This publication is also available in Spanish.

The Brave Girls Initiative/ U muuk’il xch’uupalo’ob” is providing Indigenous adolescent girls in southern Mexico with meaningful opportunities to enhance their skills and overcome gender-based and sociocultural obstacles that hinder their progress, specifically in education.

This initiative has welcomed 10 community-based organizations who are working closely with girls and women of Maya ancestry and were recently brought together for their first in-person convening. Collectively, this cohort explored the meaning and challenges of being a brave girl in Yucatan. Through this exploration, we’ve produced a ‘thread of the spoken word’ based on the themes and reflections shared.

Read more about the grassroots and collectives that integrate Brave Girls cohort here.

We are the ceiba,

We are stories in motion

We are jaguars, we are diverse corn

We are the hunter’s sons,

the daughters of the people

Now, it is we

who must keep and share the memory

People with a clear conscience of their identity,

who are not ashamed of our Mayan culture and language.

Women and sexual dissidence

who express themselves through hip-hop.

A team that loves each other

and builds bonds of great affection,

that cares.

We are the grass that heals,

the threads that are woven from creativity.

We have one foot in the party

and another in protest

The discursive and the theory is not the relevance.

We use the game to meet and resist.

We open spaces, we deconstruct and reconstruct

In a playground where we share

With bets from our stories, pains, joys and knowledges

Because what happens in your town also happens here.

We work from the decoloniality

of knowing, doing and being

Our activities are from the people

We learn in resonance with the milpa, with the pachpakal.

We are not alone,

we are from the radio, from the milpa,

from the rap lyrics, from the street theater

from spaces of peace for the wellbeing of the soul

Our center is in the milpa,

from the strength of the people we work with girls

We celebrate the reinvention, the game

The other ways of telling stories of our life and context.

We celebrate diversity!

We know that it is necessary to go through a cycle

to reach the harvest

There is a lot of stone here,

but with the cleaning and the burning

we look at what we have

There are strong moments, we are exposed

we are also vulnerable,

but there is a new sunrise among beautiful gray clouds.

From the personal to the collective, we are grateful.

With the first harvests of our milpas

No one is going to create these spaces for us,

we are going to do it ourselves

as a way to raise our voices,

to be heard and to share what we feel.

We are like corn and beans

that are intertwined

We are strength, resilience, collectivity, integrality of knowledge and sharing,

We are community.