Music festival line-ups in the United States have been scrutinized for their lack of female acts in recent years, and it seems the music scene in Mexico isn’t much better.
Daniel Carbajal, a visual communications student in Mexico City, noticed the blatant gender imbalance and decided to use his photoshop skills to make a point. The 22-year-old took images of the posters of four music festivals in Mexico this year and removed all the male-only acts, leaving mix-gender groups.
He posted the modified versions to Twitter on Thursday, to highlight the lack of women who are featured on music festival line-ups.
Carbajal spoke to Remezcla about what inspired him to edit the line-ups for Festival Bravo, Festival Marvin, Hellow Festival and the Corona Capital Festival.
“Ever since I was a teenager I’ve been interested in music by women and members of the LGBTTTI community,” he told the site. “The minimal representation and visibility these projects have bothers me. There are women who get half the recognition men do and they work twice as hard; women of color deal with this even more.”
Gender inequality in music festivals is something HuffPost explored last year, when HuffPost’s Alanna Vagianos looked into the line-ups of ten major music festivals in the U.S. over the course of five years. The analysis revealed a shockingly wide gender gap that's remained relatively consistent since 2012.
When HuffPost inquired within the music industry about the lack of female artists booked, experts and executives pointed to scheduling conflicts and the fact that many of the leading female acts are pop artists, whom they said are not commonly booked for festivals.
The Executive Vice President of Programming for Superfly, the production company behind The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, also said some headliners are booked years in advance. But he admitted there is generally a lack of female artists booked.
“We’re very aware of the gender imbalance,” Sampson told HuffPost in May 2016. “We try to book the best festival that we can every year. We want the best artists out there, at every level, male or female.”
As Carbajal said, he isn’t the first person to make a point about the lack of female artists at music festival. But the Mexico City-native feels the topic is more important than ever in 2017.
“What I did isn’t something other people haven’t done before, but I find it frustrating that these highly imbalanced lineups keep showing up in times when diversity and representation are so necessary,” he told Remezcla.
