Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics and Power in Modern Mexico

Abstract

Editors Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano have assembled a crisp, well-integrated set of articles focused primarily on the experience of women during and after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Indeed, the title is somewhat misleading, because the collected articles deal far more with questions of gender identity and the use of ideas about masculinity and femininity in the popular classes’ negotiation with the state in the aftermath of armed upheaval than they do with the history of sexuality. The essays are revised versions of papers presented at a 2001 Yale University conference on women and gender in the Mexican Revolution. Framed by a foreword by Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivais, introduction by Mary Kay Vaughan, and epilogue by labor historian Temma Kaplan, the collection’s short essays by scholars based in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States provide an overview of women’s activism during the revolution and in labor movements afterwards; the deployment of gendered imagery through literature, song, and cinema chronicling the achievements of the revolution; and considerations of transgendered figures who established new identities over the course of the conflict and its aftermath. Researchers interested in the social, political, and cultural history of women in twentieth-century Mexico will want to consult this collection.The volume is organized into three sections. Gabriela Cano’s examination of the life of Amelia/Amelio Robles initiates the book’s first section on revolutionary culture. Cano identifies the steps that a young woman from rural Guerrero state took in order to become a man and fight as a revolutionary soldier, living life after the conflict as a man and seeking recognition as a male veteran many years later. The analysis establishes the characteristics that were regularly recognized as female and male in southern Mexico during the middle of the twentieth century. In her consideration of the work of postrevolutionary filmmaker Emilio “el Indio” Fernández, Julia Tuñón shows that indigenous women were all too often represented as victims, docile or too strong for their own good, but rarely as more complex or nuanced figures. Anne Rubenstein’s depiction of the social tensions sparked by Mexico City women’s adoption of flapper hairstyles and dress reveals the fears held by men who contested the independence and challenge to gender norms embraced by “las pelonas,” as those with short hair were called.In the second section, essays by Patience A. Schell and Ann S. Blum examine the gendered assumptions that underpinned reform activities related to vocational training and family formation in Mexico City. Stephanie Smith’s review of official and popular attitudes toward divorce in the radical state of Yucatán nicely contextualizes the debates that occurred there and demonstrates the international implications of the state’s liberal divorce laws, which attracted great numbers of foreigners seeking quick remedies to unfortunate relationships.The articles on the gendered nature of labor organizing in the third section are particularly strong. María Teresa Fernández Aceves’s nuanced exploration of union politics related to tortilla production in Guadalajara reveals the complex ways in which male union bosses marginalized women workers to the least skilled tasks, even as they built a political machine based on an integrated approach to the food-making trades. In her study of trade unionism among coffee workers in Veracruz state, Heather Fowler-Salamini uses interviews with former bean sorters to elucidate the persistence of paternalism, despite the radicalism of the revolutionary years, and to reveal that women who sought employment in the coffee industry were regularly regarded as promiscuous because of their proximity at work to men who were not family members. Susan Gauss’s analysis of gender politics within the Puebla state textile industry shows how industrial work in that region became identified with the image of a nonviolent, politically active male work force, effectively marginalizing their female co-workers.In a final section, Kristina A. Boylan’s work on Catholic women’s organizing provides an important contrast to the previous section’s consideration of more radical women, while Jocelyn Olcott’s overview of women’s political organizations sheds light on the ideological and class differences that frequently challenged a unified women’s movement in Mexico. An essay by anthropologist Lynn Stephen considers women’s participation in more recent collective action, including the 1994 Zapatista uprising, and identifies areas that reflect change and continuity with respect to preoccupations with gender in regional and national politics.Instructors will find many of the individual essays in this collection useful for helping students appreciate the ways in which the Mexican Revolution was or was not a revolution for women. For those undertaking research, this engaging collection complements other recent work on the topic, including a number of monographs on gender politics and cultural politics in the Mexican Revolution, and essays in the recent collection The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910 – 1953, edited by Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).