Why were Mexican “Generation Z” protesters flying an anime flag featuring a straw-hatted skull and cross-bones on Saturday?
Protests erupted in multiple cities in Mexico this weekend. Reuters notes that in Mexico City, people wearing hoods apparently tore down structures protecting the National Palace, where president Claudia Sheinbaum lives. Over on American right-wing cable news, Fox and Friends welcomed two besuited Spanish-language podcasters who furnished the American news consumer with the claim that Mexico is experiencing a “national awakening” against its leftist president, brought about by rampant crime. They cited the recent killing of an anti-cartel mayor, apparently by cartel assassins, as a cause, and said they would welcome foreign military invasion. Meanwhile, according to centrist magazine The Economist, homicides have actually dropped significantly under Sheinbaum.
So if you want one tidy, unifying cause for these protests, I would wait until the dust settles if I were you. But if you want a unifying symbol, you could do a lot worse than the straw-hatted Jolly Roger flag flown by the pirate protagonists of the manga and anime super franchise One Piece. The flag was all over the protests, and, thanks to its ubiquity in photos of demonstrators, feels inextricable from this movement.
What are the politics of One Piece?
One Piece has one of those sprawling textual universes that is appealing to content hyper-consumers, and intimidating to casuals, precisely because it is so huge. The protagonists are a bunch of plucky pirate-adventurers, informally called the Straw Hat Crew, and they often have traumatic backstories. Their leader, Monkey D. Luffy, often seems guided by the principle of freedom, but he also wants to be “pirate king,” which makes his an eccentrically defined form of freedom—the “freedom” to just hang out with his cool friends and go on fun adventures, basically.
There are a lot of fights in One Piece, and they aren’t all tied to the pursuit of freedom, or the related pursuit of victory over injustice, but they often are. In particular, the Straw Hats fight the global overlords known as the World Nobles who are one of those cabals of palace-dwelling, decadent, cruel tyrants you see in fictional worlds from The Hunger Games to Zardoz, along with, say, political cartoons about France in the 18th century.
Who are the protesters using the One Piece flag?
In Mexico right now, this is a bit of a muddle—especially if, like me, you’re trying to get a read on these events from a long way away while reading about it in the wrong language. The Associated Press wrote that one protest was “attended by people from several age groups, with supporters of the recently killed Michoacan Mayor Carlos Manzo, attending the protest wearing the straw hats that symbolize his political movement.”
Manzo—who was a millennial, not a member of Gen-Z, if that matters—did indeed style himself in working-class straw cowboy-style hats. One was placed on his casket during his funeral. Protesters in Guadalajara, for their part, hoisted a giant straw hat during a march, though in photos of that group, none look particularly “Gen-Z.” At the same time, even if you’re not a One Piece fan, you probably noticed that One Piece straw hats are trendy among the youths if you came in contact with any trick-or-treaters this past Halloween.
But the One Piece flag and its straw-hatted central emblem started going on display at protests around the world this past summer. In Indonesia, demonstrations in August were, according to the BBC, fueled by “cost-of-living woes and public frustration with the political elite,” initially sparked to “condemn what many viewed as excessive pay and housing allowances for parliamentarians.” Indonesian protesters used the symbol.
Southeast Asian politics researcher Kurniawan Arif Maspul tracked the One Piece flag phenomenon to late July, when it started being used in that country as a general purpose protest flag. He observed the following in the local media:
A truck driver from East Java told a local outlet that he hoisted the flag because ‘life is getting harder’ and ‘Luffy fights injustice, that’s what we feel too’. Others in university interviews called the flag a ‘symbol of honesty’ and ‘bravery against an oppressive system’, noting that the national flag felt more ceremonial than meaningful for them.
In September, the flag was used by protesters in the neighboring Philippines, according to the Guardian, which quotes a 23-year-old organizer named Eugero Vincent Liberato, as saying, “We see the flag as a symbol of liberation against oppression … that we should always fight for the future we deserve.”
So what does the One Piece flag mean as a protest symbol?
One flag-loving Redditor in the r/vexilology subreddit called the flag the “de facto flag of Gen Z.” Seeing its use around the world in protests, it’s tempting to rush to that bold conclusion.
NPR corespondent Eyder Peralta says the protests “were organized by young people, Generation Z, who say they’re speaking out against a narcogovernment.”
So the story on its face is that members of Gen-Z in Mexico have claimed as its banner a symbol created by a Generation X manga artist, Eiichiro Oda, in a protest set off by the slaying of a millennial mayor.
President Sheinbaum of Mexico, however, has claimed that the protests are funded and astroturfed by members of the right in Mexico, and spurred by online bots.
It’s worth noting, however, that symbols from pop culture just kinda show up at protests. The three-finger Hunger Games salute was used in 2020 to protest the royal family in Thailand. Various Harry Potter-derived slogans and symbols were used during the 2018 pro-gun control March for Our Lives movement. And back in 2008, Guy Fawkes masks, lifted from the movie adaptation of Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta, were used in anti-Scientology protests, before they were co-opted as protest symbols globally.
It might not be more complicated than that.