This poster reports the preliminary findings from my field work to Mexico City, one of the leading places for the creation of artivism (art + activism) that seeks to address social inequalities and oppression. During the trip, I photographed street art (graffiti, banners, mural paintings) produced in the context of International Women’s Day on March 8^th, 2026. The present research is part of my doctoral dissertation that tracks how contemporary literary works by Mexican women are increasingly engaging with horror and the gothic mode to grapple with gender-based violence. To complement my analysis of literary representations, I propose that we turn to other art forms and spaces through which women denounce heteropatriarchal, racial, and colonial violence. Given graffiti’s discursive power but also its ephemeral nature, I approach its textual study as a practice of recovery that seeks to amplify marginalized voices and make visible women’s concerns.

To standardize my research, I visited three specific locations before and after the social mobilizations of March 8. Tracing the same locations at different times provides insights into censorship and the erasure of women’s demands for justice. After the trip, I transcribed, encoded, and annotated a sample of visual materials following TEI guidelines. Some preliminary parameters I have identified include location; temporality; the surface (for example, fence, cement sidewalk, monument); and themes (femicide, reproductive rights, domestic abuse, among others). The purpose of cataloguing these images as text is twofold: to explore how text encoding enriches our understanding of the often-underrepresented street narrative and how these textual examples expand our use of TEI through a feminist lens. Ultimately, my research aims to contribute to current activism and debates that are in the process of creating a language that allows us to recognize, name, and address gender violence and its aftermath.