From Poetry to Protest: The Circulation of a Poetics of Justice in Mexican Women’s Writing and Activism
Friday, March 13, 2026
12 noon – 1:00pm
Curtin Hall room 118, UW-Milwaukee
Free and open to the public
The World Languages and Cultures Speaker Series presents, with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies:
From Poetry to Protest: The Circulation of a Poetics of Justice in Mexican Women’s Writing and Activism
This talk examines how a language of justice circulates from poetic writing into activist movements and public discourse in Mexico, through an analysis of Susana Chávez Castillo’s Primera Tormenta and Arminé Arjona’s Juárez, tan lleno de sol y desolado. Drawing on Chávez Castillo’s work, initially circulated online prior to her feminicidal murder in 2011, it traces how her poetic discourse of justice—including the phrases “Ni una más” and “Ni una menos,” now central to anti-feminicidal movements—entered public and political spaces. The talk then turns to Arjona’s poetry, dedicated to the dead women of Juárez, whose dissemination through the Movimiento Acción Poética brought her work into the city streets. Together, these cases illuminate how a poetics of justice transcends traditional literary boundaries to become part of the public discourse, positioning Mexico as a generative space in which women’s writing actively shapes the language of resistance.
Dr. Diana Aldrete is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College. Her research, pedagogy, and artistic production, interrogates the intersections of contemporary Mexican/Latin American/Latinx literary, film and cultural studies, Mexico-U.S. border studies, feminist and queer theory, environmental humanities, and Human Rights studies. She is currently working on her first monographic book project tentatively titled Between Land and Death: Women Writing for Justice in Mexico, which examines how literary production, primarily by contemporary Mexican women writers, have become part of the political dialectic on anti-feminicidal violence as they question notions of justice, and place literature in conversation with activism.
Professor Aldrete is also an abstract visual artist and writer, who often infuses literary, musical, and cultural references in her visual art and writing.