Ni una menos (Not one [woman] less) is a collective demand to protect the lives of women, who are at risk due to feminicide. This movement was born on June 3rd, 2015 in Argentina, when women took to the streets as a response to a femicide. 

Ni Una Menos is not only the name of the movement. It is also part of the chants in the streets on “Ni una menos, vivas nos queremos” (“no one [woman] less, we want us alive”) and appears in different semiotic artifacts, such as graffiti, drawings, lyrics, clothes, tattoos, and hashtags. It interweaved very well the actions in the street and the digital strategies for cyberactivism, bringing new communication strategies that are part of the success of this movement. The hashtag #NiUnaMenos became the rallying cry that drew together various feminisms of Latin America.  As a hashtag, the technosocial event #NiUnaMenos is similar to #MeToo. In this way, Ni Una Menos brings together offline-online spaces.

The incorporation of technology and social networks into social movements has long been underway (e.g., the Arab Spring and Indignados in Spain). For the Latin American feminist movement, 2015 is particularly important because of the new articulations and organizational experiences. The community exchanges are different after #NiUnaMenos, including new powerful local voices. 

Ni Una Menos put together many different perspectives on women’s rights and became a powerful popular movement. It includes many young women and women of all ages across the continent and has become one of the stronger recent developments of the Latin American feminist movement. It also gained international recognition and mobilized women in Spain and Italy.

In short, feminicide is the killing of cis and trans women because of patriarchal violence. In Latin America, following Marcela Lagarde’s perspective, it is understood that the State takes part in the patriarchal violence and participates in this crime because there is usually a level of impunity while the crime occurs across time, space, and different types of violence that escalate to the point of feminicide. 

This term was created in English as femicide by Diana Russell. Lagarde translated into feminicidio to prevent misunderstandings in Spanish as “femicidio” would be “a feminine homicide.” Lagarde got the permission of Russell to modify the term for the Latin American context.

In Latin America, the term has had more success than in English. Lagarde mentions that for Russell this is surprising. In other words, the term got its own life and history in Latin America, thus the word came back into English as feminicide. In the present, we even see US authors, such as Judith Butler, introducing the term first in Spanish to contextualize it in Latin America, as the author does in her book The Force of Non-Violence.

The term, for example, appears in Data Against Feminicide by Catherine D’Ignazio. The book shows forms of activism in Latin America and the Americas in general against feminicide. D’Ignazio’s book is fully accessible online and can be a useful resource for the English-speaking audience who wants to learn more about Latin American feminism.

The concept of identity has changed over time as new knowledge and ways of understanding culture have been developed. The foundation for this project is the work of Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall on Language and identity.

For these authors, creating a common identity is a social achievement because we need to participate in several mechanisms and strategies collectively to make that identity happen. Thus, identity -paraphrasing their words- is the outcome of a cultural process of meaning creation (cultural semiotics). And those meanings result from different modes of communication coming together, not only words.

The idea here is that identities are dynamic, an attribute of a situation. They are not an essence inside of us; instead, they are created in the action and the relationship with others. They shift and recombine depending on the circumstances.

Bucholtz and Hall explain how to create that meaning the participants of an interaction take what is relevant in the context in terms of social and political relations; then, take the necessary actions to produce meaning to be part of different identities according to the situation. We present more details and include the mechanisms and strategies proposed by the authors in the section of language and identity.

This project explores the collective feminist identity constructed by Lane’s video/song in the relationship between the images and the lyrics with references to people and places. We analyze the words, the bodies, and the places. Additionally, to fully understand the meanings and the context, we revise other works created about Rebeca Lane and analyze the social participants represented in the video.