On November 11, hundreds of people from Mexico’s National Assembly of Energy Users (ANUEE) came together for an event on the new feminist movement in the auditorium of the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). This is a building with a long militant history, featuring a colossal mural by José David Alfaro Siqueiros, who worked on this “Portrait of the Bourgeoisie” between 1939 and 1940, until he was forced to flee the country after participating in an assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky.

In 1936 the SME won a major victory against its employer, the British-Canadian Mexican Light, through a strike that shut off all power in Mexico City. After the nationalization of the energy system in 1960, the union became a point of reference for radical and politically independent unionism, and in recent years promoted the creation of the New Workers’ Confederation (NCT) and of a new political coalition, the People’s and Workers’ Political Organization (OPT), currently involved in the presidential campaign for a Zapatista-backed indigenous woman, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez.

In 2009 the SME called energy users to mobilize against the privatization of the energy sector, which had already caused price hikes in electricity bills that became impossible to pay. In 2010 ANUEE was created in response to this call. The struggle for public and accessible energy goes back to the 1990s, when Salinas de Gortari’s government privatized 40 percent of the generation of energy, opening Mexico’s energy market to transnational companies based in Spain.