We were abroad in Merida during International Women’s Day [this pun is random and the management refuses to endorse it]. We didn’t mean to be, exactly. We were veterans of the downstream effects of the hysterical gymnastics a year ago here in Merida. All the public buildings and churches downtown were defaced with pointless graffiti. The defacement of the Catholic churches was particularly jarring.

We’d gone to the mall all afternoon, of all places. We’re not mall people in the US. The local malls in Maine are slightly less populated with ambulatory zombies than in Dawn of the Dead, but the zombie businesses more than make up for the deficit. Apparently, an “anchor store” now refers to the item your business is lashed to before being consigned to Davy Jones (Foot) Locker. We visited the Merida malls to see how the upscale Meridians live. There are several in the northern reaches of the city, where the wealthier people live in new high rises and jam the mall on the weekends. It was instructive, but not our cup of tea. We prefer the older parts of the city, the barrios east, west, and slightly north or south of the zocalo, the large park smack dab in the city center.

International Women’s Day is an important day in the lives of the distaff set. It’s the one day when women are free to demand that everything go their way, as opposed to the other 364 days of the year, where everything goes their way without a parade. It puts one in mind of the North Pole. Santa only makes his rounds once a year, but it’s not a part time gig.

Some sort of protest parade on this date is becoming a kind of Cinco de Mayo holiday for young ladies in this town. We are accustomed to simply avoid such exertions, no matter what the subject matter, and their location north or south of the border. So a trip to the northern barrios seemed wise. Wending our way up the Paseo Montejo was an eye-opener. It’s the main boulevard in the town. Almost all the monuments on the calle had very official barricades looped around them. They’re weren’t ad hoc, either. They were obviously purpose-built after last year’s defacement foofaraw. They looked like they could withstand a mortar round, never mind a gaggle of Mexican Gen Z bosses in a mini with spray bombs.

We thought by staying away all day, we’d miss the mess. We thought wrong. We forgot that when it’s 100 degrees out, although it’s still sorta the cool season, everything happens well after dark. We gave our Uber driver the address of our go-to restaurant in town, and the downtown turned out to be strangled with cars, mobs, legions of policia of all stripes, and bomberas, the wonderful name that firemen have here. Many streets were closed, so as not to inconvenience the marchers. When we saw how many police were out, we assumed in our ignorance that they were platooned to keep the girls from defacing everything in sight this year. Not hardly. I think they’d been stationed everywhere to make sure that no one interfered in the marcher’s misbehavior in any way. It’s a fool’s errand, because there is no opposition.

The mayor of Merida is a woman. The only announcement I espied from her locally is that no one would silence the women! The president of Mexico is a woman, and although parachuted into Mexico from the Levant, is exhibit A in Mexican grrrl power shenanigans. She seems to be running for class president daily and is quite popular. At any rate, I’m not sure who exactly was going to attempt to silence a Mexican woman. I’ve not met the man who would attempt it here, never mind achieve it.

The Uber driver who ferried us back into the city was moderately incensed by the demonstrations. His ingles was spotty, and my espanol spottier, but for most of the ride, I understood him. When we got to the barricades surrounding the Monumento de la Patria, a paean in stone the entire history of the country, rendered in a Neo-Mayan style, he lost his shit a bit. His Spanish became too rat a tat to follow, but I got the gist of it. The little mujeres were wrecking the city to amuse themselves, and he didn’t approve. Strongly.

So we ate our dinner leisurely, attempting to wait it out. We’d eaten there many times. It was the first time the place was out of sorts in any respect. The waiters were sheepish and clumsy, and delivered my wife’s dinner to the next table, occupied by an old man with a rat dog, who ate the meal, and then refused to pay for it because he didn’t order it. He wasn’t Mexican, or American, either, and may his monument be shaped like a fire hydrant wherever in Europe they finally plant him.

The staff were afraid we’d be mad [no chance of that, really], and simply scrambled back wordlessly to the kitchen to hustle another meal as quickly as possible. The whole city seemed like that. When we left the place, and started walking home, all the shopkeepers stood in their doorways with a resigned, mystified, and downcast expression. Mexicans are a jolly people, and it was jarring to see them like that.

We ran smack dab into the protest parade, or quiet riot, or whatever you want to call it. There were a lot of young women in it. They all held signs they’d made themselves. The signs were hard to read for us anglos. Girls being girls, a lot of the signs used glitter inks and illegible fonts and had little flourishes that made them even less legible. It didn’t help that a substantial minority wandered past us with their signs held upside down. This seemed a byproduct of reading their own sign in front of them, over and over, and then lifting it over their heads without a background in spatial analysis.

The placards were all over the place for a feminist march. There was more than a smattering of pro-palestinian sentiments, which I thought were appropriate, the man in the moon not being available. Most were concerned with femicide. Apparently the killing of a female human is much more important than the killing of a male human, because reasons, and needs its own sobriquet. Some longed for abortions, although they’re already legal here.

We are from Maine. Other than neighboring New Hampshire and Vermont, Maine has the lowest murder rate in the nation, at something like 1.7 per 100,000 chill-blain sufferers. Of course you might wonder if femicide is a real problem here in Merida, on the Yucatan, enough to promote a yearly quiet riot over it. Hmm. The murder rate in Merida is 1.5 per 100,000. All of Mexico isn’t that safe, of course, the murder rate hovering around 25 per 100,000 nationally, which isn’t a fun fact, but not really more dangerous than living in Mississippi or Louisiana. According to the Wikiup, New Orleans has a murder rate of 75 per 100,000. People we know who have gone to Mardi Gras in New Orleans tried to warn us off visiting Merida, because, you know, Chicken Noodle News told them Mexico was dangerous.

Dive a little deeper into the demographics of murder here, and you find out that over 90 percent of all victims are male, which is about the same proportion throughout the country.

So the women’s march yelled, over and over, that they would not be silenced, although no one offered to even try. They’re protesting murders that don’t occur to genders that don’t suffer them much. It’s a totally TikTok protest, worshipping the only gods that feminists approve of these days, Nurse Ratched and Medea.

But we got the sadz over it eventually. The last president of Mexico, AMLO, was a cagey guy and got a lot of stuff done that less able politicians wouldn’t have tried. He worried that the Yucatan was poorer and less developed than most of Mexico, and that the Mayan residents were treated like second class citizens compared to the big cities up north. He spent real coin trying to improve things in the Yucatan peninsula. He built the Tren Maya, a big looping train line that runs from Cancun to Campeche and back again, stopping at archaeological sites and other points of interest. Merida itself was spruced up aggressively. A huge public park, La Plancha, was fashioned out of an abandoned railyard and empty warehouses. We stroll in it almost every night. It was connected to the city proper by a new Corredor Gastronomico. It’s a long, beautiful walkable strip of stores, restaurants, nightspots, and renovated houses.

It cost a lot of money, and it’s a main attraction in the city now. We love it, and walk it every night on the way to La Plancha. Well, we loved it.

We discovered the next day that they had treated the gastronomic street to its own My Little Pony Kristallnacht last night. Every building, signpost, bench, planter, and horizontal or vertical surface was defaced with spray paint, with a mishmash of petulant slogans. They don’t like gentrification. How this is a feminist problem escapes me. They don’t like gringos (who does? we’re here to escape them}. Segura (security) isn’t just for gringos! they intoned, in a city where there is little crime for anyone, and when you get right down to it, not many gringos. I know the swears, and they swore at me and my inoffensive wife in spray paint, and told me to go home. We would anyway, of course, whether they wrecked a poor shopkeeper’s wall with the sentiment. My money generally accompanies me, but I doubt they thought that far ahead.

After the big sweep of the mob passed by, we walked home in the dark down abandoned streets, closed by the police to amuse the protesters. It’s perfectly safe to walk at night here, but walking down the middle of a big street with almost no one around is disorienting. Like a zombie movie. As we passed along the abandoned parade route, we noticed a mendicant sitting on a doorstep. An old, gaunt, very Mayan looking woman with no legs. My wife rifled her purse, and poured every coin she could find into her little cup, which was completely empty, although several thousand well-off women, desperately worried about the welfare of other women, had passed by her. My wife shames me with her good nature every day, but I’ve never seen her shame an entire city before, but she managed it.

To close out the festivities, on the way back from shitting where they eat, as the Italians say, they rang our doorbell at 2 AM, and ran away. You know, to demand respect.