Acoustic Patriarchy - Hearing Gender Violence in Mexico City's Public Spaces

Acoustic Patriarchy: Hearing Gender Violence in Mexico
City’s Public Spaces
Anthony W. Rasmussen
Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 23, 2019, pp.
15-42 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2019.0001
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/732295
Access provided at 30 Sep 2019 14:16 GMT from McMaster University Library
Acoustic Patriarchy
Hearing Gender Violence in Mexico City’s Public Spaces
Anthony W. Rasmussen
A
coso callejero (street harassment) is an insidious form of gender violence
normally executed in public spaces between strangers.1 In Mexico City,
acoso callejero often manifests sonically and may include whistles, whis-
pers, grunts, shisteos (e.g., ch- ch- ch), attention- demanding calls (e.g., “Hey!”), ver-
bal greetings, and piropos, “verbal expression[s] that men . . . use to express their
opinion of the physical aspect of a woman.”2 Such sounds may precipitate overt
physical contact or contact disguised as an accident. In other cases, acoso calleje-
ro may be decidedly silent and consist entirely of unwanted physical contact or
insistent gazes.3 Whatever the manifestation, these acts serve to “exert power over
another . . . in a physical and/or symbolic form.”4
Despite the rapid proliferation of media technology and the privatization
of wealthy enclaves in Mexico City, face-to-face encounters in public continue to
be, for many, sites in which relations of power are laid bare. Frequently sonorous,
such encounters mark momentary, territorial occupations characterized by “a con-
stant state of active contestation. Because sounds are ephemeral, a regular stream of
sonic acts is necessary to maintain the spaces they occupy.”5 In this article, I argue
1 For clarity, I follow my interlocutors’ usage of the terms “space” (espacio) and “place” (lugar).
2 Judith Schreier, “Quién fuera mecánico . . . Un estudio sociopragmático sobre la aceptación social del
piropo,” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 3, no. 5 (2005): 65. All translations are my own
unless otherwise stated. For translations of direct Spanish quotes from primary sources, I have included
the original Spanish in the footnotes.
3 Patricia Gaytan Sánchez, Del piropo al desencanto: Un studio sociológico (Mexico City: Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, 2009), 58–59; see also Schreier, “Quién fuera mecánico.”
4 Andrea García Hernández, “¿Qué mecanismos han generado las mujeres usuarias del sistema de
transporte colectivo metro de la ciudad de México para defenderse del hostigamiento por el género mas-
culino?” (licenciada en psicología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), 132.
5 J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 192; see also Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and
Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2010).
that acoso callejero is just such an occupation, an attempt to deny women (or
those identified as women) equal access to public spaces and, in doing so, preserve
patriarchal structures that both symbolize and are reinforced by institutions of
power in Mexico.
In order to understand how such patriarchal structures manifest at the in-
tersubjective level, I explore the specialized listening of victims of acoso callejero.
By this I refer to two mutually constitutive processes that are the outcome of ex-
posure to a sociocultural setting in which personal safety and auditory awareness
are enmeshed: (1) a heightened, often preconscious sensitivity to sounds as acoustic
phenomena, as well as their sociocultural emplacement (e.g., who or what is pro-
ducing a given sound and for what purpose, where and when it is being produced,
who is the intended audience, etc.); and (2) an acuity in selective listening (i.e.,
drawing auditory consciousness away from sounds deemed innocuous).
These processes are akin to ethnomusicologist J. Martin Daughtry’s notion
of (in)audition, “the hidden and often unconscious labor that goes into the seem-
ingly effortless activity of listening to the world,” which, taken in a setting in which
such labor is integral to physical and psychological well-being, is of “great conse-
quence[, impacting] tactical, ethical, political, and aesthetic fields of possibility.”6
Acoso callejero, which accounts for 73.7 percent of reported gender-related crimes
in Mexico City’s public spaces, coexists with other forms of violence (e.g., sexual
assault, rape, and armed robbery) and is framed by a national epidemic of femi-
cide: between 2013 and 2015, approximately seven women were murdered each day
in Mexico, rising to eight each day in 2016.7 Furthermore, endemic institutional
corruption and criminal collusion have generated an atmosphere of impunity; it
is estimated that eight out of ten women who experience some form of gender
violence in Mexico City’s public spaces will not report the incident to authorities.8
Subjected to whistles, shouts, murmured profanity, and words of false fa-
miliarity as a matter of routine, victims become experts in discerning the implicit
intention behind sounds and filtering out those they deem benign. This filter-
ing involves not only a reflexive analysis of the sounds themselves but also situ-
ating those sounds between the producer(s) and intended listener(s). Says Karen
Condés, actor and cofounder of the performance art group Las Hijas de Violencia
(The Daughters of Violence), “When [a piropo] is anonymous and shouted at a
6 Daughtry, Listening to War, 16, 19.

7 INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía), “Panorama de violencia contra las mujeres
en el Distrito Federal,” Encuesta Nacional sobre la Dinámica de las Relaciones en los Hogares 2011
(Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2014), 48, http://www.sideso.cdmx.gob.mx /documentos/2017/diagnostico
/inegi/2011/Panorama de violencia 2011.pdf; INEGI, “Estadísticas a propósito del día internacional de la
eliminación de la violencia contra la mujer (25 de noviembre)” (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2017), 11, http://
www.inegi.org.mx /saladeprensa /aproposito/2017/violencia2017_Nal.pdf.
8 ONU Mujeres (Entidad de las Naciones Unidas para la Igualdad de Género y el Empoderamiento
de las Mujeres), “Diagnóstico sobre la violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas en el transporte público
de La Ciudad de México,” Programa Global Ciudades y Espacios Públicos Seguros para Mujeres y Niñas
(Mexico City, 2017), 47, http://inmujeres.cdmx.gob.mx /storage /app/media /Foro Global Ciudades Seguras/
Diagnostico_Ciudades_y_Espacios_Publicos.pdf.
16 Women & Music Volume 23

distance it is harassment, but if there is a direct relationship [between the piropo
giver and receiver], that gives us the opportunity to [participate] in a dialogue.”9 In
order to manage or avoid this harassment outright, victims draw on a personal his-
tory of sonorous encounters (e.g., where they happened, what they sounded like,
whom the sounds came from, etc.) to construct topographies of risk: ever- evolving,
spatiotemporal arrangements of relative safety and danger. I will show that the
phenomenon of acoso callejero is reliant on silence and omission. The overriding
strategy of many victims is to feign oblivion in a performance of omission that
extends beyond the encounters themselves to interactions with friends and family.
Finally, I will discuss how a rising tide of artists and activists are fighting to spot-
light the crisis of acoso callejero in public consciousness and, in doing so, lift the
shroud of silence that frequently isolates victims.
Methodology
Of the many mutually constitutive ways of hearing and being heard in Mexico
City, the sounds of acoso callejero have, in my experience, proven to be the most
difficult to perceive. I am a Spanish-speaking white male from the United States.
I have lived in Mexico City for over three years and am connected to the city
through family, friendships, and professional relationships. Nevertheless, from my
first arrival to the present, my performance of masculinity in public seems to have
a dampening effect on the production of these sounds. Traveling alone through
the streets, I have only encountered traces of acoso callejero— distant shouts, shrill
whistles, or mumbled words directed elsewhere. Traveling with a female compan-
ion, I may hear nothing, though my friend heard something only moments be-
fore we met. “María” is a musician and administrative assistant in her early thirties
(names first introduced in double quotation marks represent pseudonyms for in-
terlocutors who wish to remain anonymous). During a conversation, I brought up
that acoso callejero evaporates when I accompany a female friend in public. She
opined, “In that moment you are their patron, their male guardian. To attack her
would really be attacking you, which they’re not willing to do.”10
Unable to perceive acoso callejero myself, I have been granted access through
the testimonies and comportment of interlocutors. For many of these individuals,
acoso callejero was an unusual topic of conversation. Several remarked that they
had never before discussed acoso callejero with another person. Others comment-
ed on how acoso callejero was something that happened to them nearly every day
but that clear memories of these encounters were curiously hard to access. In most
interviews, interlocutors deliberated carefully before speaking, as if by speaking
about their harassment they might summon it forth into the present. Some found
9 “Cuando [un piropo] es anónimo y es lanzado desde distancia o no hay una relación interpersonal
es acoso, [pero] si hay una relación directa nos brinda a nosotras la oportunidad de [participar] en un
dialogo.” Karen Condés, interview with the author, February 23, 2016, Mexico City.
10 “En ese momento estás su patrón, su guardián masculino. Atacarla realmente te estaría atacando, lo
cual no están dispuestos a hacer.” “María,” interview with the author, February 2, 2016, Mexico City.
Rasmussen, Acoustic Patriarchy 17

it illustrative to imitate the sounds of their harassers and in doing so added an
uncanny dimension to their recounting.11
This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico City
from August 2014 until September 2016. My methodology included individual
and group interviews, audio documentation, and analysis of contemporary and
historical texts published in Mexico.12 This interview subject pool included both
women and men, from young adults to senior citizens, all living in the Mexico
City metropolitan area. I have documented incidents of acoso callejero occurring
within the same gender group (e.g., between homosexual men), as well as several
accounts of male harassers who practice (or at one time practiced) acoso callejero;
however, such topics are beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I intentionally
foreground the testimonies of individuals who self-identify as women and whose
experiences involved harassment by one or more male harassers.13
Because of the sensitive subject matter of acoso callejero and the fact that
it usually occurs between people unknown to each other, it was neither practi-
cal nor tactful for me to conduct cold interviews with strangers on the street.14
Instead, I had the most revelatory discussions about acoso callejero with interloc-
utors whom I had interviewed for previous investigations (particularly amateur
musicians), as well as friends, colleagues, and others with whom I shared at least
a mutual acquaintance. Thus, because I am a musician and social scientist, artists
and social scientists are well represented in this article. Interlocutors spoke most
easily about their experiences well away from the sites where those experiences
occurred, that is, at gatherings of friends, during work breaks behind an ice cream
counter, or at dinner over tacos and beer. A sense of fellowship also seemed to facil-
itate recollection; conversations grew animated between interlocutors who shared
common experiences of harassment. Consequently, this investigation is framed by
two such gatherings and enriched by testimonies from several others: first, a casu-
al dinner party with archaeologist “Karola” and her colleagues; second, a gender
11 Interlocutors refer to the individuals who perpetrate acoso callejero as acosadores (harassers or
stalkers).
12 Finding published research on the subject of acoso callejero has been a challenge. The topic is con-
sidered a footnote in the larger discussion of gender violence in Mexico, and the few scholars who discuss
acoso callejero are largely junior scholars and graduate students in Mexican institutions who incorporate
their own experiences with surveys and interviews. These studies—what I consider a hybrid of primary
and secondary sources—have been crucial in expanding this research beyond my own interview subject
pool. Nevertheless, sound perception and production—things that I argue are central to this topic—are
only dealt with tangentially in these works. For example, see Claudia Ban Toledo, “La mujer en el espacio
público: Urbanismo con perspectiva de género” (título de arquitecta, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 2011); and García Hernández, “¿Qué mecanismos?”
13 In this investigation, I never heard of or witnessed women perpetrating acoso callejero. Perhaps the
absence of such reports is, in part, indicative of gendered behavioral norms that influence how victims
interpret harassment, as well as the mechanisms in place to publicly denounce harassment, which, by
design, assume a male perpetrator and a female victim.
14 According to a 2014 report produced by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography
(INEGI), 96.1 percent of women who reported experiencing crime in Mexico City’s public spaces indicat-
ed that the perpetrator(s) were strangers. INEGI, “Panorama de violencia,” 49.

violence awareness workshop held at the home of multimedia artist and feminist
activist Mónica Mayer.
A Mexico City native, Mayer has been a galvanizing voice in the evolution
of Mexican feminism for over forty years. Now in her early sixties, she has exhib-
ited her art in the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art in Mexico City and the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and is the cofounder of the first feminist art
collective in Mexico, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder). She has been
hosting workshops, free and open to the public, since 1976. These workshops, she
informed me, are typically “attended by artists, students of art and art history, his-
torians, and members of the public in general who are interested in the theme[s]
of art and gender, . . . performance, or some combination.”15 These workshops are
dialogic spaces in which attendees collectively articulate the nature of gender vio-
lence in Mexico City, ruminate on its causes, and construct paths of resistance. As
the topic of acoso callejero is often trivialized or omitted from popular discourse,
these workshops proved crucial to this investigation.
With the exception of Mayer, the interlocutors presented in this article range
in age from early twenties to midforties. Overall, I found individuals in this age
range to be more forthcoming about their experiences of acoso callejero, perhaps
reflecting a generational shift in public awareness concerning the recognition of
acoso callejero as a form of violence. However, accounts differed regarding the cor-
relation between age and the frequency and character of acoso callejero. For exam-
ple, Karola, who is in her late thirties, mentioned that she has been harassed with
greater frequency since her adolescence, while her colleague “Fani,” who is in her
early forties, related that her experiences of harassment peaked in her midtwenties
and have since tapered off. Additionally, these individuals, with few exceptions,
self-identify as mestiza (i.e., racial mixture primarily between Amerindians and
Europeans), a hegemonic racial category in Mexico City and a central construct
of Mexican nationalist ideology.16 Since this label reveals more about a given indi-
vidual’s racial identity than her phenotype, a discussion of race as a factor in acoso
callejero merits an extensive historical analysis of racial politics in Mexico, as well
as an examination of how phenotype might factor into the targeting of victims,
both of which are beyond the scope of this article.
While the majority of the interlocutors presented in this article possess at
least some college-level education, corresponding to various degrees of enhanced
social mobility, it must be emphasized that, in the particular context of Mexico
City, education does not neatly align with economic power and does not necessar-
15 “Asisten artistas, estudiantes de arte e historia del arte, historiadores y público en general interesados
en [los] tema[s] de arte y género, . . . performance o cualquier combinación.” Mónica Mayer, email message
to the author, May 15, 2018.
16 A major architect of Mexico’s postrevolutionary reconstruction, philosopher and secretary of
public education José Vasconcelos attempted to foment a sense of shared destiny and national identity
from an extremely diverse, regionalized population by forwarding a notion of the mestizo/a (a person of
mixed European and Amerindian ancestry) as a zenith of human evolution, “an entirely new element in
human history.” José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, Aspects of Mexican Civilization (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1926), 84–85.

ily liberate individuals from their dependence on public transportation and face-
to-face interaction. Indeed, of 15.6 million weekly commuters in the Mexico City
metropolitan area, only about 22.3 percent utilize private transportation exclusive-
ly or in some combination with walking and public transportation.17 Thus, all the
interlocutors represented in this article are under significant economic pressure
in terms of where they live, work, and consume and how and when they move
between these nodes—all factors that expose these individuals to acoso callejero
and are, in turn, complicated by acoso callejero.
Troubled Binaries: Gendered Difference in Urban Spaces

A central objective of this work is to demonstrate—through the testimonies of liv-
ing people—that the quotidian violence of acoso callejero is one of the many out-
comes of systemic violence and inequity. In adopting this position, I challenge two
fallacies about acoso callejero that are virulent in popular discourse and effectively
cancel each other out: (1) that acoso callejero is simply a “normal” manifestation
of gender relations and (2) that acoso callejero is committed solely by deranged
individuals. Regarding the former, psychologist Andrea García Hernández argues
that acoso callejero is “not seen as violence. In our culture [i.e., Mexican culture]
there exists many expressions of violence that are quotidian and may not appear
aggressive at first glance, but when we analyze and deeply contemplate [them] we
realize that [they are] form[s] of relating that [are] deeply rooted.”18 Anthropolo-
gist Henrietta Moore posits that “violence at the national and international level
is strongly sexualized,” and this violence is transduced to intersubjective relations
in which “genderized difference . . . comes to stand for a very real differences in
power between groups of people and between individuals.”19 Sociologist Soledad
González Montes approaches this transduction in reverse: “Violence exercised by
men against women is not the expression of individual pathology. . . . Rather it is
a constitutive part of a gender order marked by cultural norms and practices that
legitimize and encourage the preservation of a patriarchal structure.”20
Across the board, reports of gender violence are increasing— domestic
abuse, rape, femicide, human trafficking, violence targeting LGBT communities—
while at the same time women, homosexuals, and transgendered people are
assuming greater roles of economic and social power and public visibility.21
González Montes suggests that the impetus for women’s growing participation in
the public sphere is not only the consequence of changing economic realities in
Mexico but also the “destabilization of the generic model of masculine authority.”22
17 INEGI, “Encuesta origen- destino en hogares de la zona metropolitana del valle de México (EOD
2017)” (Mexico City, 2017), 23, http://www.beta.inegi.org.mx /proyectos/enchogares/especiales/eod /2017/.
18 García Hernández, “¿Qué mecanismos?,” 135.
19 Henrietta L. Moore, A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 63.
20 Soledad González Montes, “La violencia de género en el campo mexicano: Contribuciones recien-
tes a su conocimiento,” Estudios Sociológicos 30 (2012): 218.
21 Ban Toledo, “La mujer en el espacio público,” 30.
22 González Montes, “La violencia de género,” 221.

According to sociologist Patricia Gaytan Sánchez, this has led to a paradigmatic
shift in public interactions, producing “changes in the organizational framework
reflected in social patterns distinct to traditional gender interaction.”23 Social
scientist Elizabeth Wilson suggests that as cities grow and become ever more
central to cultural production, the independent movement of women in cities is
increasingly conflated with moral turpitude: “Prostitutes and prostitution recur
continually in the discussion of urban life, until it almost seems as though to
be a woman—an individual, not part of a family or kin group—in the city, is to
become a prostitute—a public woman.”24 Seen from this vantage, the independent
“public woman” and the prostitute both exist beyond the realm of male protection
and are thus equally threatening. Such independent movement has been a risky
venture, says Mayer, because traditionally, the nuclear and extended family served
to simultaneously protect and cloister women. The idealized hierarchical family
structure that Mayer describes— one that is headed by an oligarchy of men who
delegate, discipline, and protect women and children—represents a microcosm
of state power. The promotion of this microcosm is necessary for the state to
perpetuate itself through the myth of its own permanence. As women are drawn
into the public sphere by opportunity or the pressures of necessity, “men and the
state continue their attempts to confine them to the private sphere or to the safety
of certain zones.”25
According to philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, space is inherently neutral in
that its purpose is determined by a given occupant. Thus multiple occupants
may endow a given space with multiple, parallel purposes.26 The imposition of
binaries—male/female, rich/poor, mestizo/indigenous—upon spaces limits the
possibility of their unsanctioned repurposing. Individuals are consigned to “ap-
propriate” spheres and closed circuits. In Mexico City, acoustic patriarchy—the so-
norous enforcement of unequal access to public spaces, one that privileges the free
movement of men and restricts women—is a critical vehicle for this consignment.
While unwelcomed sounds may appear relatively harmless, “there is nothing ethe-
real about female role imperatives when they are viewed as grounded in physical
space. Simultaneously, women’s placement in space provides support for the ideol-
ogy and energizes the cultural definition of female roles.”27
In the limited writing on the subject, the testimonies presented here, and
the initiatives implemented by city government to curb the phenomenon, acoso
callejero is often conceived of as acts perpetrated by men on women.28 It is based
23 Gaytan Sánchez, Del piropo al desencanto, 107.

24 Elizabeth Wilson, Beyond Good and Evil, the Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and
Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 8.
25 Wilson, Beyond Good and Evil, 16.
26 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001), 9.
27 Deborah Pellow, “The Architecture of Female Seclusion in West Africa,” in The Anthropology of
Space and Place: Locating Culture, ed. Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2003), 162.
28 For example, the segregation of metro trains and metro buses between women and children under
the age of twelve and everyone else.

Fig. 1. Street performers render violence of gender and violence of the state corporeal in a demon-
stration against gender violence as part of the Ayotzinapa marches of 2014. Photo © Viviana Zúñiga
Rojas. Used with permission.
on a lightning-fast visual assessment of potential victims by perpetrators. Physical

appearance establishes the premise for victimhood, so that “if a man has a femi-
nine physical appearance, the people with whom he interacts may perceive him
from the gender stereotypes that they have incorporated, [and the] same situation
could occur with a woman who appears masculine.”29 My purpose is not to suggest
that men are never harassed by women or that this anonymous violence never
involves members of the same gender group. Rather, I argue that acoso callejero
is both produced in and serves to enforce conceptual spaces that are defined by a
rigid, heteronormative gender division.
Strange Loops: Anticipation, Perception, and Trauma

Under dimly lit overpasses, in cavernous metro stations, and along busy streets,
harassers evaluate people as if loading a tray in a buffet line. Depending on the
conditions, proximity, and predilections of harassers, they may engage a would-
be victim with a gaze, a touch, or an utterance. Such contact is often brief and
consequence-free for the harasser. According to many of my interlocutors, it is
standard practice— one established by the advice of family and peers and rein-
forced through experience—to ignore these advances, to pretend that one does
not see, feel, or hear them. In an urban setting in which acoso callejero coexists
29 Luis Ortiz Hernández and José Arturo Granados Cosme, “Violencia hacia bisexuales, lesbianas y
homosexuales de la ciudad de México,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 65, no. 2 (2003): 282, http://dx.doi.org
/10.2307/3541566; see also Gaytan Sánchez, Del piropo al desencanto, 110.

with overt violence, many believe that if they return a gaze or engage the harass-
er in any way, they will invite escalation. However, the victim’s auditory ray, the
cognitive filter that allows one to attend to certain sounds over others, also allows
one to monitor a particular acoustic environment without swiveling one’s head.30
The corporeality of the victim prioritizes aural perception: hunched with limbs to
trunk, intentionally blind while listening intently, the victim knows public spaces
as a polyphony of lilting piropos, strident whistles, heavy footfalls, and idling en-
gines. In this ritual of quotidian violence, the Cartesian hierarchy of the senses—
the association of vision with masculine rationality and hearing with feminine
hysteria—is reinforced by the penetrating gaze of the harasser and the furtive, in-
determinate auditory ray of the victim.31
The reductive force of acoso callejero acts upon victims in myriad ways,
meeting variable points of resistance, ambivalence, and vulnerability depending
on the victim. Yet despite the specificity of sensing bodies, there is a point at which
they all collapse under the weight of trauma.32 For psychiatric historian Ruth Leys,
trauma “is fundamentally a disorder of memory. . . . The experience of the trau-
ma, fixed or frozen in time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually
re- experienced in a painful, dissociated, traumatic present.”33 For the sake of illus-
tration, I distinguish three mutually generative responses to acoso callejero that
transect the testimonies presented here: (1) anticipation of acoso callejero, (2) per-
ception of acoso callejero, and (3) trauma response(s) to acoso callejero. I conceive
of these responses as parts of what cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter calls a
strange loop—a structural hierarchy in which, upon reaching the hierarchy’s ze-
nith, one has suddenly returned to its bottom.34 The responses by victims to acoso
callejero present an illusion of sequence that may, in fact, generate and regenerate
each other and occur at any time. Because the prevailing strategy of victims is to
avoid eye contact with the harasser, both the anticipation and the perception of
the event are often consigned to the haptic spectrum of hearing and touch. Thus,
these three responses as experienced by victims are deeply implicated with audio-
cognition and are largely internal, yet they unfold in a complex relationship with
the surrounding world.
30 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2007), 21.
31 Robin James, “Gendered Voices Forum | Sounding Out!,” Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog
(2016), https://soundstudiesblog.com/category/gendered-voices-forum/; Amanda Weidman, “Voice,” in Key-
words in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 234.
32 Here, I use “trauma” in its clinical sense (i.e., “a psychological shock”) rather than “its more wide-
spread, popular usage (an open wound in the collective memory).” Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman,
The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009), 2.
33 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2.
34 Hofstadter coined the term to describe a “paradoxical level- crossing feedback loop” and uses M.
C. Escher’s Drawing Hands as a visual representation. The strange loop consists of a “series of stages that
constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which
feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upward’ shifts turn out to
give rise to a closed cycle.” Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 101–2.

Anticipation
For victims of acoso callejero in Mexico City, the possibility of danger may ema-
nate from a moving, faceless multitude. In the absence of an identifiable harasser
(as is frequently the case), victims may graft their fears onto particular locations,
general areas, times of day, or swaths of the urban population. To dwell in the
city is to calculate the risks of unknowable variables. Victims often consider how
they may appear to potential harassers, struggle to deny the needs and desires that
might draw them out of schedules and places that make them feel safe (e.g., en-
joying a night walk), and cultivate the skills “to interpret the intentions of others
in each instance in which they find themselves.”35 What the victim creates through
the accumulation of experiences and the acquisition of both rumors and hard
evidence is a topography of risk—a conceptual map of areas and times of day or-
ganized by degree of danger.
This way of navigating urban spaces is both sophisticated and subject to
error. It represents a practical method to avoid danger and a ritual practice: making
judgments about geographic locations based on perhaps isolated events may pro-
vide a sense of control over the fleeting, anonymous encounters that characterize
the majority of interactions in the streets of Mexico City. Specialized listening is
at the heart of this process of constant calculation. As an audio- cognitive prac-
tice, anticipation lies at the axis of desire and repulsion. Whether it is the voice of
someone deeply missed, the roar of the waves after a long journey to the sea, or the
impending rebuke of a long-time opponent, the anticipated sound may precede
the sound itself and, in terms of emotional gravity, bear the same weight. One may
prehear a sound that never occurred and, according to musicologist Jean-François
Augoyard and composer Henry Torgue, “can be observed either in the expectation
of an unknown sound . . . or in familiar situations where the listener anticipates in
her or his mind, a foreseeable (or fore-hearable) sonic context.”36 In terms of acoso
callejero, prehearing, coupled with other sensory impressions, may account for the
“funny feeling” (sensación rara) described by many victims that alerts them to dan-
ger that is already under way. During one of Mayer’s workshops, Condés remarked
on the multisensoriality that she has often experienced immediately before an
incident of acoso callejero. “[Perceiving acoso callejero] is a very kinesthetic thing,”
she explained. “Before it happens you’ve already turned around to see someone,
because it’s as if you felt the energy. One feels acoso [callejero] not only because
you hear it but because you perceive it through the other senses.”37
“Ysidora” owns an ice cream shop in the borough of Coyoacán and has
spent her life between Mexico City, the countryside of Guanajuato State, and
Orange County, California. While she has experienced acoso callejero in all three

36 Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (London:
McGill- Queen’s University Press, 2005), 25–26.
37 “Es una cosa muy quinestésica. Antes de que ocurra pues ya volteas a ver a alguien porque es como
si sintieras la energía. Uno siente el acoso no nada más es porque lo escuchas sino porque lo percibes a
través de otros sentidos.” Condés, interview.

places, she remarked that the local flavor of sexual harassment in Mexico City is
especially impersonal and decidedly sonorous. Her personal topography of risk
involves both anticipation and a degree of negation of her own feelings. Said
Ysidora, “I don’t know if it’s because I’m scared or if it just offends me, and in
order to avoid it, I just don’t go to certain places.”38 When general avoidance fails,
Ysidora deploys the following tactics: “If I hear a car slowing down behind me, I
stop and pretend to take something out of my bag or that I forgot something and
go in the opposite direction. If I hear someone walking really close behind me, I
do the same thing. So when I’m walking, I do keep an ear out for those noises. If
someone is approaching me really fast, or if someone’s close, or if someone starts
to run . . . that’s what I listen for.”39
Karola and her coworker “Flamingo” employ remarkably similar tactics:
KAROLA: [If] a car parks beside me, I am alert, but if I hear footsteps coming closer and
closer, I immediately turn around and walk in the opposite direction.
FLAMINGO: I also stop and change [direction]; that is, I act like I’m looking for some-
thing in order to see who’s behind me.
KAROLA: I stop in my tracks and let them pass me so that they know that I know [that
they are there].40
When asked if she has ever returned a gaze when she feels one upon her, Flamingo
shook her head: “Not me. I just glance to see who it is as they pass me. I don’t know
if this is like a placebo, but it gives me the idea that I have a little bit of control over
the situation.”41 Intentionally unseeing, carefully scanning the soundscape while
appearing not to hear, these women use their oblivion as a cloak in a form of play-
acting that seems to be as much about curbing disturbing behavior around them
as providing a modest sense of control.
The fluid conversation between Karola and her colleagues on the topic of
acoso callejero, one frequently interrupted by bursts of laughter and thoughtful
moments of collective reflection, impressed two things upon me. First, despite be-
ing well-acquainted with each other, these coworkers had clearly never discussed
the topic. Second, as they compared their personal topographies, it became evident
that the points of reference that they mentioned represent more to them than
structures of cinderblock and rebar:
38 “Ysidora,” interview with the author, February 17, 2016, Mexico City.
39 “Ysidora,” interview.
40 KAROLA: [Si] un coche que se estaciona junto a mí, estoy de alerta, pero si escucho pisadas más
cerca y más cerca, yo inmediatamente volteo y camino en la dirección opuesta.
FLAMINGO: Yo incluso he llegado a pararme y cambiar [dirección], o sea, de voy a buscar algo para
ver si están atrás de mí.
KAROLA: Me paro en seco y los dejo pasar que se den cuenta que me di cuenta.
“Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview with the author, August 14, 2015, Mexico City.
41 “Yo no. Sólo veo quién es ya cuando me pasa. No sé si sea como un placebo, pero me da como la
idea de que puedo tener un poco de control sobre la situación.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,”
interview, August 14, 2015.

KAROLA: I try to avoid the metro stations in the Historic Center like the Balderas Station.
FLAMINGO: It’s like there are certain stations in the Historic Center, right? For example,
Bellas Artes isn’t so crowded.
JULIETA: Hidalgo is cool too.
FLAMINGO: But if you go to metro Juárez or Garibaldi, it’s not so cool.
KAROLA: I do often change my routes when returning home at night. I say to myself,
“Maybe this way, but definitely not that way.”
JULIETA: Even if it takes more time?
KAROLA: Even if it takes more time, yes! [I decide my route] based on the time and area.
Or I take a taxi with Fani, who lives near me, depending on the hour. I prefer to avoid
men’s areas, which are less crowded but where I also feel more exposed. And I prefer
to walk calmly for a long distance on the street rather than battling with men on the
metro.42
I asked Karola what she means by “men’s areas,” and she answered, “Construction
sites, factories that mostly employ men, like the ice factory near my house, places
where taxi drivers hang out to wait for fares, but also buses and the metro.”43 As of
2015, approximately 52.2 percent of Mexico City’s inhabitants are female, and this
distribution roughly corresponds to the usage of public transportation.44 It is trou-
bling to think that despite their numbers, women like Karola continue to feel that
when they enter a bus or a metro car, they are entering an area belonging to men.
Perception
Karola’s daily commute, a mix of walking and riding a pesero, a trolibus, and the
metro, is consistent with those of the majority of my interlocutors and represents
42 KAROLA: Yo trato de evitar los metros de centro como Balderas.

FLAMINGO: Es que hay ciertos metros del centro ¿no? Por ejemplo, metro Bellas Artes no está tan
pesado.
JULIETA: Hidalgo está chido también.
FLAMINGO: Pero si te vas al metro Juárez o Garibaldi, ya no está tan chido.
KAROLA: A menudo cambio mis rutas para regresar a mi casa en la noche. Me digo, “por acá tal vez,
pero por acá definitivamente no.”
JULIETA: ¿Aunque das más vuelta?
KAROLA: Aunque haga más tiempo, ¡sí! Por la hora y la zona. O me voy en taxi con Fani que vive cer-
ca de mí, dependiendo de la hora. Prefiero evitar las áreas de hombres, que están más vacíos, pero también
donde me siento más expuesta. Y prefiero caminar tranquila por una larga distancia en la calle que estar
batallando con hombres en el metro. “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.
43 “Sitios de construcción, fábricas que en la mayoría de empleados son hombres como la fábrica de
hielo cerca de mi casa, lugares donde los taxistas se juntan para esperar a los clientes, pero también los
autobuses y el metro.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.
44 CONAPO (Consejo Nacional de Poblacion, México), “Proyecciones de la población 2010–2050,”
Secretaría de Gobernación (Mexico City, 2018), http://www.conapo.gob.mx /es/CONAPO/Proyecciones.
According to a 2017 report issued by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, of commut-
ers in the Mexico City metropolitan area who are over the age of six and conduct at least one trip by public
transportation during the work week (7.96 million people), 49.89 percent are women, and 52.02 percent
are men. INEGI, “Encuesta origen- destino,” 23.

Fig. 2. A construction site. An example of a “men’s area” where several interlocutors anticipate acoso
callejero. Photo by the author.
a fairly cost- effective way to get around.45 These modes of transport may be solitary
or crowded depending on the time of day, and each bears different challenges and
possibilities for unwanted encounters. As a commuter slips between these differ-
ent modes he or she experiences what Augoyard and Torgue term cut out—a sud-
den change in the color, volume, resonance, and composition of the enveloping
sound.46 Cut out typically corresponds to a commuter’s visual field— direct sound
overtakes reverberance as one passes from an open plaza to a small shop—but
may also trigger a change in comportment and the depth of one’s sensorial focus.
Following sound artist and social theorist Brandon LaBelle, the “mediating spell”
of the sonic event, in this case, the passage between thresholds, leads to “the effec-
tive dislocation and reconfiguration of the body.”47 If we accept phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s postulation that perception of the surrounding world is
accompanied by an awareness of being perceived, then perhaps, as the commuter
moves from an open space to an intimate one, there may be a sensation of the
witnessing Other pressing closer.48
In the open street, harassers often compete with intense ambient noise. In
order to rattle their victim’s cloaking oblivion, harassers employ the niche effect.
45 A pesero is a small, privately owned and operated diesel bus. A trolibus is a city bus that is powered
by an overhead electric cable.
46 Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 29.
47 LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 107.
48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (1945; London: Rout-
ledge, 2012), 219; see also Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 100.

According to Augoyard and Torgue, the niche effect requires one to occupy “a fa-
vorable zone of sound emission in relation to the intended receiver” and depends
entirely on the acoustic qualities of a given space.49 The sound producer may ma-
nipulate the intensity, pitch, timbre, or rhythm of his sound-producing instrument
(in the case of acoso callejero, the voice) in order to stand out from other sounds.
Musician “Laila,” for example, recounted a confrontation with a group of men in
the street: “When I passed by where they were [standing], they began to whistle so
loudly that the sound was almost deafening.”50 However, if harassers use the niche
effect to demand their victims’ attention, I argue that these niches may be both
acoustic and sociocultural. For example, a deafening whistle issued in the street
would hurt most people’s ears, regardless of where they hail from. But in the par-
ticular context of Mexico City—where whistles not only are loud noises but also
represent a substantial, historically inflected mode of communication—a shrill
whistle can perform double duty depending on who is listening: it can be both a
hurtful blow and a verbal directive.51
Harassers may find another sort of niche by penetrating the personal space
of another; extreme proximity provides another way to compete with the ambient
din. Many victims of acoso callejero recount the effort of harassers to “close the
distance” in the street or ambush them behind unseen corners or amid crowded
bottlenecks. For example, Karola recalled a frightening encounter that took place
near the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood. “My friend
Clara and I were strolling along, just talking and talking. [Clara] was very distract-
ed, but I started to sense the footsteps of two men behind us: the shoes [went] clap,
clap, clap, but they [the men] weren’t talking. Their silence alarmed me. I sensed
them getting closer, and I spun around. . . . They were two enormous men dressed
in black and staring at us.”52 Karola was tipped off not only by the sound of foot-
steps but also by the eerie silence of two men walking together. The men caught
up to Karola and her friend Clara and, perhaps noticing that Clara was the more
distracted of the pair, asked her for directions. Karola grabbed her friend, pulled
her away from the men, and sternly commanded, “Clara, come on!” (Clara, ¡ven!).
Walking away at a fast clip, Karola spotted a third man waiting for them at the
end of the block. He was “a kind of interceptor . . . waiting in ambush,” explained
Karola.53 If there was indeed an ambush in place, Karola’s reaction to the sound of
49 Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, 79–80.
50 “Cuando pasé por donde ellos estaban comenzaron a chiflar tan fuerte que se hizo un sonido ensor-
decedor.” “Laila,” email message to the author, May 17, 2016.
51 “In contemporary Mexico City, . . . whistles may take the form of simple signals meant to announce
the presence of an individual, family, clique, or to warn against danger. They may be used to startle, con-
found, and mock unwelcomed intruders demonstrating a form of sonorous, territorial defense.” Anthony
W. Rasmussen, “Sales and Survival within the Contested Acoustic Territories of Mexico City’s Historic
Centre,” Ethnomusicology Forum 26, no. 3 (2017): 322.
52 “Mi amiga Clara y yo estábamos paseando hablando y hablando. [Clara] venía muy distraída, pero
yo empecé a sentir las pisadas de dos hombres detrás de nosotros: los zapatos clap, clap, clap pero ellos no
venían hablando. Su silencio me alertó. Yo los sentí más cerca y volteo. . . . Eran dos hombres enormes
vestidos de negro y viéndonos.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.
53 “Un tipo de interceptor esperando en una emboscada.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,”

her pursuers upset their plans just enough to allow the women to slip away. She
summarized, “The sound tipped me off . . . the sound and the absence of sound.
They came up to us, and we didn’t know if they were going to assault us or what.
We were trembling. We stopped trembling [and] walked in a big loop around the
neighborhood in order to get to another metro station. It was horrible!”54
Harassers may feign vulnerability by asking for assistance or money or by
claiming that they have just been accosted themselves. They may offer assistance:
many female victims of acoso callejero describe incidents in which men warned
them that they were in a place where they should not be and offered to escort
them. Other times, the harasser is direct, as in the case of a man who cornered
climate scientist “Marta,” asking her, “Wanna have sex?” (¿Quieres sexo?). However,
Marta explained that in her experience, it is much more common to hear sala-
cious remarks such as güerita (little white girl), mamacita (little mama), mi preciosa
(my precious), mi reina (my queen), and so on.55 Such utterances demonstrate a
perversion of the language of intimacy, and to complicate matters, the familiar
language and inflated praise of piropos are common features of business transac-
tions in Mexico City’s informal economy and essential parts of the street vendor’s
semantic tool kit. Psychologist Susana Velázquez suggests that between strangers,
these words may “provoke ambiguous sentiments in women who may appreciate
the compliments as a self- esteem boost,” but she warns that, more often than not,
the piropo between strangers has nothing to do with flattery.56 Linguist Judith
Schreier adds that regardless of the context of a piropo, its likely impact (if not
motivation) is “to reinforce the image that he [the piropo giver] is in charge of
himself and society and is, above all, masculine.”57
The discomfort that piropos inspire in most of my interlocutors makes it
clear that they do not take them as compliments, yet some also express a wisp
of ambivalence. In several conversations, interlocutors wondered if other women
enjoy the attention. There is a subtle narrative in these accounts that someone
(no one seems to be able to determine who) enjoys or at least is unaffected by
acoso callejero. Consequently, victims are doubly tormented—first, through the
harassment itself, and second, by the thought that there is something wrong with
them for feeling harassed. The myth that reacting negatively to piropos is outlier
behavior serves to isolate victims, but it also animates and justifies the behavior
interview, August 14, 2015.

54 “El sonido me alertó . . . el sonido y el no sonido. Venían como sobre nosotros and pensamos que
nos iban a asaltar o no sabemos. Temblamos. Terminamos temblando, rodeamos todo el barrio para ir a
otro metro. ¡Fue horrible!” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.
55 “Marta,” interview with the author, February 10, 2016, Mexico City. “Güero/a (diminutive: güerito/a)
literally refers to a light-skinned person but is often used as a broad signifier of beauty. As a legacy of
European colonization during which time a rigid caste system was enforced, such everyday expressions
betray a strong epistemological correlation between phenotype, beauty and social status.” Rasmussen,
“Sales and Survival,” 328.
56 Susana Velázquez, Violencias cotidianas, violencia de género: Escuchar, comprender, ayudar (Buenos
Aires, Argentina: Paidós, 2004), 239, 146–47.
57 Schreier, “Quién fuera mecánico,” 72.

of perpetrators. But how do interlocutors tell the difference in a cultural context
where the same expressions may be meant to convey genuine affection, facilitate
business, or ensnare and dominate? Ysidora explained, “It is all about how a person
says something: the silkiness of his voice, where his eyes go while he’s talking, how
close to you he chooses to stand.”58
Breaching one’s personal space, appealing to a victim’s politeness, or ma-
nipulating words of endearment are tactics for some harassers that others forgo.
Laila recounted one of her earliest and most haunting memories of acoso callejero,
which bypassed conversation altogether. Only twelve years old at the time, walking
alone to school in the predawn, Laila saw a young man exiting a construction site
farther down the sidewalk. “The moment we crossed paths,” she explained, “he
grabbed my breast, and the only thing I could do was to say, ‘Asshole!’ It was hard
to get the words out because I was somewhere between surprise and anger. I didn’t
know what else to do.”59 The man strolled along, entitled and unconcerned.
The Sardine Life: Aboard the Metro

Passing between the open street through the metro station and wrestling aboard
waiting metro cars, commuters must engage in what journalist / cultural critic Car-
los Monsiváis dubs “squeezed humanism” (humanismo del apretujón).60 There is a
dramatic cut out between the shimmering reverb tank of the boarding platform
and the coffin-like acoustics of the car. Commuters are greeted by a mass of bodies,
heat, odors, and intimate sounds, and their perceptive spheres draw inward like the
petals of a heliotrope at sundown. There, one enters the realm of caresses, jabs, and
whispers. The intense compression of bodies has the effect of suspending many be-
haviors informed by conceptualizations of public and private space; consequently,
many commuters perform and tolerate behaviors that they otherwise would not.
For example, positioning one’s face within centimeters of a stranger’s; accidentally
touching the hair, torso, or hand of another as one grasps for an object of support;
or pressing one’s chest or pelvis against another’s is generally tolerated with the
tacit understanding that there is simply nowhere else for these body parts to go.
Obviously, the cramped conditions of a metro car offer ample opportunities for
harassers. These individuals no longer need to shout, disorient, or trick their victims
into a conversation. The distance between harasser and victim has, as a result of
limited space, been closed for them. Simultaneously, this peculiar social space, in
which normal rules of public interaction are suspended, opens new dimensions of
misinterpretation and self- doubt for the victim. Everyone is touching, pressing, and
shifting their weight on tired feet. Which caress is intentional and which is not?
For Flamingo, an empty metro car is not much better than a crowded one.
She described an incident that occurred while riding the metro when she was sev-
59 “Al momento de emparejarnos me tocó un seno y yo lo único que pude hacer fue decir ‘pendejo.’
Me costó mucho que saliera la voz porque entre sorpresa y enojo. No supe qué más hacer.” “Laila,” email
message.
60 Carlos Monsiváis, Los rituales del caos (Mexico City: Bolsillo Era, 1995), 111.

enteen. A man approached Flamingo, who was alone, from behind, tapped her on
the back to get her to face him, and began masturbating. She remembered, “When
I saw what he was doing I thought, ‘Dude, if he’s masturbating in my face, he’s
probably going to rape me.’ So I remained super still.” I asked her what happened
next. “Well,” she answered, “fortunately, he got off at one station before mine, be-
cause if not, he could have followed me home. As soon as he left, I started to cry
out. I felt super, super, super scared!”61 Flamingo described a sensation that welled
up inside her while she was in the man’s presence, as if she was wailing internally
but could not release it. Only after the man walked away— casually, as if this were
part of his daily routine— could she bring her voice back into the world.
Personal Sound Systems: From Cocooning to Subterfuge

In the crowded metro car, passengers can choose what they gaze upon but must
bear what they smell, feel, and hear. But what of listening? Sociologist Virdiana
Tovar Nemesio suggests that “listening in” on private conversations is difficult to
avoid on long metro rides and to extricate oneself, adds philosopher Don Ihde, is
“essentially a matter of psychic control.”62 For victims of acoso callejero, simply
exerting “psychic control” over their acoustic arena is not enough to safely navi-
gate public spaces.63 Mexico City’s experienced auditors, as well as many of my ac-
quaintances in the United States, often wear headphones while walking or aboard
public transport.64 In the case of victims of acoso callejero, this practice serves at
least two purposes. First, sound studies scholars such as Karin Bijsterveld, Jean-Paul
Thibaud, and Michael Bull forward the notion that through the use of a personal
sound system (an iPod, a CD player, or a car stereo system), urbanites are able
to customize their listening experiences in public, “decompos[ing] the territorial
structure of the city and recomposing it through spatio-phonic behaviors.”65 The
“acoustic cocoon” of one’s music playlist “provide[s] a performative shelter for the
senses by both filtering out the undifferentiating flood of sound as well as em-
powering individual agency in controlling what comes in.”66 Despite or perhaps
61 “Cuando vi lo que estaba haciendo pensé, ‘güey, si se está masturbando en mi cara, probablemente
me va a violar.’ Entonces yo me quedé como súper inmóvil. . . . Pues, se bajó como una estación antes que
yo, afortunadamente, porque si no, hubiera podido seguirme a casa. Tan pronto como se fue, me solté a
llorar. ¡Me sentí súper, súper, súper asustada!” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August
14, 2015.
62 Virdiana Tovar Nemesio, “El acoso sexual a mujeres en el transporte público de la ciudad de
México (2009–2010)” (licenciada en sociología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), 46;
Ihde, Listening and Voice, 82.
63 Phenomenologists Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter conceive of the acoustic arena as “the experi-
ence of a social spatiality, where a listener is connected to the sound-producing activities of other individ-
uals.” Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 25.
64 Daughtry, Listening to War.
65 Jean-Paul Thibaud, “The Sonic Composition of the City,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael
Bull and Les Black (New York: Berg, 2003), 329; see also Michael Bull, “iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasures
of Audiotopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, Oxford
Handbooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 526–43.
66 LaBelle, Acoustic Territories, 97; see also Karin Bijsterveld, “Acoustic Cocooning,” Senses and Society 5,

because of the common practice of amplifying music at high volumes in Mexico
City’s public spaces (e.g., to advertise, to entertain, to index a certain identity or
lifestyle, etc.), it is normal to witness pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and patrons of
public transport moving about in customized personal audio environments. How-
ever, while filtering out unwanted sounds is certainly at play here, a more pressing
issue for victims of acoso callejero is the need to listen to the acoustic arena with-
out appearing to listen.
Gender violence in Mexico City lies along a spectrum of intensification.
The anonymity of harassers and the ambiguity of some of their actions present
an interpretive challenge for victims and often provoke a crisis of intense self-
doubt. At Mayer’s workshop, Condés described how this sensorial uncertainty is
surgically exploited by harassers: “I believe that unintelligible sounds are the most
common type. . . . I think this is because they [harassers] are highly trained and like
to find the point where only the victim will perceive it. It’s like something already
happened, and it happened so quickly that it’s difficult for someone to perceive it
because we are not paying attention. . . . In the context of the city, each person goes
around like a robot. You don’t go around with your senses open.”67 Listening with-
out appearing to listen defends against only certain types of harassment, scenarios
where a harasser shouts to grab the attention of a victim or tries to spark a con-
versation. These are the most common forms of acoso callejero and the ones that
wearing headphones most help to tamp down. However, victims of acoso callejero
must also be attentive to sensory clues that hint that a particular encounter may
be leading in an unusual direction. For example, Karola loves to orchestrate her
day with the music of her favorite artists, such as David Bowie and the Cure, and
this customized immersion lends a degree of “individual agency,” which LaBelle
describes. But Karola added, “I never play my music at a high volume, because I
have learned that being distracted in the street can get you in trouble. So I just use
music to accompany me. It puts me in a lighter mood while I walk.” Colleague
“Julieta” was curious about the way Karola uses her headphones and asked her to
elaborate on how she is able to perform the double duty of enjoying her music
and also being vigilant. “It’s like this,” explained Karola. “I go around like, ‘la, la,
la,’ but I am always alert.”68 As a frequent victim of acoso callejero, Karola cannot
afford to miss a single warning, cut out, or ambient metamorphosis, but she gleans
no. 2 (2010): 192, https://doi.org/10.2752/174589210X12668381452809.

67 “Yo creo que de las cosas más comunes son los sonidos ininteligibles. . . . Pienso que pasa justo
porque [los acosadores] están muy entrenados y como en encontrar el punto en el que solamente la
acosada lo percibe. Es como que ya paso y fue tan rápido que es difícil que alguien lo perciba porque no
estamos poniendo atención. [En] el contexto de la ciudad, cada quien va como robot. No vas como con los
sentidos abiertos.” Condés, interview.
68 “Nunca escucho mi música a un volumen alto porque he aprendido que estar distraída en la calle
te pueden en peligro. Entonces, sólo uso la música para acompañarme. Que me pueda hacer más ligero el
trayecto caminando. . . . Es así. . . . Yo voy así como ‘la, la, la’ pero estoy alerta siempre.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,”
“Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview with the author, April 5, 2016, Mexico City.

little from keynote sounds (e.g., traffic, normal crowd noise, etc.) and is able to filter
them skillfully.69
Trauma
Victims of acoso callejero often maintain a prehistory of harassment that is sub-
sumed by a more conscious, personal narrative. For many of my interlocutors,
incidents of harassment populate the margins of conscious memory. I asked Laila,
now in her late thirties, about her first experience of acoso callejero. “I can’t put an
exact date on it,” said Laila, “but it happened when I was a child.”70 Karola believes
that over the span of her life, the frequency of acoso callejero has increased. “When
I was a little girl,” she explained, “the men didn’t bother me. I grew up, and I feel
like men bother me more now because they see me as mature.”71 Karola also sug-
gested that perhaps it was not that she was left alone by harassers as a girl; rather,
she was too young to read signs that bore sinister intent or to label the uneasy feel-
ings that these encounters gave her. Yet whether or not one is mature enough to
comprehend the violence acted upon them, says García Hernández, this violence
accumulates in the corporeality of its victims: “From the time that they are small,
women have been taught to occupy a space of limited form, adopting ‘convenient’
body postures like sitting with a rigid back [and] walking with short, slow steps. . . .
Women must maintain all these body postures to appear aesthetically pleasing,
and they also sometimes utilize them in order to defend themselves in the mo-
ment of sexual harassment.”72 During our dinner party, Karola and Fani reflected
on how their comportment changes in the street:
FANI: It’s like you make generalizations about people in the street, right? You walk
around, or you see that there’s a construction site ahead or something, then you walk past
anyway, but you just feel . . .
KAROLA: Tense!
FANI: Yeah! Or you try to cross [the street] to the other sidewalk, and nobody shouts at
you, but you already associate a certain type of person or certain spaces with people who
lack respect, so your body is already tense.
KAROLA: You prepare yourself. It is a reaction of fear, right? And this protection changes
everything: your face, your expression, your body. You make yourself look serious all the
69 Composer R. Murray Schafer’s term to describe sounds that are so continuous or ubiquitous that
they garner little conscious attention. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the
Tuning of the World (1977; Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1994), 9.
70 “No tengo la fecha exacta, pero sucedió cuando yo era niña.” “Laila,” email message.
71 “Cuando yo era niña, los hombres no me molestaban. Crecí y me siento que los hombres me mo-
lestan más ahora que me ven madura.” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, April 5, 2016.
72 García Hernández, “¿Qué mecanismos?,” 155.

time, like a snob.73
Such untenable states of body consciousness are often followed by “a kind

of indifference necessary in order to endure the great quantity of things that pres-
ent themselves daily in the streets and on public transportation.”74 During many of
my interviews, I was taken aback by the cool delivery of some interlocutors. Many
recounted memories of humiliation and panic without any evident emotion or
with flippant humor. Several simply reported on events as if they had read about
them in a newspaper.75 On the other hand, some conversations slowly evolved,
growing more emotional and mutually revelatory. Regarding her research with
sexual abuse survivors, composer Jenny Johnson notes that many had “sensory and
synaesthetic associations with specifically musical or acoustic memories.”76 In my
own interviews with interlocutors, it was often the recovery of a sensory detail—a
spoken phrase, a whistle, the description of a particular sonic atmosphere—that
transformed the conversation from journalistic to emotional. I am reminded of
Johnson’s belief in the uncanny ability of the audible to coax traumatic memories
to the surface. For example, as Laila struggled to articulate both the details and the
emotional impact of acoso callejero in her own life, she seemed surprised by her
own words as they took shape: “I must confess that I avoid dressing in skirts and
short dresses, and if I do, I wear nylons. Now as I write this I am realizing this. It
has converted into an automatic action of my day-today [life]. How sad! I want to
avoid acoso callejero, and I don’t even consider it something to be fought against
but rather as something that is and is immovable. Because of this, I am responsible
for protecting myself against it. HOW SAD!”77
Voices In Between
The vast majority of interlocutors say that they ignore acoso callejero whenever
possible. They return the volley of shouts, whistles, gazes, and gropes with pensive
73 FANI: Es como que haces generalizaciones sobre la gente en la calle, ¿no? Vas pasando o ves que
enfrente hay una obra o algo, entonces pasas de todos modos, pero ya vas así como . . .
KAROLA: ¡Tensa!
FANI: ¡Ajá! O tratas de ir por otra banqueta y nadie te grita, pero ya asocias a cierto tipo de gente o a
ciertos espacios con gente que te falta al respeto, entonces ya es que tu cuerpo se tensa.
KAROLA: Te preparas. Es una reacción de miedo ¿no? Y esta protección cambia todo: tu semblante, tu
expresión, tu cuerpo. Te pones seria todo el tiempo, como mamona.
“Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.
75 See Velazquez, Violencias cotidianas, 62.
76 Jenny Olivia Johnson, “The Luminous Noise of Broken Experience: Synaesthesia, Acoustic Memo-
ry, and Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Late 20th Century United States” (PhD diss., New York University,
2009), x, http://gradworks.umi.com/33/80/3380203.html.
77 “Debo confesar que evito vestirme con faldas o vestidos cortos y si lo llego a hacer, uso mallas. Aho-
ra que lo escribo caigo en cuenta de esto. Se ha convertido ya en una acción automática de mi día a día.
¡Qué triste! Quiero evitar el acoso callejero y ya ni siquiera me lo planteo como algo que se debe combatir
sino como algo que está y es inamovible. Por tanto yo soy responsable de protegerme. ¡QUÉ TRISTE!”
“Laila,” email message.

silence. Silence may be a sign of both compliance and resistance, used “to imply
an active politics of domination and nonparticipation[, as well as] a significant
political, symbolic, and interpretive strategy to respond to situations of conflict.”78
Silence is indeed a strategic response and one that many harassers seem to expect.
For these victims, silence often extends from the encounter itself to the recollec-
tion of the encounter and is, in turn, reinforced by the silence of others. Speaking
from her own experience, Karola believes that acoso callejero is a topic that is
rarely discussed among either family or friends. She added, “What’s so sad is that
nobody talks about it because you take it for granted that it happens to all of us.”79
I am curious about the words that my interlocutors, in the blur of the en-
counter with their harassers, have left unsaid. I ask them what they would like
to say to their harassers if they were certain that they could speak without fear
of retaliation. “I would like to tell them that I’m not a Barbie doll,” said Ysidora.
“If they think I’m pretty, well, ‘thank you,’ but I don’t need to hear it. I don’t need
their opinion or approval. Their attention makes me feel uncomfortable, and they
need to respect my space and respect me.”80 Marta responded similarly but could
not overlook the subjectivity of these individuals despite the fact that they have
denied hers:
They need to understand that women don’t exist for the visual or physical pleasure of
men. If I’m walking down the street to pick up my laundry, that is not an opportunity
to hit on me. [Having said that,] I’m constantly analyzing things on different levels.
Not to excuse acoso callejero, but I try to understand why these men do it. And I feel
like Mexico is such a horribly unequal country that this is one of the manifestations. I
think a lot of these guys wouldn’t care about my feminist perspective about why aco-
so callejero is bad. They’re like, “I do it because I feel like it [cuando me de la gana].”81
Flamingo is less generous to her harassers. She said, “My fantasy [confrontation] is
very violent. I feel so violated sometimes that there comes a moment when I would
like to . . . [throws a right hook at the air].”82
The Daughters of Violence

Las Hijas de Violencia (The Daughters of Violence) were a Mexico City–based
performance art group that was active from 2013 to 2016 and that would verbally
confront harassers, shoot confetti in their faces, and then bombard them with
their theme song, “Sexista Punk,” with the help of backpack-mounted microphone/
78 Ana María Ochoa Gautier, “Silence,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 183–84.
79 “Lo que es tan triste es que nadie lo habla porque das por hecho que a todas nos pasa.” “Karola,”
interview with the author, June 12, 2016, Mexico City.
81 “Marta,” interview.
82 “Mi fantasía es muy violenta. Me siento tan violentada algunas veces que llega un momento que a
mí me gustaría . . .” “Fani,” “Flamingo,” “Julieta,” and “Karola,” interview, August 14, 2015.

speaker rigs.83 Karen Condés, actress Ana Beatriz Martínez, and visual artist Bet-
zabeth Estafanía were inspired to found Las Hijas—and to adopt punk rock as
a performance tool—after the 2012 arrest of the activist punk rock group Pussy
Riot.84 Through their performance, Las Hijas sought not only to draw attention to
acoso callejero but to challenge some of the prejudices that accompany it. Condés
explained:
People think that acoso callejero occurs much more frequently or with greater vio-
lence in poor or marginalized neighborhoods, and we [Las Hijas] know from our
own experience as women that there is [also] a harassment committed by the upper
middle class. And it is, perhaps, a subtler harassment but no less violent. So it was for
that reason that we tried to stage performances in various places. . . . For example, the
neighborhoods of La Roma and Condesa. . . . The people who usually patronize these
places are more or less upper-middle- class people. And we wanted to do this not only
to expose harassers of the middle to lower economic class but also to capture the
upper-middle- class harassers who exist and are equally violent.85
I first discovered Las Hijas through their promotional video, “Fighting

Street Harassers with Confetti Guns and Punk Rock.”86 Featuring English titles
and English translations of Spanish lyrics, interview excerpts with Las Hijas, and
footage of real confrontations with harassers, the video succeeded in bringing in-
ternational attention to the crisis of acoso callejero in Mexico City. During their
tenure (they have since gone on to pursue individual projects), Las Hijas received
press coverage from a number of English- and Spanish-language publications, in-
cluding Buzzfeed, Good Magazine, and El Universal, reaching a climax in 2016, when
Al Jazeera ran a video segment about Las Hijas that “tallied millions of views.”87
Their music video, “Sexista Punk,” provides a rich allegory of acoso calle-
jero, poetically demonstrating both what it is and how it feels. The video begins
with jump cuts showing each of four group members as they walk alone, casually
dressed, along a leafy Mexico City street. Harassers hop from off frame, startling
83 For brevity, I will refer to Las Hijas de Violencia as “Las Hijas” throughout.
84 Ana Paula de la Torre, “Las Hijas de Violencia: Con punk y performance combaten el acoso calle-
jero en México,” Pijamasurf, September 23, 2014, https://pijamasurf.com/2014 /09/conoce -a-las-hijas- de -la
-violencia- con-punk-y-performance - combaten- el-acoso - callejero - en-mexico/.
85 “Se piensa el acoso callejero viene mucho más frecuentemente o con mayor violencia en sectores
pobres o marginales y nosotras sabemos por nuestra propia experiencia como mujeres pues que [también]
existe un acoso por parte de la clase media-alta. Y que es, tal vez, un acoso más sutil pero no por ello
menos violento. Entonces fue por esa razón que nosotras tratamos de realizar el performance en lugares
variados. . . . Por ejemplo, la colonia Roma y la colonia Condesa. . . . La gente que suele consumir en esos
lugares es gente más o menos de clase media-alta. Y Queríamos hacer esto justo para no recargarnos sol-
amente en visibilizar acosadores de clase económica media-baja si no también poder captar a acosadores
de clase media-alta que existen y que son igual de violentos.” Karen Condés, email message to the author,
May 25, 2018.
86 “Fighting Street Harassers with Confetti Guns and Punk Rock,” YouTube video, 1:28, posted by
“AJ+,” January 27, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ze4AH_5kJw.
87 Alba Calderón, “Acoso sexual. Alto a piropos con confeti,” Metrópoli, El Universal, February 13, 2016,
http://www.eluniversal.com.mx /articulo/metropoli/df/2016/02/13/acoso -sexual-alto -piropos- con- confeti.

their victim. Some appear behind the protagonist and deliver gentle caresses, while
others gather in the background. The harassers are wearing plastic animal masks;
beaks and snouts protrude from dark hoods.
The narrative perspective of the video shifts, and we move from the voy-
eurism of the street to a representation of the victim’s interiority: she (each of Las
Hijas becomes the subject in a series of jump cuts) is again alone, but this time
she is posed in front of a bare brick wall (a symbol of the urban terrain). With
tense shoulders, she gazes into the camera and braces herself in anticipation as
a wreath of disembodied hands reach toward her from out of frame. The hands
billow like tentacles, and she appears to grow smaller. Cutting from scene to scene
with the rhythm of the soundtrack, we see each woman in solitary torment but
each expressing that torment in a slightly different way. The grasping hands begin
caressing, groping, and tugging. Pink tongues wag through the plastic muzzles of
the masks.
The video continues. Back on the street, one of Las Hijas is mobbed by the
anonymous harassers and strikes back by shoving a bird-faced attacker against a
lamppost. The mob responds by whipping off their masks, revealing the faces of
Las Hijas themselves. Wide- eyed, shoulders shrugged, the unmasked stalkers seem
to be saying, “Calm down. What’s the big deal?” As they shuffle off, the cycle of vi-
olence is complete: the victim has been both humiliated and denied the validity of
that feeling. At the end, each of Las Hijas gazes into the camera, breathing deeply.
Condés delivers a final message. Calmly drawing her confetti gun to her line of
sight, she takes aim at the camera, and pop, we see what her harassers are meant to
see—a flurry of colored paper punctuated by a final drum roll and trailed by a lazy
coil of white smoke.88
As a piece of music, “Sexista Punk” loads this visual narrative with the ten-
sion of a steel spring. Driving punk rock music, composed by Alejandro Preisser,
in which sixteenth-note machine gun bursts punctuate phrases of kick drum and
staccato shouts, passes stanza to stanza between Las Hijas and grows more intense
with each volley.89 At four bars, the percussive wash of drums and voice is met
by Phrygian interjections of electric guitar and bass, overdriven to the point of
fizzy saturation. One can almost feel the racing pulse of the victim and sense the
88 “Sexista Punk Las Hijas de Violencia,” dir. Zaba Zantcher, original music by Alejandro Preisser,
lyrics by Ana Beatriz and Ana Karen, YouTube video, 2:59, posted by Las Hijas de Violencia, December 30,
2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5pqOWBLNqA.
89 Throughout its nearly forty-year history, Mexico City punk rock has served as a vehicle for anties-
tablishment politics and feminist activism, and women have provided a crucial voice in its development,
particularly during the 1980s. For more on the history of feminism and punk rock in Mexico, see Julia
Palacios and Tere Estrada, “‘A contra corriente’: A History of Women Rockers in Mexico,” in Rockin’ Las
Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America, ed. Deborah Pacini-Hernández, Héctor Fernández
L’Hoeste, and Eric Zolov (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 142–59; and Alice Poma
and Tommaso Gravante, “‘Fallas del sistema’: Análisis desde abajo del movimiento anarcopunk en México,”
Revista Mexicana de Sociología 78, no. 3 (2016): 437–67. Condés informed me that she met Pressier while
collaborating on a choreography for a theater project entitled “Tripulación abordo,” and when she later
asked if Pressier would help to compose the music and record “Sexista Punk,” he was willing to do it free
of charge. Condés, email message.

internal struggle to ignore, repress, or retaliate. Reaching the chorus, Las Hijas join
together over a bed of double-bass drum rolls and chromatic riffs that ascend a
spiral of rising tension.
The lyrics, written by Ana Beatriz and Condés, add a critical layer of mean-
ing to the video. While the images cleverly evoke the feelings that many victims
describe, the lyrics convey their inner voices in the words that so many interlocu-
tors confess they long to express:
[Extracto: 2o Verso] [Excerpt: 2nd Verse]
En una voz baja, tú me dices tantas In a low voice, you tell me so many things.
cosas.
Paso a un lado y veo tus miradas I pass to the side and I see your revolting gaze.
asquerosas.
Si esto fuera el metro, no dudo ni en un If this were the metro, I wouldn’t doubt for a
momento moment
que tus manos en mis nalgas ya estarían that your hands would be inside my ass.
adentro.
No me halagas. Me incomodas como You don’t flatter me. You make me
todo el resto. uncomfortable like they all do.
No te importa cómo vista o qué traiga You don’t care how I look or what I’m
puesto. wearing.
No tienes derecho y lo que haces es de You don’t have the right and you act like a
un cerdo. pig.
¡No tienes derecho y lo que haces es de You don’t have the right and you act like a
un cerdo! pig!
Si hoy me callo, tú te callas, nos callamos, If today I shut up, you shut up, we shut up,
de un pedazo de carne no bajamos. we are nothing more than pieces of meat.
O sea que no es normal que me trates de It’s not normal that you try to touch me,
tocar, that you talk to me as if you were going to
que me hables como si me fueras a violar. rape me.
[Coro] [Chorus]
¡Sexista! ¡Machista! ¿Qué es lo que tú Sexist! Machista! What is it you want?
quieres?
¿Mostrar tu hombría? ¡A la mierda de mi To show your manliness? Get the fuck out of
vista! my sight!
The objectives of Las Hijas are pragmatic. Ana Beatriz explains, “We certain-
ly don’t think that we’re going to change the world. But we sure know that we’ve
changed ours.”90 The salient point here is that while Las Hijas are interested in
educating would-be harassers and generally raising awareness of acoso callejero,
90 “Fighting Street Harassers.”

the more critical (and possibly more feasible) goal is to remove the isolation that
many victims experience by reminding them that they are not alone.
Conclusion
During an interview with Mayer at her home in the Del Valle neighborhood of
Mexico City, I brought up “Sexista Punk,” and Mayer lit up, telling me that she
knows Las Hijas and that several of the group members would be attending her
upcoming workshop. I returned the following week, characteristically early and
a bit nervous. During the course of Mayer’s workshop, Las Hijas shared videos
of some of their recent projects and discussed the importance of social media in
their struggle to promote public awareness of gender violence in Mexico. It is also
through media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter that Las Hijas garnered a new
sort of harassment. Emboldened by anonymity, perhaps even more than what they
feel on the street, individuals threatened by Las Hijas’ message regularly posted
vicious insults and sexist memes and even targeted individual members with death
threats. One in particular showed a man with his face covered by a bandana and
brandishing an automatic rifle. His message to Las Hijas stated, “If you don’t stop,
I know how to stop you” (Si no paras, yo sé cómo pararte). Secure in the warm fel-
lowship of Mayer’s workshop, we all laughed at the man’s cowardice. Nevertheless,
Las Hijas take these threats seriously and, consequently, are very guarded about
divulging their personal information to the press.
By defining acoso callejero in explicit terms and symbolically inverting
this ritual of dominance and humiliation, Las Hijas are exposing the breadth and
depth of acoso callejero in Mexico City. Mayer believes that Las Hijas address a par-
ticular issue at the root of the crisis: the isolation of victims. If many of the victims
of acoso callejero express a fantasy response to their assailants, Las Hijas give these
fantasies flesh. Mayer states: “Las Hijas are self-reflecting; they’re saying what they
want. Something that has changed is that forty years ago, there was nobody doing
these things. I think it’s wonderful that the voice has multiplied and that it has a
lot of textures and different attitudes today.”91
Though Las Hijas have achieved international notoriety, they are not
alone. For example, adding both force and nuance to this manifold voice is Lia
García (a.k.a. La Novia Serena), trans activist, multimedia performance artist, and
cofounder of the Red de Juventudes Trans México (Mexican Trans Youth Network)
who, through her performance series “Affective Encounters,” works to decolonize
“sociocultural images of femininity”; Bataclán Internacional (not to be confused
with the theater in Paris), founded by gay rights activist and performance artist Elías
Luna and focused on challenging boundaries of gender performance and taboos
of human sexuality while drawing attention to the politics of gender violence; and
Producciones y Milagros Agrupación Feminista (Productions and Miracles Feminist
Association), a collective of “lesbian feminists working for the rights of women
[and] struggling against the patriarchal system, capitalism, racism, and sexism
91 Mónica Mayer, interview with the author, February 19, 2016, Mexico City.

in all its expressions.”92
This nascent movement
coincided with the
March against Gender
Violence in April 24,
2016, the first of its kind
to be held in Mexico
City.93 The rising public
profile of acoso callejero
has also inspired social
experiments aimed at
bolstering solidarity
among victims by
drawing attention to the
public apathy that allows
acoso callejero to fester.
One such experiment
staged incidents of
acoso callejero on public
transport in order to
highlight the hesitance of
bystanders to intercede
in these attacks.94
Public outcry
concerning acoso
callejero has forced
policy makers in Mexico
City to play “catchup.”
Legislation against
domestic violence in
Mexico first began in the Fig. 3. Metro passengers waiting in an area designated for wom-
en and children only. Photo © María Magdalena Alonso Pérez.
late 1980s, but it was not
Used with permission.
until the passing of the
General Law of Access of
Women to a Violence-Free Life in 2007 that public harassment (e.g., acoso callejero)
92 Valerie E. Leibold, “La Sirena decolonial: Lia La Novia y sus interrupciones afectivas,” Extravió:
Revista electrónica de literatura comparada 8 (2015): 151; “Quienes somos,” Producciones y Milagros Agrupación
Feminista A.C., http://produccionesymilagros.blogspot.com/p/quienes-somos.html?view=classic.
93 Mónica Cruz, “#VivasNosQueremos: Los mensajes de las mexicanas durante la marcha contra el
machismo,” El País, April 25, 2016, http://verne.elpais.com/verne /2016/04 /25/mexico/1461540734_476453
.html.
94 “Impresionante reaccion de la gente ante un acosador del metro/ Experimento social,” YouTube
video, 3:58, posted by “MESAJEROS URBANOS,” August 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
YmL7Y- oI3IU.

began to be categorized as a prosecutable offense by the Mexican government.95 In
2008 the Safe Rideshare Program was established, designed to curb acoso callejero
on Mexico City’s vast public transportation system. This program included the
segregation of the metro system, as well as the installation of booths with the title
of Modules of Attention for Victims of Sexual Violence on Public Transport.96 The
impact of this segregation remains unclear. Mayer argues that such segregation
is problematic, enforcing the belief that gender violence is natural rather than
systemic. Grosz makes a similar point: “To produce a women- only space is to
produce that space as a separatist and thus as reactive to the dominant male
culture.”97 On the other hand, poet and musician “Diana” recognizes that this
segregation may reinforce the belief that “that’s just how men are,” but she asked
rhetorically, “Is a massive amount of the population expected to endure sexual
harassment on a daily basis just to prove a point?” She has observed “women-
and- children- only cars” to be sites of inverted confrontation: “That’s something
interesting that I’ve seen . . . women vocalizing . . . fighting back. Now, when
men get on these cars, I notice that they get nervous, like they’re expecting to be
kicked off.”98
Acoso callejero in Mexico City is a form of systemic violence made possible
through brazen inequality and corrupt institutions of power and is perpetuated
through public apathy and omission. But for Mayer, hope is not lost: “Forty years
ago, when I was a part of the feminist movement, I thought we would never get
abortion legalized. No way! Gay marriages? No way! And these two things are now
possible. So why isn’t it possible to fight against acoso callejero when, I would say,
90 percent of the cases happen because of a lack of education? If more of us started
reacting when someone else is being harassed, that would make a difference.”99
María suggested that both harassers and victims of acoso callejero need an educa-
tion on the subject. It is necessary to continually disrupt patterns of violence and
call attention to them. “The key,” María explained, “is to change our routines. They
[harassers] expect you to react in the same way as victims normally do when they
are whistled or yelled at. They expect you to take it. If you break that routine by
confronting them, they will have to acknowledge what they are doing.”100
As Mayer’s workshop drew to a close she invited us all to rise and form a
circle, hand in hand. We were invited to offer a prayer, a single word of inspiration
that passed from mouth to ear along the tight spiral of safety. “Strength,” “hope,”
“empathy.” In the final station of her ritual, Mayer invited us to kiss our neighbor
on the cheek, first clockwise and then counter- clockwise. I was transported to the
95 González Montes, “La violencia de género,” 215.

96 Ban Toledo, “La mujer en el espacio público,” 54–59.
97 Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 25.
98 “Diana,” interview with the author, May 5, 2016, Mexico City.
99 Mayer, interview.
100 “La clave es cambiar nuestras rutinas. Ellos están esperando que tu actúes en los mismos términos
como las victimas normalmente responden cuando les chiflan o les gritan algo. Esperan que lo tomes. Si
tu rompes esa rutina por confrontándolos, tendrían que admitir lo que están haciendo.” “María,” interview.

Catholic mass of my childhood. “Peace be with you,” we seemed to say as we de-
parted into the howling nighttime streets.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the editorial board, staff, and peer reviewers of Women &
Music for their encouragement and priceless insight. I wish to thank Karla Ponce,
Mónica Mayer, and Las Hijas de Violencia for their courage and generosity in shar-
ing their stories. Many thanks to René Lysloff, Jonathan Ritter, Leonora Saavedra,
and Deborah Wong for their extraordinary mentorship. Research for this article
was funded by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United
States (UC MEXUS); thanks to director Exequiel Ezcurra, the advisory committee,
and staff for their stalwart support.
anthony w. rasmussen is a UC MEXUS– CONACYT postdoctoral fellow in

residence at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He specializes in
sound studies and Mexican popular musics with a particular interest in the in-
tersection of aurality and gender. His work has been featured in Ethnomusicology
Forum and Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog. His current research examines
the whistle practices of Mexico City as dynamic indices of gender and social class
and represents one of the first critical investigations of global whistle practices
from a sociocultural perspective.

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on a lightning-fast visual assessment of potential victims by perpetrators. Physical

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interview, August 14, 2015.

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The Sardine Life: Aboard the Metro

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Personal Sound Systems: From Cocooning to Subterfuge

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no. 2 (2010): 192, https://doi.org/10.2752/174589210X12668381452809.

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Such untenable states of body consciousness are often followed by “a kind

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The Daughters of Violence

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I ﬁrst discovered Las Hijas through their promotional video, “Fighting

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90 “Fighting Street Harassers.”

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95 González Montes, “La violencia de género,” 215.

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anthony w. rasmussen is a UC MEXUS– CONACYT postdoctoral fellow in

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