Bodies, Shawls, and Train Cars: Women and the Traveling Homes of the Mexican Revolution

Abstract

abstract: This article examines the ephemeral architectures and the place-making practices of the women in charge of building the mobile dwellings of military columns during the early twentieth-century Mexican Revolution. During this decade-long civil war, federal and rebel armies mobilized throughout Mexico and were heavily dependent on the services provided by the crowds of working-class women who traveled with them. Better known as soldaderas , these camp followers cared for the daily necessities of cooking, laundry, and health care for soldiers, while also creating ephemeral dwellings for the military columns. These domestic settings developed cyclically in a process of building, using, dismantling, transporting, and building anew. Two different artifacts remained constant and central to the building and rebuilding work of soldaderas: the train car and the shawl. This article analyzes how they worked in tandem with the bodies of soldaderas to produce a domestic architecture in need of constant rebuilding, a domestic architecture whose contingent transformation meaningfully fused the fabrication process and its material malleability. Losing its unity and fixity, this architecture unfolded in a series of domestic and material practices that were no longer contained in a single site and moment.