México's Nobodies

The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women

B. Christine Arce

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438463599
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Mexikanische Geschichte

Honorable Mention, 2018 Elli Kongas-Maranda Professional Award presented by the Women's Studies Section of the American Folklore Society
Winner of the 2018 Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize presented by the Modern Language Association
Winner of the 2016 Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Book Prize presented by the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature and Culture
México's Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as "La Adelita" and "La Cucaracha, " iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art's crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.

PART ONE

Entre Adelitas y Cucarachas

The Soldadera as Trope in the Mexican Revolution

1

Soldaderas and the Making of Revolutionary Spaces

Junto a las grandes tropas de Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata y Venustiano Carranza, más de mil novecientos líderes lucharon en bandas rebeldes. Las soldaderas pululan en las fotografías. Multitud anónima, comparsas, al parecer telón de fondo, sólo hacen bulto, pero sin ellas los soldados no hubieran comido ni dormido ni peleado.

[Together with the great troops of Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza, more than one thousand nine hundred leaders fought in rebel bands. The soldaderas hovered in the photographs. An anonymous multitude, groups in the background, they only form a blurry shape, but without these women the soldiers would not have eaten, slept or fought].

—Elena Poniatowska, Las soldaderas

Elena Poniatowska chose this photograph (see Fig 1.1) as the cover of her important book on the participation of soldaderas, the thousands of women who accompanied troops of male soldiers and acted in a wide range of capacities, during the Mexican Revolution. Originally thought to have been taken between 1910 and 1914 by Agustín Casasola, it is one of the most widely disseminated portrayals of the soldaderas. Indeed, the image contains all the elements Roland Barthes might consider relevant for both a journalistic and posed photograph. In his book, Camera Lucida, Barthes suggests that for the photographer, the best picture would be taken when that subject is not aware of the camera, thus capturing the original and unaffected state of the subject (32).

FIGURE 1.1. “Soldaderas on the platform at the Buenavista train station,” México City, D.F., April 1912.

It is clear that certain figures in this photograph are caught unaware, while other women are very much conscious that they are being photographed, and are in fact posing, or looking directly into the camera. The woman to the left, whose image alone has been cropped and reproduced innumerable times, is hanging from the train and wears a rather desperate expression on her face. Is she looking for her soldado? Is she simply a vendor looking to sell her wares, or is she looking for trouble? Her ambiguous expression, one that is simultaneously worried and reminiscent of the mischievous stereotype we see of the soldadera in so many texts, is emblematic of the very ambiguous nature of the soldadera herself. Unlike this random shot, the young pregnant woman to the right is very much aware of the photographer capturing her image. Barthes describes the process of posing and becoming an image as a self-constitutive act, claiming that “once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image” (10). Although her head is slightly bent, she is looking directly at us, squinting as if the sun were in her eyes, or as if she were uncomfortable with being photographed. Is this timidity, like Poniatowska describes below, or annoyance? Behind her a woman with a rebozo1 covering her head is slightly out of focus, but likewise looks demurely into the camera, posing for what might be her single moment of anonymous immortality. The whole scene, though typical of those we have come to associate with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, is nonetheless missing some of the vital elements: soldiers, rifles, and horses.

Poniatowska describes these photographs as a contradiction to the kind of story told by the canonical authors of the Mexican Revolution. In the following passage from her book Las soldaderas, she remarks on the vision projected by Casasola’s images and how they undermine archetypal figures like “La Pintada” provided by Mariano Azuela’s classic revolutionary novel Los de abajo (1915), the model on which México’s premier film diva María Félix’s2 character “La Cucaracha” (1959) was based:

En las fotografías de Agustín Casasola, las mujeres con sus enaguas de percal, sus blusas blancas, sus caritas lavadas, su mirada baja, para que no se les vea la vergüenza en los ojos, su candor […] sus manos morenas deteniendo la bolsa del mandado o aprestándose para entregarle el máuser al compañero, no parecen las fieras malhabladas y vulgares que pintan los autores de la Revolución mexicana.

[In the photography by Agustín Casasola, the women with their percale petticoats, their white blouses, scrubbed faces, lowered gaze hiding the shame in their eyes, their candor […] their brown hands holding the money pouch or rushing to pass their partner his Mauser, do not seem like the foul-mouthed, vulgar beasts the authors of the Mexican Revolution would make them out to be]. (13)

This photograph reveals a fundamental ambiguity: we see the “caritas lavadas,” “blusas blancas,” “enaguas de percal,” “mirada baja” and “candor” while we simultaneously observe what might be either the weariness of their dress or the deterioration of the image. We also notice that women are caught unaware as pieces of the revolutionary background, and in the foreground, as protagonists and subjects “becoming” images before the click of the camera shutter is completed.

Soldaderas constituted the “anonymous multitude” and “blurry shapes” that helped to make the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (which preceded both the Russian and Cuban Revolutions) a reality. Poniatowska lauds the role of photography in preserving the legacy of the soldaderas and laments that were it not for the work of Agustín Casasola, Jorge Guerra, and the “kilometers” of film shot by Salvador Toscano, the presence of these women would be lost because history has only denigrated them (21). She compiled many of these photographs into a book which functions as a cultural and historical memoir, poetically splicing together bits and pieces from novels, corridos, history, and revolutionary chronicles in a disjointed and almost miscellaneous fashion, not unlike the haphazard way in which the soldadera traveled and has been remembered. She, like myself and many others, laments both the historical and cultural representation of these women as miserable camp followers who were not much more than prostitutes, troublemaking and vulgar “cucarachas,” or sweet-faced “adelitas” patiently waiting for their men to come home. These photographs, however, reveal something more than the histories related to us through revolutionary novels, chronicles, and films; they reveal a presence that has been effaced, misunderstood, maligned, and distorted, but that nevertheless existed.

Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes suggest one axiomatic truth: photography provides proof of what at one point existed at a moment in time. Barthes states that “[e]very photograph is a certificate of presence” (87) and Sontag claims that “[p]hotographs furnish evidence” (5). These blunt aphorisms become undeniably true in the case of the soldadera as they are almost the sole empirical testament to their existence; but more important, they are the closest approximations to what might have constituted their reality. This photograph is in fact witness to their multiple stories, to their roles in the background as what Poniatowska calls “bultitos de miseria” [bundles of misery] as well as in the foreground: as nurses, generals, warriors, spies, cooks, wives, mothers, daughters, lovers, prostitutes, and companions. It also speaks to the forced, improvised, or even arbitrary nature of their participation in addition to their willed and conscious involvement. By posing for photographs, they created images and constituted their subjectivity; by deflecting their gaze from the intrusiveness of the camera, they constituted themselves as part of the background.

This one image single-handedly emblematizes and obscures the legacy of the soldadera. As it turns out, this photograph has traveled through historical memory and was not even taken by Agustín Víctor Casasola at all, but, as John Mraz affirms in his book on the Casasola legacy in Mexican photography, by Gerónimo Hernández (Photographing the Mexican Revolution 240). It has been interpreted and misinterpreted as an icon of revolutionary womanhood in what Mraz calls a “condensed comedy of errors” (240). It first appeared on the cover of the newspaper Nueva Era on April 8, 1912, where the “cutline proclaimed, ‘I will defend my Juan’ ” (240). It subsequently disappeared only to reappear thirty years later in Gustavo Casasola’s (Agustín’s brother) compilation published in 1942, Historia gráfica de la Revolución, labeled as “Adelita-la-soldadera” accompanied by the following information: “The soldadera has seen all of Mexico, crossing from border to border” (240). Indeed, the conflicting hypotheses regarding the origin of this image abound. Mraz confirms that it couldn’t have been taken in 1910 because there were very few troop movements that year, but rather, was shot in 1912, at the Buena Vista Station in México City where troops were preparing to travel north in order to quell the rebellion of Pasqual Orozco (240).

Now that we know the historical “truth,” the empirical fact that situates this photograph in a specific time and place, does it tell us anything more about what it was like to be a soldadera, or if indeed these women, whose image has traveled “throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia,” actually were soldaderas at all (240)? Like the crack in the original glass negative, this broken image, often cropped to leave the other women out, constitutes an historical fragment, a flicker of knowledge, an alternative saber3 that allows us to meet these women and surmise their history. “I will defend my Juan” sounds like a romantic line from a film we would all like to see, but hardly constitutes any historical truth because these women occupied the slippery spaces in between the cavalry and the retaguardia [rearguard], the immobile home and the ambulant hearth, the abnegating wife and the loose woman. With this image in mind, this chapter will argue that the mobile presence of the soldaderas affected women’s place in Mexican history, but also created, through the aleatory nature of a popular uprising, revolutionary spaces that led to a split from previous models of female behavior. I claim that this particular military intervention by the soldaderas, more than in previous wars, constituted a radically different ontological state marked by movement and the creation of a habitus in motion. That is, the oppositional tensions implicit in stasis and movement coincide with the mode in which the soldaderas travel.

Art, in all its forms and figurations, has been instrumental to remembering these women at the same time it has deformed their legacy. The first part of this book will examine the way the female body becomes the site of a powerful tropological discourse in revolutionary and post-revolutionary México, leading to my theoretical queries: why does her body constitute the site of such discursive tension? Why is the image of this figure, bandoliers across her chest, carrying both child and molcajete4 in her rebozo, braids flowing, synonymous with the Mexican Revolution, yet discursively and hence historically erased in the same gesture? How does this figure point to the fissures in the nation’s historical memory with regard to its public women? Soldaderas mark the limits of the rhetoric of the nation-state and their very nomenclature debases the real worth of female participation in war. The contradictions in the photographic images foreground the very paradoxical nature of the soldaderas’ historical invisibility, and yet, figural ubiquity. I will first explore the movement of the soldaderas and the importance of the train in their peripatetic migrations outside of the domestic domain into the public sphere as a concrete example of how they created a veritable motile habitus, or as James Clifford has theorized, a “dwelling-in-travel.” By breaking from traditional notions of female behavior, they created what Diana Taylor would call a performative “scenario.” This scenario—which is repeatable, prosaic yet multivalent—would brand their place in the imaginary of Mexicans for generations to come. The following section will unpack some of the concepts that the example of inhabiting the train makes manifest: the creation of a scenario, “dwelling-in-travel” through revolutionary practices and tactics, and divergent occupations of place and space. I will then present a brief herstory that will outline what little is known about the soldaderas, and conclude by returning to the image examined at the beginning. The contemplation of this image will allow us to reconsider the role of photography in preserving their memory vis-à-vis the cultural products that showcase them in the following chapter.

Y se les fue el tren …5

Throughout the Revolution all the rail workers contributed to the cause, because the Mexican Revolution was made on the train-tracks.6

—Guillermo Treviño in Documentary by John Mraz,
Hechos sobre los rieles [Made on Rails] (1987)

FIGURE 1.2. “Soldier and soldaderas on the roof of railcar,” México, 1914.

One of the most important instruments of the Mexican Revolution was the locomotive, and many believe, as emphasized by railroad union leader Guillermo Treviño in John Mraz’s documentary about the trains in México, that the Revolution was literally “made on the rails.” That is to say, that it revolutionized war practices by transporting the arms, cavalry and of course the soldaderas on its rooftops; any of a dozen films featuring the soldadera during the Revolution will showcase the train as practically a character in the revolutionary drama. The soldaderas had no official texts: the trains were one of their texts, their “practiced places,” whose image now resonates as the icon of one of most important revolutions of the twentieth century. They certainly “got on” the trains (albeit in unconventional fashions) by climbing onto the rooftops; but they also got in the cars with the animals, and some even tied planks below, hanging perilously in the lurch if the train hit a sharp curve.

Regarding the risks of the train’s mobility, Michel De Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, pronounces the following dictum which we could use to consider the ways in which the soldadera occupied the locomotive: “[t]o get in [the train], as always, there was a price to be paid. The historical threshold of beatitude: history exists where there is a price to be paid” (113). The soldaderas inhabited the trains, made a space out of a transient, marginalized place, lived through movement, not stasis; they blurred and even obliterated the frontiers between private and public spheres, creating a humble home out of a what for De Certeau is a bourgeois vehicle. However, the making of a space for De Certeau is also the unmaking of stasis, of a “proper” (what De Certeau calls a place) and is actualized as a vortex of conflicting variables of time and energy:

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables […] It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities […] In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.” (117)

Somehow, the soldaderas paradoxically accomplished both. They made and unmade the train as a place by defying its “proper” function but also by simultaneously domesticating it; the train operates as multiple “phatic topoi.” By claiming it as a place, they created their own “proper” and embodied space, undoing the “proper” grounded by hegemonic groups.

The train in motion creates a dynamic relationship between the inside and the outside, the relative stasis of the railroad car, closed in by the windows, and the constantly changing field of vision: “The machine is the primum mobile, the solitary god from which all the action proceeds. It not only divides spectators and beings, but also connects them; it is a mobile sym-bol [sic] between them, a tireless shifter, producing changes in the relationships between immobile elements” (113). The train paradoxically divides and connects simultaneously. This relationship, for De Certeau, is negotiated through the chiasm of the windowpane or the rail because it inverts the immobility of the inside with the mobility of the outside (112). However, in our case this division is rendered ambivalent, as it is not always clear who the spectators are. For De Certeau, the spectator is located within, gazing out and observing the countryside from a privileged position of speed and isolation. But this neglects that beyond the windowpane people are gazing back onto the train; the visual image of the revolutiona...