While Mexico City youth get some exposure to sex education in schools, the most impactful sex education happens in everyday experiences with movies, TV, porn, religion, family, friends. Unfortunately, this informal education frequently reinforces heteronormative and patriarchal notions of gender, sexuality, and relationships. These notions, in turn, sexually and socially disenfranchize women, people who are gender non-conforming, and anyone identifying outside of the heterosexual norm (these cultural dynamics are of course not unique to Mexico).

It is Colectiva Justicia Sexual’s mission to offer alternatives to mainstream sex education. In our project, Educación Sexual para la Justicia Social (Sex Education for Social Justice), we hope to take our sex education to informal spaces around the city, starting with the metro station, La Raza. Through a series of public lectures and workshops, we will offer sex education about gender, sexuality, and relationships that promotes gender equity, the embracing of diverse sexual identifications, consent, communication, and safe sex.

Because La Raza is a transfer station for two commuter lines that traverse the entire city and extend between two major universities, it experiences extremely high foot traffic of diverse populations and is an excellent site for the presentation series.

Colectiva Justicia Sexual is already in communication with the La Raza station administration, and they are on board with our project. The administration will promote the Sex Education for Social Justice presentations on station message boards and lend the collective its presentation space, which comes with seating and audio equipment.

The collective will create a series of presentations that engages commuter audiences in topics rarely articulated in public spaces. To speak about sex education in a public metro station will be a radical and effective retaking of the informal public sphere for sexual and social justice.