The organization was founded by a group of Mexican women in 2012 in response to a wave of domestic abuse situations that Mexico City grappled with. It seems that the group presently is very much aligned with its initial self, in the sense that it continues to retain the same structure and social circles, with the added element of its popularity and social media presence. Throughout the years, their services and numbers have expanded, yet they retain the grassroots spirit that they were founded on, not to mention their identity as the Comando Colibrí.
The name “Comando Colibrí” was inspired by the Kuna people’s mythology and symbolism of hummingbirds. The following is their retelling of the story that inspired the name:
The forest was ablaze. The tiny animals ran desperately to escape the flames, but a single hummingbird flew in the opposite direction. A deer stops and asks it, “What are you doing? You’re going towards the flames.”
And the hummingbird replied, “Yes, there is a lake there.”
Then, the incredulous deer affirmed, “You will not be able to stop the fire: your beak is too small and will not be able to take enough water.”
To this, the hummingbird declared, “That is true. I can only carry one drop in my beak, but I am doing my part.”
When we fly with a drop in our beaks at times we spill the water and, other times, we crash. Gliding in the air is not our best quality. We have lost a couple of feathers, a couple of loves, and once again one of us has scratched her leg. We do not know very well how we are able to rise again, to open our wings once again, receiving the Sun on our faces and the Moon on our bellies. However, our forest was ablaze. It was ablaze because they have set it on fire in an attempt to end with any chances of life, of growth, of breath, of play, of pleasure.
“We were not born to survive”, Audre Lorde, the Black poet, whispered into our ears once. Life is ours, and it is as simple as that, not survival: to live in the life. In what moment are we to fight for our lives when it is our lives that we give? And, of course, the courageous appear who, drop by drop, take water in their beaks. It is not simple, it is painful and nothing is guaranteed, but it is time to rise as a flock, a coalition of circus freaks and relearn the fight.
The group is holistically defined as feminist and anti-colonialist. They believe in the empowerment of women in a pre-colonial context, rid of Eurocentric, racist, and classist prejudices. They lean extremely left on American political terms, and even more so in the Mexican political sphere. The following is another member’s elaboration upon the members’ ideological identity:
“In this instance, it is obvious that we are feminists. Feminists of the b*tching kind, not the good ones. A feminist is a monster that fights for a world where many worlds may fit and where humanity is not synonymous with devastation, where vaginas do not mean that of now and menstruation is not a condition of subalternity. The comando colibrí are all of us and is none of us.
We do not comprehend well, as you will see, in what moment pacifism united itself to feminism. And no, we are not going to kill anybody, because we have generated a revolution without shooting a single weapon. We speak of defense, never of attack.
Yes, we make ours the history of coloniality, of how the slaves and indigenous women were violated, of how we were constructed as objects, as pack animals, but never as humans and, as of then, we construct ourselves. And we do it because one thing is certain, in the face of the different forms of discrimination, of silencing, of discipline, of coloniality, in our world made up of various worlds: the resistance is feminist and decolonial or it will be nothing.
The organization has various wings that function in a combination of teacher-student relationships (such as the self-defense classes), group-democratic relationships (more so in the emotional support sections), and as a collective, autonomous unit within its broader activist self. It is largely made up of low and middle-income Mexican women, and most of the tasks within it are allocated through division of labor accordingly. The identity of the group, however, is much more than merely structure, as is show in their following explanation:
We are in all of the jungles, all of the deserts, all the mountain ranges, all the cities, all the countrysides where the patriarchy has settled. We are monsters, yes, but the command is promiscuous, exaggerated, and spectacular. Therefore, we are a coalition, by affinity, of dogs, wolves, hummingbirds, pink dolphins, aliens, paid and unpaid wh*res, lesbians, witches, vampires, weird girls, non-women, indigenous women, slaves, Malinches, cry-babies, cyborgs, peasants, mestizas and other circus freaks.