Best Served Up Pasted: Bella Dear is in the ’Hood.

By Karen Moe & Bella Dear

Bella Dear Chingona 2024 - Juarez, CdMx

If you’ve ever been to Mexico City,

it’s impossible not to notice the graffiti that, as a graffiti lover, I say adorns all possible spaces and, just as spectacularly, is rarely removed. Of course, affluent la-la lands like la Condesa and Polanco are not blessed with such colour and culture; however, even on those luxurious boulevards, when there is a crack of an opportunity, it magically appears literally overnight. And then there are the stickers, and the past ups. Chilangos (people who live in Mexico City) are fully committed to marking their mega-city, spraying and sticking and pasting aesthetic conversations on every available wall and in every possible cranny—claiming and communicating through aesthetic play.

A transplant like me and residing in the same colonia of Escandón, a London-hailing graphic artist known as Bella Dear is deep into the act and art of paste-up. What is paste-up? You may ask? Paste-up is a type of street art—the artist uses glue or often wheat paste to stick up posters—the posters can be prints, drawings, collages, or paintings. Anything one can conjure to paste-up on urban surfaces! Renegade graphic artists transfer a sketched image onto a piece of Lino by cutting it in—drawing—with a knife. Like with analogue darkroom printing from decades past, the paste-up artist needs to create a negative so, after cutting in the image, they gouge out the positive with sharp, little tools. Bella Dear explains the next step:

"You ink up the Lino ‘plate’ and then press the plate onto the paper. This requires a lot of pressure to transfer the ink from the plate to the paper. Hence the need for a spoon and lots of muscle—or a printing press."

Before Bella Dear had a press, she couldn’t create many prints at a time. Now that she has one, however, she can more freely spread her rage-inspired, revengeful, revolutionary play around Mexico City.

After the paste-up artist has their prints, they scout for the ideal surface for that image and, in the dark of night, roam the streets like naughty kids armed with their buckets of glue or wheat paste and broad paintbrushes to add another image to what Bella Dear describes as “little art galleries that just pop up.” This is the egalitarian world of street art, liberated from the elitest and often nepotistic curation of art galleries. There are loads of places to paste, Bella Dear explains and comments how, “Mexico City is crumbling and building at the same time so there are abandoned buildings and weird old walls that give you the canvas.” A clandestine free-for-all, pasting on the walls of urban spaces is a conversation and an interaction with the urban environment between humans, the architecture and the elements. 

Bella Dear’s father is also a graphic artist.

She told me the story of how, as a child, her father showed her a Zincograph print Corrido del Caracol (Ballad of the Snail) by Mexican graphic artist José Guadalupe Posada from 1899. “It was like the Zocalo during the apocalypse and there are these giant snails crawling through the Zocalo,” she recalls. Bella Dear’s love of Mexican art and the tradition of printmaking had begun.

José Guadalupe Posada, Corrido del Caracol (Ballad of the Snail), 1899.

As an adult, she stopped printing for a while and, eventually, became bored of her life in London. She decided to look for adventure and chose Latin America, the opposite of the cultural cold fish of life in England. Her first stop was Quito, Ecuador, where she started printing again but realized she wanted a bigger city life. She then came to Mexico. During our interview, Bella Dear exclaimed how, when she arrived, she thought: “Motherfucker! This is like the center of printing and, when I went to Oaxaca City for the first time, I said damn there are about 5,000 print workshops and everyone's doing these amazing prints!” Bella Dear the renegade urban paster was born.

Mexicans have a unique relationship with public surfaces as communicative spaces.

Mural art is a Mexican tradition that began in the post-revolutionary early 1920’s by three of Mexico’s most iconic artists: José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their murals have been described as “grand public spectacles conveying socio-politically charged messages and immense skill [that] are integral to Mexico’s art history.”

Then there are the Rótulos Commerciales (commercial street paintings) that are referred to as ‘el otro muralismo’ (the other muralism).[1] Painted by Rotulistas, these vibrant and playful paintings on the storefronts and vendor’s stands not only compete to attract those with a desire for tacos or tortas to each vendor’s particular combinations of pork parts and salsas or startlingly tall bunwiches built with layers of more pork, cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, they also add another layer to Mexico’s vibrant street art scene and the life of the metropolis’ public spaces.

One of the countless Rótulos of Mexico.

During elections, walls in pueblos and cities, even along a highway where a concrete building has long crumbled but still maintains an available wall, are used as campaign billboards. If one travels across Mexico, you come across walls that proclaim PRI, PAN—the neoliberal parties that ruled for one hundred years with their names, happily, now faded—and now, most prolifically, the revolutionary MORENA party. Nevertheless, regardless of popularity and abundance, any painted sign on a wall is prey to the scorching sun and inevitably fade, peal and merge with the surfaces upon which they were once exuberantly inscribed. The street art scene in Mexico City, with the formal and usually condoned murals, Rótulos and election campaign billboards combined with the carnival and chaos of pasting and sticking and spray-painting all available surfaces is the ideal home for an impassioned paster.

An old election sign on a corrugated metal wall, Tetecala, Morelos 2024. Photo: Karen Moe.

Paste-up art, unlike commissioned murals, Rótulos Commerciales and wall-spanning election signs, is furtive—an aspect that a young woman out to rage revenge against machismo culture particularly enjoys. Bella Dear told me how:

"It’s thrilling when you're doing it because you have to go in the nighttime and you have to be a bit secretive about it and wear dark clothes, so it's really fun and exhilarating as well. I remember when I first time I did it, I was just shitting my pants like, oh my God, I'm gonna get deported and now I'm okay, it's not really illegal, and there are loads of people doing it."

Loads of people are out at night giddily pasting and painting their messages of rage, revolution and sometimes just plain quirky Mexican fun.

Mural by @hokzyn Calle General Salvador Alvarado, Escandón, Mexico City. Photo: Karen Moe.

Art is always connected to the personal life of the artist.

Even if artists think otherwise, and that direct connection to life lived undermines the integrity or the sublime reachings of great art, it is impossible for art not to have its origins in the life experience and the emotional state of the artist as a living, feeling creature. In Western culture, the acknowledgment of the life of the artist as the inspiration and grounding of her praxis and her artwork is particularly prevalent in the art of women and the often-shocking abuses they survive through their relationships with men in patriarchy, through relationships with men in a system built on power abuse. It should go without saying that, in machismo cultures like Mexico, gender abuse as fodder for creative expression is virtually bottomless, which, from a Canadian or British perspective, can be nothing short of bizarre.

This is not to say North American and British men aren’t capable and guilty of violence against women, emotional, psychological and physical, far from it; but in Mexico, the proportions of gender violence in all of its manifestations extend into the realms of what, for me, were previously unimaginable. During my eight years in Mexico, I have had a few boyfriends. This is not to demonize all Mexican men, I know there are some who are less infected by what they are oblivious to; and I also know that whenever I bring up the lies, games and abuses of power that are just the everyday activities of the men of a machismo culture, Mexican women agree whole-heartedly and, on one occasion, a friend told me it was my turn to punish him. I didn’t and, yes, as she predicted, he punished me again and won the game I didn’t know how to play. The same happened for Bella Dear.

Bella Dear Te vemos pendejos (We See You, Assholes). First ever paste up 2023 - photo taken late 2024, Tacubaya CDMX. Photo courtesy of the artist.

During our interview,

Bella Dear told me the story about her first relationship with a Mexican man. The experience was a toxic combination of non-stop lies, endemic infidelity and emotional abuse. Young, having recently arrived in a new city, alone and vulnerable, Bella Dear told me how the perpetrator was able to abuse her to the point where she hated herself. After six years of emotional abuse, she explains how the veil dropped, and she realized:

"He's just a hollow shell, a misogynist that hates women and he has been in my life like a horrible parasite for the last six years. I was obviously fucking furious. And I soon learned it's a really common story. I started connecting to Mexican women and talking about their situations with the machismo culture and seeing everyone had similar experiences. I couldn't stay still, and pasting is a really good thing to do because you have to walk around at nighttime and it's very relaxing. And then when people would see [my images and messages] … and message me and be like, “Oh my God, this happened to me and Oh my God, this made me feel really empowered!” The Mexican women, all the women that I know in my life also understood. So, I think that it's a growing movement in Mexico:  female empowerment and overt public rage."

Feminism in Mexico

in terms of women speaking out publicly—or more like shouting and destroying colonial, male monuments en masse—is relatively new. In my 2021 article, “The Life of a Woman is more Important than an Historical Monument,” I outlined the impetus of the growing movement of outrage against gender violence in Mexico:

"In Mexico City in July and August 2019, three women were raped by police officers: on July 10th, a 27-year-old homeless woman was raped by two police officers; on August 3rd, a 17-year-old woman was gang-raped by four policemen in a police car; on August 8th, a minor was assaulted by a police officer in Museo Archivo de la Fotografía in México City. And the thing is, this is nothing new. But what is new is that the women of Mexico aren’t remaining silent anymore.

On August 16th, 2019, for the first time in Mexican history, the women of Mexico City rose up en masse against not only these recent rapes by the police, but also the conservative estimate of 3835 femicides in Mexico in 2019 with an average of 6 women murdered per day. To add to these horrifying statistics, it is estimated that only 10% of femicides are reported, resulting in numbers that are nothing short of a gender-cide."[2]

Bella Dear Somos poderosas y peligrosas con cuidado pendejos (We are powerful and dangerous. Be careful, assholes), 2023 - Obrera, CdMx. Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Sexual violence statistics

are always challenging to calculate due to the fact that, especially in countries like Mexico where male impunity reigns, very few complaints are even taken seriously. Indeed, it is a common practice for the police to claim that victims of femicide are drug addicts, mentally ill and committed suicide even when their bodies are hung by the telephone cord in a phone booth.[3] Sexual assault victims and families of femicide victims often fear revenge from the perpetrator. Moreover, there are even higher statistics than the 6 women per day murdered by their male partners. In 2020, in connection with the rise in femicide rates internationally during with the pandemic and resultant quarantining, El Pais reported that 10 women per day were murdered by their male partners[4] and some reports have gone as high as 12—and these were only the ones the authorities knew about.[5]

In contrast and not to undermine the severity of violence against women internationally, in Canada and Great Britain, there is one femicide every 2-3 days and—even though it’s far from enough—perpetrators are convicted to a greater degree in countries like Canada and Great Britain that have had organized feminist movements lobbying the government to take violence against women somewhat seriously for decades not to mention being far less plagued by machismo culture. In Mexico, though, an article put out by the Wilson Centre in 2020 reported how, not only is violence against women often not even believed, “feminicides are increasingly public with women’s corpses left on display, sometimes with visible signs of torture or beatings…. In Mexico, femicide is more than an epidemic, it is a scare tactic.”[6] However, as is represented by the women’s day marches with, over the last six years, at least one hundred thousand women raging down Avenida Reforma along with the street art by women directly confronting a machismo culture and male impunity, women in Mexico are sick of being scared and the rage of images and their messages on the city’s walls add further fodder to and a most justifiable and justified fury.

Enter the Chingona.

The badass take no shit Mexican woman. Residing in Mexico City for eight years now, Bella Dear has fully embraced Chingona’s irreverence and in-your-face fearlessness. When I came upon my first Bella Dear pasting on General Salvador Alvarado on the way to the Patriotismo Metro Station, I was stunned. I was mesmerized. And, yes, I literally laughed out loud.

Bella Dear "Chingona" Calle General Salvador Alvarado and Progresso, 2025. Photo: Karen Moe.

This Chingona is leaving.

Exiting through the door frame Bella Dear found as the ideal site for her almost life-sized pasting. Chingona is sauntering her adios, sexy, indifferent, a baseball bat casually resting across her shoulders ready to wield if/when the necessity arises; her identity as a Chingona is written across the back of her pink t-shirt like a player on a sports team, a torn-in-half heart is falling from gel-tipped fingers with a gesture of adios pendejo; Bella Dear’s tell-tale leopard is nestled against this Chingona’s strut as she is shamelessly all decked out in pink and red, polka-dots and hearts proclaiming fuck-you, I can still be feminine, I’ve got my bat and my enormous cat and—my favourite part—“Eat My Dust” is inscribed on the back of her leg. From a so-called first-world perspective where women’s rights have been more on the forefront of social concerns for generations, this representation of a woman carrying a bat can be construed as violent. However, especially in a machismo culture with one of the highest rates of femicide in the world, I think it’s realistic to be carrying a bat sometimes. Or maybe all the time.

“Chingona means power,” Bella Dear explains. “The rage that I and a lot of women feel.

It's violent and how we get people to listen, like with the smashing of the monuments. Going back to the relationship: it was like he just stepped out of that and just continued on with his life. And I thought, what about all the fucking chaos that you've caused. And I wanted to get revenge. My pasting its power. Its rage. It's violence. It's revenge and in some sense it's like, I don't need you to feel powerful. This is my power, a communal power through pasting, and I think that having a community of women is one of the most powerful things I’ve experienced in my life.”  

Bella Dear Te vemos (We see you) 2023 - Mixcoac, CdMx. Photo: Courtesy of the Artist.

Unlike the Chingona on Calle Salvador Alvarado

who is exiting stage machismo, most of Bella Dear’s women greeting us from the walls of the city are staring straight at us and, like in Te Vemos Pendejo (We See You Asshole) they are watching, keeping guard, letting machismo—and Bella Dear’s personal pendejo—know the jig is up. In one, the vigilant gaze is so blatant that the woman is haloed by an enormous eye and even her shorts are keeping watch with stylized eyes as polka-dots. And in one of my personal favourites, at the base of what was once the entry of the abandoned OXXO on Jose Marti and Ciencias, ubiquitous urban (and enormous) rats are glowering and growling, “Qué Asco! Estos Machistas Saben Mierda!” (Disgusting! Those Sexists Taste Like Shit!) and, yes, next to one of the rats is a chewed off male arm and spat it out. However, connected by one of the rat’s tails that extends into the frame of what was once the barred window where customers were served through late at night is an innocent kitsch-of-a-girl by another paste-up artist, a subversion of the Lulu soda brand, wearing a balaclava that is also a bow. Revenge—especially in the paste-up world of interactive play—can also be fun.

Bella Dear, pasting on the abandoned OXXO Jose Martis and Ciencias, Escandón 2025.

And yet, like the temporality of life experience along with the infinity of lives in a mega-metropolis, the pastings come and go. The paster is always on the lookout for a space that will fit her latest creation, what was once a doorframe, a circumference of cracks, a freshly painted wall that, after one paste-up artist dares to “break the seal,” in Bella Dear’s words, "blossoms into a community of paste-ups," of stickers and graffiti overnight. Then, the rain gets to them, the humidity, other street artists begin to paint, comment, sticker and paste on top as images start to disappear and the space becomes fair game again. The paste-ups with their messages are always ending and always ongoing and, as Bella Dear comments, “disappearing back into the sea of the city.”  

Immersed in the playful kitsch and irreverent humour that is distinctly Chilango,

the paste-ups of Bella Dear and other women raging on the walls of Mexico City are a celebration of women’s newfound outspoken irreverence and vocalized revenge against the machismo culture they still negotiate daily. Exuberantly, such bold irreverent images like Bella Dear’s, calling out as a feminist aesthetic community are becoming more prolific amidst the transience and carnivalesque of other pastings, graffiti and stickers that are all backgrounded by the whimsical dilapidation of the walls. However, in the endless cycle of pastings coming and going as they appear overnight and last for an indeterminate amount of time before they are absorbed by the urban environment, what remains in the heart of every woman who is now standing up to the abuse of machismo culture is: “Eat my Dust.”

Bella Dear Tus pendejadas no dejan ni una huella (Your bullshit doesn't even leave a trace) 2024 - Roma

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About the Artist:

Bella Dear is a feminist and a vandal (for justice, I would add) who specializes in embroidery, engravings, and paste ups. Check out her Instagram @bella.dear and website: www.belladear.shop. She lives in Mexico City.

About the Writer:

Karen Moe is an author, art critic, visual and performance artist, and feminist activist. Her art criticism has been published internationally in magazines, anthologies and artist catalogues in English and Spanish, she has exhibited and performed across Canada, the US and Mexico and has spoken on sexual violence internationally. She is the author of Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor Vigilance Press (2022). During her North American Tour, she was presented with the “Ellie Liston Hero of the Year Award” by the DA of Ventura County for being instrumental in the life sentence given to a serial rapist. Karen speaks internationally on sexual violence sharing her lived experiences of "trauma & triumph." Victim has recently been translated into Spanish and is being adapted for film. She is currently collaborating on the life story and legacy of Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, the spiritual leader of the Fairy Creek Blockades. Karen lives in Mexico City and in Lantzville BC, Canada.

https://karenmoeauthor.com/

IG: @karenmoeart

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Notes:

[1] https://www.alexkurunis.com/rotulismo-mexicano

[2] https://www.vigilancemagazine.com/post/life-of-a-woman

[3] In 2017, twenty-two-year-old university student Lesvy Berlin Rivera Osorio was murdered by her boyfriend on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM). Her body was found hung in a telephone booth; her boyfriend Jorge Luis Hernández González had hanged her to death with the telephone cord. Continuing the misogynist tradition of victim-blaming, Lesvy’s murder, like Mariana’s seven years before, was catalogued and filed away as a suicide. The real case was closed. In order to buttress their victim-blaming tradition of suicide, the Public Prosecutors Office of Mexico City took to social media with accusations like “Osorio was an alcoholic and a drug user who was no longer studying at UNAM, and had been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend.” Authorities insisted on investigating the victim’s sex life and family relations in order to build evidence of promiscuousness and mental instability that would back up their fabrication of suicide. More effort was put into making up evidence than into investigating the crime. https://www.milenio.com/policia/lesvy-berlin-osorio-caso-feminicidio-joven-cronologia; http://www.coha.org/femicide-and-victim-blaming-in-mexico

[4] https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020/02/11/actualidad/1581458921_638096.html?rel=str_articulo#1582057787912

[5] A positive transformation reported in https://www.visionofhumanity.org/violence-against-women-in-mexico/:

“While the rates of sexual assault and family violence have more than doubled since 2015, last year marked the first year since the index’s inception in which these sub-indicators reported improvements. Between 2023 and 2024, the national rate of sexual assault fell by 6.1 per cent and the rate of family violence fell by 2.9 per cent.

The substantial gains in women’s representation in government also bodes well for the prospect of more effective institutional responses to gender-based violence. The country’s journey toward gender equality in politics has been a decades-long process marked by both progress and setbacks. In 1923, Yucatán became the first state to grant women the right to vote, and in 1953 women’s suffrage was achieved nationally. Despite initial limitations in political representation, structural reforms and gender quotas implemented in the 2010s gradually increased female participation, leading to a historic near-gender parity in Congress by 2018. Six years later, in 2024, full gender parity was achieved in Congress, and the country also elected its first female president, marking a defining moment in women’s political participation. 

As political participation increased for women on the national stage, the country implemented reforms aimed at strengthening protections for women, including against violence, pay discrimination, and other forms of vulnerability. For example, certain reforms mandated that public security and investigative institutions operate with a gender perspective and require public prosecutors’ offices to have specialised prosecutors for cases involving violence against women. In addition, through the National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence Against Women (CONAVIM), 73 women’s justice centres have been established in 31 states to provide greater victim support. 

While this progress is encouraging, regional bodies have recommended further reforms and innovations for better tackling violence against women. These include improving data collection and information systems, enhancing prevention strategies through greater investment in education, awareness campaigns to challenge harmful gender norms, expanding access to protection and support services, and addressing impunity through better financed and more robust investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial processes.”

[6] https://gbv.wilsoncenter.org/explore-gbv-data

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@erre.erre Calle General Salvador Alvarado y Jose Martis, Escandón, CdMx. Photo: Karen Moe.

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