The actress and model Martha Cristiana, who for eight weeks was the director of Miss Universe Mexico, resigned from her position for finding inconsistencies between the words and actions of the national organization, such as qualifying itself as inclusive and not allowing participants even of a certain age. adult or of a different sexual identity or with a diverse body.
Beauty, if it is not inclusive, is not revolutionary. Beauty is revolutionary only when it embraces diversity. That motto was my flag to enter the organization.
It turns out that I have been in office for eight weeks and I want to thank Raúl Rocha Cantú for thinking of me and his wife Paulina. Unfortunately, things have not been as promised and I find myself involved in a truly uncomfortable situation, where the answer to everything is ‘trans? for nothing, zero’. What is handled in the meetings is ’40 (years)? Very old, forget it.’ ‘Trans?’, that’s lip service, that’s not going to happen. ‘Martha Cristiana will not pass’, verbatim words.
I need to denounce this, because all my life, no matter what it has cost me, I have always raised my voice and even more so if it concerns my causes that are close to my heart, which is gender equality and inclusion.
I should not, nor can I, be part of an organization that is managed in that way and, for that reason, today I present my resignation, because I cannot continue promising things that I know will not be fulfilled. I hope this keeps my mouth shut and that this board of directors has the intelligence to include a trans woman,” Martha Cristiana stated yesterday at a press conference.
The 53-year-old model specified that the participants she chose, except for one 40-year-old, were eliminated.
We are not here to motivate anyone, but to inspire. Motivation is lip service and inspiration is internal. If there is no intelligence in these beautiful women, no speech, no cause, no desire to revolutionize, there is nothing, because the face falls and the physique ends, but the personality and the causes do not wrinkle or hang.” he pointed out.
Martha Cristiana thought that, as part of the innovation of the national pageant, a new casting had to be done and different from that done by previous directors of the beauty pageant.
“I didn’t want rehashes, but women that no one knows and with a personal aesthetic, not standardized by Photoshop or what we see on social networks,” he said.
The actress from the series Today I’m Going to Change (2017) realized that there were inconsistencies in the national organization in a meeting, after a casting with the modeling agency Paragon Model Management.
Many of them got involved because they trusted me, because I work to this day and they continue to invite me to do catwalk shows. Imagine the responsibility I felt. My best friends all belong to the community and in my family there are more than two people who are from the community. What am I going to tell them when the next day I arrive and they tell me ‘it won’t happen’.
In the end, we don’t like any of them, we want a narrative that goes more towards the editorial part, towards naturalness, personal beauty, the development of each one of them and how they impose and are planted on a stage; that is also beauty.
The fact that they turned me away from seven girls, without even asking my opinion and one of them was a 40-year-old competitor, because ‘no, she’s very old, we don’t like old girls’, I said: ‘oh wow, first red light’. Second red flag, they make me make videos to say ‘there are going to be 33 participants and one star’. The star was the trans woman and, suddenly, there were 32 states and I said ‘ok, for no reason can I lend myself to this’. It is a matter of principles. The more upright we become as Mexicans, the better everything will turn out for us in this country, on a personal level and on a public level,” she explained.
Martha Cristiana clarified that she never signed a contract, but she did receive what she worked for. She presented her resignation to Raúl Rocha Cantú, in hand, as irrevocable.
There are people who you trust completely and I can’t tell you how to run your company. I respect him deeply. I told him ‘it’s irrevocable’, so there’s not much point in discussing day-to-day things that happen in meetings, because it’s already become radio in the hallway and I’m a serious person.
There are guidelines that are already too deep-rooted and that refuse to accommodate anything else. The unknown and changes scare us, but we were ready and that was the only reason I agreed to participate. Hopefully they get their act together and do it as they promised,” he added.
He specified that in the end they did leave the 40-year-old participant, “with a brutal story,” as well as a curvy one.
Raúl was not at these meetings and they do not tell the truth to their boss, because they are afraid of losing their job. Fortunately, I am a businesswoman and I do not make a living from this, but I have earned the freedom to raise my voice,” he noted.
ONLY EXPECTATIONS
Martha Cristiana explained that she took the direction of Miss Universe Mexico, because she was attracted to the idea that, for the first time, a trans woman would lead the pageant, the Thai businesswoman Anne Jakrajutatip.
The model, who was Miss Puebla and participated in Señorita México 1986, in addition to winning third place in Miss International 1987, appreciated the change in position that Miss Universe allegedly offered, where inclusion seemed like the model to follow. Although, as she said, in practice it was not like that.
For the first time in history there was going to be representation of the LGBTIQ+ community. My father belonged to that community and homosexual rights have always been a great flag for me, because if my father could not be happy and could not come out of the closet in his time, because it was not allowed, since the first march that took place Pride in this country was in 1979, I was going to take charge of raising my voice in a way he couldn’t do.
Knowing that there is this search for a participant, a transgender woman, seemed fascinating to me, as well as being able to be living those changes at that moment.
That they changed the rules and that there was no age limit, I thought ‘we are also going to do activism against ageism and we are going to give women permission to have their birthdays.’ In addition to that, have any marital status, married, divorced, with children. I won the Face of the Herald and they dismissed me for being a mother of two children, so this blew my brains out,” she said.
When Mexican businessman Raúl Rocha Cantú, 50 percent owner of the organization, sought her out, she felt grateful for the opportunity to give a voice to the LGBTIQ+ community.
We were facing a historical fact, because there is an absolutely normalized transphobia in this country and it seems sad to me that we continue with that position and that we do not realize that, at the end of the day, we are all human beings and we have the same rights and that those rights They also belong to the world of beauty.
Raúl Rocha Cantú has been a honest man, who has treated me well, who has respected my positions. I love that he is a Mexican who has had the courage to share a franchise and buy it, the owner being Donald Trump first, and that he shares 50 percent of this franchise with a trans woman.
He remembered that they did
meetings with the modeling agency Paragon Model Management and that he thought that Mexicans would be “progressive, inclusive, brave and loving” in the face of what would happen in this contest. However, it was not. Martha Cristiana added that she never personally met the owner of the pageant, Anne Jakrajutatip.
At the time of going to press, the organization did not comment on Martha’s resignation on its official networks.
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