Teresa de Jesús Vázquez Figueroa
Teresa de Jesús Vázquez Figueroa is a woman human rights defender from the State of Chiapas, a social anthropologist from the Autonomous University of Chiapas (UNACH), and has been an activist for the rights of indigenous peoples, women and children since 2019. She is a Clown theatrical performer, daughter of workers and granddaughter of Afro-descendant migrants from the Chiapas coast. She also works with Kanan Derechos Humanos as Head of Community Accompaniment in villages of the Yucatan peninsula for cultural processes, in the exercise of the right to social struggle and the exercise of self-determination of the Mayan territories.
Teresa is a collaborator in the autonomous community collective HUAXIN in the community of the village where she has lived since 2021, where she works together with her husband, mothers and children of the village in the struggle to live free from violence, through the use of tools of community theater, forum theater, theater of the oppressed, shadow puppets and street cinema debate.
Human rights defenders (HRDs) and journalists in Mexico are subject to intimidation, legal harassment, arbitrary detention, death threats, acts of physical aggression, enforced disappearances and killings as a result of their activities in defence of human rights and the exercise of freedom of expression and journalism.
