maya's (l)inklings

In just a matter of months, Vallejo has been catapulted from anonymous student body president to Latin American folk hero with more than 300,000 Twitter followers. Type her name into Google and there are more than 160,000 results just from the past 24 hours. Brazilian students now parade her as a VIP guest at their marches, the Chilean president invites her to negotiate a settlement and when she calls for a show of strength hundreds of thousands of students throughout Chile take to the streets. As an adept and wildly popular social media phenomenon, Vallejo has risen to become the most recognisable face of the student protesters.

Throughout the six-month revolt, Chilean students – in many cases led by 14- and 15-year-olds – have seized the streets of Santiago and major cities, provoking and challenging the status quo with their demand for a massive restructuring of the nation’s for-profit higher education industry. In support of their demands for free university education, since May they have organised 37 marches, which have gathered upwards of 200,000 students at a time.

Five hundred strangers in a park will never themselves be the engines of any profound societal transformation. But if what I saw last night is real, if OWS is offering a critique that resonates in content — if not necessarily in form — with a broader and more eclectic swath of the country, then maybe those five hundred strangers are pounding on a door that’s a bit less well-armored than it looks.

Maybe what they have to offer isn’t a plan so much as an opportunity to have a bigger conversation, or even just an invitation to continue and expand a conversation that’s been going on in small ways in small places for a long tim

I march because there’s something in the air in New York, and it feels big and exciting.

I march because I am not only in solidarity in principle, because solidarity cannot be exercised in theory.

I march because I want my friends and family to know where I stand, even the ones who disagree, even the ones who don’t understand. I march because I want my aunt and my uncle and my grandmother and my cousin to find a way to be proud of me, to love me anyway, to love me even more for what I stand for and who I’ve become.

I march because I have the privilege to define walking under a banner of “slut” as subversive and empowering for me, a privilege that my grandmother and all her grandmothers before her couldn’t choose to invoke.

I march because no matter how brave or strong I try to be, my own fear of the label “slut” has at times been big enough to cause me to betray myself.

I march because I choose creativity over critique.