Yucatecan Rosa Torre González was the first Mexican woman ever to be elected to hold a government position

To honor her legacy, within the framework of International Women’s Day, a well-deserved and emotional recognition was given to Rosa Torre González, an outstanding feminist and the first woman to hold a popularly elected position in Mexico, in whose honor, a plaque was unveiled in the house where she lived, located on Calle 52, downtown Merida.

(YA) Mérida, Yucatán.- The event was organized by the Pro Historia Peninsular patronage (Prohispen), headed by Margarita Díaz Rubio, together with the Mérida City Council.

“On this special day, we recognize Rosa Torre González, the first Mexican woman ever to be elected to hold a government position ,” said Mayor Renán Barrera Concha.

“How difficult it could have been for Rosa Torre to be the first woman elected in this country as Councilor of the Mérida City Council. Equity is a constant, endless struggle, and back in those days, equity was not totally equitable, ” the mayor added.

Rosa Torre González was born in the Santa Ana neighborhood of Mérida in 1890 and thanks to the help of a government scholarship she studied at the Literary Institute for Girls from 1907 to 1909, where she was a student of the teacher Rita Cetina Gutiérrez, also an outstanding activist.

In 1910, at the age of 20, Ella Torre González became a propagandist for the revolutionary movement headed by Francisco I. Madero, whom she followed until his assassination in 1913.

After the arrival of Salvador Alvarado in the state, under the command of Venustiano Carranza to quell the rebellion, the outstanding Yucatecan served as a nurse in the military column and later was a supplier of food for the soldiers stationed in the Santiago Barracks, in Campeche.

In 1916, the honoree worked as an organizer of the First Feminist Congress in this city, promoting the meeting in Acanceh, Temax and Motul, to promote the participation of qualified women, where topics such as education were discussed, including sexual education, religious fanaticism, legal rights and reforms, equal employment opportunity, and intellectual equality.

Likewise, Torre González helped Elvia Carrillo Puerto and other valuable women to establish the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez League, in 1921, which proposed to work for the solution of deficiencies and problems of all social classes and to fight for the women’s right to vote.

On November 7, 1922, after being nominated for mayor of the Mérida City Council by the Socialist Party of the Southeast, she became the first Mexican woman to access a popularly elected position, at a time when the female gender did not have equal political rights (they didn’t even have the right to vote).

After the murder of the Carrillo Puerto family and the socialist repression of 1924, Torre González went into exile in Tamaulipas and later in Mexico City, where she participated in the National Congress of Revolutionary Women of the Mexican Republic, the League for Peace and Freedom, as well as the Ateneo Mexicano de Mujeres, until her death at the age of 83, in 1973.

The ceremony was attended by authorities such as Dulce María Sauri Riancho, the first female governor of Yucatán; Ana Rosa Payán Cervera, first female mayor of Mérida; in addition to María Cristina Castillo Espinosa, Secretary for Women.

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