Women's Suffrage, the Anti-Chinese Campaigns, and Gendered Ideals in Sonora, Mexico, 1917–1925

Abstract

AbstractSonoran women who organized anti-Chinese auxiliaries in the immediate postrevolutionary years participated in Mexican women's movement into the public sphere from a more constrained role in the private spaces of home and church. While a particular ideal of womanhood imposed on women a duty to defend country, race, and gender—increasingly in the public sphere—the lack of suffrage constrained women's political participation. At least two Sonoran women, María de Jesús Váldez and Emélida Carrillo, imagined the vote for women, a vision in which women's suffrage depended on and was instrumental to racial hierarchy and discrimination against Chinese. As leaders of anti-Chinese committees, chineras, pelonas, voters in newspaper contests, and Independence Day Queens, Sonoran women acted both within and against evolving notions of ideal Mexican womanhood, an ideal that was gendered, racialized, and classist. Women's anti-Chinese activism in Sonora complicates the story of women's enfranchisement in Sonora.