition in Mexico also dictates that whoever ate Rosca de Reyes on January 6 and found the small figurine (representing Baby Jesus) must offer tamales and atole to the rest. However, the Immaculate Conception is also venerated in May, on August 15, and on December 8, although the longest pilgrimage takes place in mid-January.

While San Juan de los Lagos awaits the arrival of tens of thousands, the Cathedral-Basilica (the country’s second-most visited Marian sanctuary, after the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City) is already hosting processions and dances. All of this is done to honor a figure measuring just 33 centimeters and weighing over 300 grams, adorned with eighteenth-century Baroque-style ornamentation –which is why Paty calls her with love “little virgin”. The Virgin, made from corn-pith paste, was crafted in workshops in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán.

According to testimonial records from 1623, the Virgin performed her first miracle by restoring the life of a young trapeze artist who had reportedly died after falling from a swing.

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.

San Miguel de Allende

“As Long as You’re Buying…”: Mexico and the Endless Fast Fashion Loop

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By Estefanía Camacho

The other day I read someone saying that their excess clothes and plastic didn’t really count as fast fashion if they didn’t throw them away. In a way, they had a point — but it also completely ignores how we got here in the first place. This year I wrote a feature piece about what fast fashion is, where and how it started, and what we can actually do about it. That helped me understand the whole know-how behind it.

Buying clothes and simply not throwing them out is not really the answer. Even Marcelo Claure, the global vice president of the Chinese ultra fast-fashion company, told El Universal that they manufacture only 100 to 200 units of each product and then increase production depending on sales. Claure also confirmed that Mexico and Brazil are among its top five global markets, after the United States.

If you’re unsure what fast fashion means to this day, it’s basically when companies copy high-fashion designs and reproduce them on a massive scale, at low cost, using mainly outsourced labor — all within 15 days or even less.

The impact of imports on Mexico’s textile industry
This is true in the United Kingdom and in Mexico. Everything depends on how each country regulates the entry — and the disposal — of imported goods, especially in industries it could produce itself. So with lax rules for textile imports, it’s not surprising that the national industry has declined, just as it has in countries in the Global South like Chile, Ghana, or Kenya.

Mexico’s INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) documented this in May 2024: between 1995 and 2000, the textile and clothing industry’s GDP grew an average of 6.5% per year, boosted by NAFTA. But in 2001 — the year China joined the World Trade Organization — that momentum dropped sharply and stayed low for the next decade.

Recently, while researching autonomous vehicle manufacturing, I realized something funny: the cars aren’t even on the roads yet, and developers are already planning how they’ll be disposed of at least a century from now. Meanwhile, the textile industry — especially fast fashion — never thought this way about clothes. Even the cement industry has disposal solutions.

Measures against fast fashion: tariffs and environmental proposals
In Mexico, digital access is still uneven, but you’ll still find second-hand shops almost anywhere with a sign that says, “We take Shein orders here.”

At the end of 2024, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a temporary 35% tariff on textile imports from countries without free trade agreements. On the surface, it looks like part of a larger tariff war with China, but internally it also affects how Shein orders arrive in Mexico.

This basically ends the tax loophole that allowed imports under $50 USD to skip duties.
Rafael Zaga, president of the National Chamber of the Textile Industry, told Forbes that the Mexican textile sector loses $3.2 billion per year due to imports from online platforms like Shein. China is the main origin of Mexico’s textile imports (35.4%), followed by the United States (24.6%).

Mexico City: new practices for collecting textile waste
Denmark, for example, collects clothing directly from people’s homes and sends it to companies that sort what can be reused or recycled — but only after an awareness campaign that teaches households how to prepare the textiles. It’s still a very new system: it only began in July 2023.

Mexico City recently joined other regions working to properly collect textile waste. In September 2025, Mexico City’s Congress approved changes to the Solid Waste Law to officially recognize textile waste. It also authorized the Ministry of the Environment to create agreements with the industry to promote collection, treatment, recycling, reuse, and finally the disposal of textile waste. And, just like Denmark, it plans to promote collection programs through awareness campaigns on proper sorting.

In Europe, a person bought an average of 6 kilos of new clothes per year in 2020. And in Mexico City alone, 3.7 billion tons of textile waste are discarded each year, including bedding and curtains.

But these proposals will also need to consider the problems that other Global North countries have already faced with parts of this process. For example, the sorting phase requires workers who specialize in this job, and these tasks are usually done by nonprofits or private companies with their own interests because it’s minimized.

Europe sends much of its textile waste to sorting centers located in countries with lower labor costs, mainly in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. And that matters because the better this sorting process is, the more opportunities there are for reuse, resale, and recycling, but if this specialized work depends on underpaid workers, it might not be as useful or advantageous as we urgently need it to be.

Fast fashion, fast rewind
The term fast fashion is basically the same age as Taylor Swift — it was coined by a journalist in New York in 1989, when Zara opened its first store in that city and outside Spain for the first time. So, if you think about it that way, reversing this practice is not impossible; it’s not like we’ve been overconsuming for centuries.

The woman online who said she wasn’t contributing to pollution as long as she didn’t throw clothes away wasn’t totally wrong: wearing an item as many times as possible is the first solution given when trying to tackle this situation. The problem is that fast-fashion materials are lower quality so the cycle continues, lasts less, and even pollutes when washed.

But that doesn’t mean the garment can’t get a second life. You can repurpose it, mend it, redesign it, or give it another cycle. And if you’re part of the group that uses their clothes 37% less before discarding them, consider selling them on digital platforms or donating them if they’re still in good condition.

And if you finally decide the item is trash — even after waiting for it to cross the ocean, accumulate CO₂ emissions by air, sea, and land — then, before tossing it with everything else, check for local textile recycling centers or ask your waste collector if you can separate it.
Meanwhile, we’re also waiting for governments to adopt stronger measures, like the ones proposed in France, which would require fast-fashion companies to display environmental disclaimers on their websites or set a limit on how many new items they can upload per day, as well as their marketing.

In Mexico –where we don’t need a lot of justifications to keep on partying– we know this famous phrase first told by rancheras singer Vicente Fernández: “Mientras sigan aplaudiendo, yo sigo cantando” which means “as long as you keep clapping, I’ll keep singing”. It reminds me of the fast fashion cycle and how it sometimes feels like companies think exactly like Chente: “as long as you keep buying, I’ll keep producing.”

Estefanía Camacho is a freelance Mexican journalist working across media and digital magazines. She is a specialist in gender, SMEs, economics, and business.