“Cuando una mujer avanza, no hay hombre que detenga" (When a woman advances, no man can hold her back)

On August 1, 2006, thousands of women took part in a protest demonstration in Oaxaca City known as the March of Pots and Pans (la marcha de las cazerolas), in solidarity with the striking teachers and APPO. “Cuando una mujer avanza, no hay hombre que detenga” was one of the slogans they chanted.

Following the demonstration, the women marched to the state-run radio and television station, Channel 9, where they occupied the building and began to broadcast. They continued broadcasting until August 21st, when paramilitary and police forces destroyed the station's antennas and violently removed the women. Within 24 hours, however, APPO and members of the teachers’ union took over all 12 of the commercial radio stations in the city, returning all but two stations to their owners by the end of the day.

Women participated actively in the 2006 social movement in Oaxaca, despite the traditional machismo attitude that has long oppressed women of the region. The March of Pots and Pans was organized by women who felt the need for a space of their own in the movement.  In the words of Tonia, one of the march participants,

When my friends and I got to the Fountain of the Seven Regions, where the march was to begin, it was filled with women. . . . The air filled with the sounds of women beating their pots and pans . . . crying out their anger at the government’s brutality . . . You couldn’t see where the march ended or began. [There were] all kinds of women: poor indigenous women, middle class women, rich ladies, young students.

It had been a secret dream . . . to take over the TV station [Channel 9] that claims to be the ‘Channel of the Oaxacan People.’ In reality, it always works in favor of the government and against the people. Everyone was tired of the misinformation and the slander against the movement (Denham 2008).