Revolutionary Women of Texas and Mexico: Portraits of Soldaderas, Saints, and Subversives

PREFACE

KATHY SOSA

SOMETIME IN 2009, I WAS GIVEN AN ESSAY WRITTEN BY MY FRIEND LANCE Aaron, pointing to the then-imminent hundredth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution (1910–27) and the Cristero War that extended conflicts through 1929, both of which threw Mexico into violence and chaos and turned the Mexican political and social orders inside out. There were many significant outcomes of the revolution in Mexico, and these have been well documented. But what wasn’t well known, he said, was the huge impact of Mexico’s revolution on the United States, on our home state of Texas, and on our multicultural yet very Mexican hometown of San Antonio. This cataclysmic event drove an entire population—hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million people—north to the United States. The vast majority never returned. In the process, our borderland home became irrevocably transformed, became more densely and fundamentally Mexican, and the Latinization of the United States began in earnest.

Not only did this essay open my eyes, but it also stirred memories of my husband’s stories of his grandmothers, both of whom had come to San Antonio to escape the revolution, both alone with several small children. I was already somewhat familiar with the soldaderas, the Mexican women who underwrote the revolutionary armies’ success by providing their supply lines and food, taking up arms when necessary, but it occurred to me that the story of the revolution, and its impact on both Mexico and Texas, was to a great extent the story of revolutionary women: those who left Mexico and those who stayed, their courage amid brutality and disorder, their willingness to assume roles and take actions previously reserved for men, and their ability, through those actions, to change the course of history. Yet so little was written or known about them, unfortunately.

Jennifer Speed, my historian friend and future collaborator, explained the project’s importance to me this way: back when biography was in favor as a means of recounting history, it was overwhelmingly the biographies of great men that were written (by male historians, no doubt). Women were overlooked, taken for granted. As the traditional biography format falls out of favor, we must address the silence around these subjects and begin to fill this void, so that women’s stories will not go untold.

Thus an obsession with telling the stories of the women of the Mexican Revolution was born, along with a broader concept for a project that would tell the stories of other formidable women in the history of Texas and Mexico. Mis grandes amigas, Sandra Cisneros and Ellen Riojas Clark, who have been trusted advisers and guides on previous creative journeys, gathered with me to discuss the merits of the project, brainstorm it, and bring form to the idea. This book is the result of my collaboration with Sandra, Ellen, Jennifer, and a group of talented and accomplished authors. It tells the stories of remarkable women who lived in different times and were revolutionary in different ways, but all lived in the Texas–Mexico region, a community with shared geography, history, culture, and DNA.

In what context are we to consider the subjects of this book revolutionary? Granted, the most common use of revolutionary may be in the context of war and politics, an area where women have historically gone unacknowledged. For this book, we adopted a broader definition of actions threatening to the established order. Herein we consider revolution, in Jennifer’s words, as a transformative process that makes the society new. This more expansive concept of revolution gives clarity to just how revolutionary women are and always have been.

At the heart of this project is women and their stories from the Mexican Revolutionary period, 1910 to 1927. This led us naturally to ask the question: Who are the spiritual godmothers of these women? Quiénes son las antepasadas, the earlier female figures from this region whose example or inspiration put wind beneath the wings of our early twentieth-century subjects? This question led to others: What is their legacy? Who are the spiritual daughters of revolutionary-era pioneers and heroines in more contemporary times? These questions were the rough structure for the book, and we began to refine the list of subjects and to find authors to write about each one.

Our contributors range from scholars to literary figures and journalists. We sought authors who are passionate about or have a keen insight into their subject, believing that these qualities were more important than consistency of style. And the style of the essays, or portraits, varies widely. Each one stands on its own, like sisters—all in the same family but each with her own point of view and personality. The collection, of course, does not represent a definitive compilation. Our intention, instead, is to offer a sampling of compelling exemplars, thereby spurring interest and further examination of the topic.

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Scene of Revolutionary Women in Texas and Mexico

JENNIFER SPEED

THE HISTORICAL CENTER FOR THIS COLLECTION IS THE ERA OF THE MEXICAN Revolution, from 1910 to 1927, and the Cristero War (La Cristiada) that followed, from 1926 to 1929. The geographical center is Texas and Mexico, given their shared history and culture. The revolution shaped the lives of women from nearly every profession and background. These essays are reflections not only on how the revolution affected women but also on how women shaped the revolution. Women actively participated in the revolution under many different guises as soldiers, journalists, nurses, scouts, political activists, and telegraph operators, to name only a few roles. In other ways, they embraced the revolution’s promises for liberty and sought to extend those promises to marginalized persons who had the most to gain from a political revolution. In that spirit, women revolutionaries fought for fair labor practices and better access to education in the same way that they fought for political access.¹ Here we make women’s connection to the revolution explicit and seek to understand their efforts in context.² From the era of the Mexican Revolution we look backward and forward along the historical continuum that extends from the Texas–Mexico colonial era until today. Without a doubt the revolution’s origins are to be found deep in its colonial history, and much of that history is well known. In bringing revolutionary women from Mexico’s premodern past into the foreground, we seek to broaden the conversation about women and revolutionary change.

Our use of the terms revolution and revolutionary is necessarily expansive. Revolution is generally understood to be a violent struggle that leads to regime change. The focus on governmental, or constitutional, change is an ancient one, for that is how Aristotle first defined it more than two millennia ago. The outcome of this regime change is freedom from oppression, to use Hannah Arendt’s language, with stress on participation in the public sphere.³ For most of the twentieth century, studies on revolution were largely directed toward either exploring the violence of revolution or the actual overthrow of the state. There has been little room for women in this schema until more recently.⁴ Even though women have often been involved in armed struggles throughout history, they have typically been in the minority—making it easy to discount their contributions.⁵ By the nature of the upheaval that revolutions cause in society, women are often drawn into nontraditional and more public roles, but these largely fall outside of the domain of military conflict.⁶ Additionally, women historically have had a small share in the leadership and elected roles at the level of the nation-state relative to their numbers in the population, whether their nation has seen a revolution or not. They are party neither to the regimes that are overthrown nor the regimes that immediately follow.⁷ As a result, women’s activities in the midst of revolution are easy to overlook, especially since their wartime freedoms are often undone by new, more oppressive regimes.⁸ A case in point, women were first popularly elected to office in Mexico during the 1920s in the Yucatán, but political upheaval and regime changes prevented them from either taking office or exercising their elected duties.⁹

Women’s absence from formal warfare and politics, however, does not mean that they haven’t shaped the cultures and communities in which revolutions have unfolded, often in extraordinary ways. In framing the idea of revolution as a transformative process that makes a culture anew, we are affording an opening for women in revolutions and as revolutionaries. In these essays, we understand revolution to be a political turnaround as well as a social and cultural transformation that may extend over a long historical period. The era of the Mexican Revolution and Cristero War marks a considerable transformation in Mexican society, but those events are also historical markers along Mexico’s long journey from Spanish territorial conquest to a liberal-democratic nation-state.

COLONIAL-ERA MEXICO AND TEXAS

The Spanish conquest of what is now Mexico and Texas began in earnest in the early sixteenth century. In ventures formally authorized by Queen Isabella of Castile and her successors, private expeditions first seized islands in the Caribbean and then began their westward expansion. One of the most influential expeditions was led by Hernán Cortés, who set out from the island of Hispaniola in 1519. Lured by tales of wealth and accompanied by a contingent of soldier-adventurers, he and his companions attacked, and then toppled, the Aztec Empire and its capital at Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City. Although the speed with which Cortés carried out the conquest is startling, it is in many ways not surprising. Cortés benefited greatly from European weapons and horses. He also held two other sources of significant advantage: translators and local peoples who loathed their Aztec overlords. As to the former, Cortés depended heavily on the political negotiations made possible by a pair of translators, a shipwrecked Spaniard who learned a native language and a Tlaxcala woman, Malintzín (or La Malinche), who had learned a number of indigenous languages in the course of being traded from one tribe to another as a slave. Cortés also found willing allies among the Aztec’s subject peoples. They aided him, of course, without being fully cognizant of the consequences for their own survival. Fewer than three decades after Christopher Columbus had first set foot in the New World, the first Mesoamerican empire fell victim to Spanish dreams of expansion. Following Cortés’s hasty conquest, the Spanish crown took over from soldiers and adventure-seekers and assumed the more difficult work of colonization and settlement. Over the next two centuries, Spain set about establishing and controlling a vast overseas empire known as New Spain.

Brought to New Spain were cadres of royal officials whose primary work was directed toward matters of justice and taxation. In the company of royal officials, but obliged to pay their own passage, came the artisans and laborers who established Spanish settlements. The shipping manifests of this era tell an important story about who did not come on those voyages: women. Overwhelmingly, single working-class men who came to the New World and stayed would partner and create families with indigenous women. The children of these unions, mestizos with mixed European and indigenous heritage, would gradually become the predominant ethnic group in Texas and Mexico.

Together, Spanish settlers and officials laid out orderly towns with churches at their centers and built modest homes, bakeries, and workshops. To supply the food needs of their communities, they established farms and gardens outside the walls of the towns, echoing the pattern of European communities. Where the Spanish crown granted large estates known as encomiendas, their encomanderos set up farming operations for cash crops. Supplying the labor were indigenous persons—women, men, and sometimes children—now bound to the land and obligated to work. Mostly male slaves bought and shipped from Africa would expand the ranks of the laboring classes. As both the papacy and the Spanish crown came to forbid the enslavement and exploitation of indigenous peoples, they permitted even worse exploitation of African slaves. Those who survived and eventually gained freedom often intermarried with indigenous women.

It is hard to overstate the cultural importance of religion for both the indigenous people of Mexico and the Spanish who brought their Catholic traditions and beliefs with them. In many areas, native religious practices were almost entirely stamped out; in others, some syncretic practices developed, to include traditions from Africa. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe emerged from this tension between native and Catholic beliefs. She was said to have appeared at Tepeyac in 1531, a site where the goddess Tonantzin has been worshipped and which Spanish conquerors had destroyed shortly after their arrival in central Mexico. Many clerics, especially Franciscan friars, initially resisted devotion to the Marian apparition at Tepeyac because they feared it was neither orthodox nor authentic. Their objections hardly mattered, or perhaps their objections actually fueled the flames.

Devotion to the Marian apparition of Guadalupe surged among people who saw in her an image that spoke to their own needs—in their faith lives, in their suffering, in their resistance to oppression of all kinds, and in their identification with indigenous culture. When Spanish settlers and clerics pushed northward, they brought their devotion to Guadalupe when they founded the first parish church in San Antonio in 1738.¹⁰ Eventually, the protection of the Virgin would be invoked by parties involved in the Mexican War of Independence, the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War, and the Zapatista uprising of the late twentieth century. Her popularity, her malleability, and the ways in which her image has been invoked in revolutions of all kinds make the Virgin of Guadalupe an ideal subject for our collection of essays.

In the rigid religious and cultural environment of colonial Mexico, the activities of persons of every class and profession were severely circumscribed by law as much as by custom. Mexican society was rigidly patriarchal and hierarchical; women were thereby doubly limited. Mexico’s rigid caste system, based on race, further delineated women’s roles. In this volume, we recognize some of the challenges that they faced in a race-based culture by calling attention to the ways in which women broke racial barriers and expectations. Regardless of ethnicity or class, though, women had the onerous burden of household responsibilities and childbearing and were explicitly excluded from the political and ecclesiastical decision-making of any kind. Upper-class urban women could consider convent life instead of marriage, but even in a community entirely of women, nuns were under the authority of local bishops and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, for example, is one woman who used the feminine space of the convent to carve out a distinctive identity for herself. She used the safety of that space, and her friendship with the viceroy of New Spain, to advocate for women’s education. Women who followed the typical path of married life moved from the guardianship of their fathers to that of their husbands or even their sons or brothers; in only the rarest of instances do we find women who were completely independent of male authority. When the war for independence began in 1810, women who rebelled against the status quo in colonial Mexico did so under extraordinarily oppressive conditions.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY MEXICO AND TEXAS

Mexico’s War of Independence from Spain raged from 1810 to 1821 and resulted in the declaration of Mexico as an empire, which lasted just over a year before giving way to Mexico’s First Federal Republic. At the time of independence, Mexico’s territory extended southward all the way through Central America and northward, comprising what is now most of the western United States as far as the modern-day border with Canada. As part of Mexico’s earliest territorial and political reorganization in 1824, the government formed the State of Coahuila and Texas, which persisted as a territorial unit for just over a decade until Texas won its own independence from Mexico in 1836. In that war, too, women played an important part.

From the time of independence up through 1876, Mexicans suffered through sustained periods of armed conflict, including wars with France and the United States, along with five major governmental changes. These upheavals had important implications for women, including those who were directly involved in combat as spies, as fighters, or as political dissidents. During the period of the French Intervention, women in areas like Oaxaca acted as the only link between the Mexican government in hiding, and women who were caught were beaten or jailed for their dissidence.¹¹ Women such as Jane McManus Cazneau acted as correspondents and smugglers on both sides of the Rio Grande during the U.S.–Mexico War. Moreover, frequent warfare and the deaths of so many soldiers tipped the gender balance in some areas, such as Mexico City, in favor of women. Many young married women were widowed before they had the chance to bear children, and others became heads of households following the deaths of multiple male relatives.¹² Women were also part of the conflicts in large numbers as soldaderas who accompanied troops and filled vital support roles that were not staffed by the army proper. Many took part in active warfare. Their stories are featured in this collection. When the troops suffered, so did soldaderas. As many as 1,500 women and children accompanied General Antonio López de Santa Anna on his campaign to defend Texas, but only 300 returned home. The others died of starvation, thirst, or exposure.¹³

Liberal reforms of the nineteenth century, such as the secularization of education, offered more avenues for women to engage in the public sphere. Schools were established for training teachers, with women enrolling in significant numbers. In general, the newly circumscribed role of the Catholic Church and expanded roles for women in other labor sectors also allowed women greater room for self-determination during the nineteenth century.¹⁴ These freedoms would once again be sharply curtailed under the long administration of Porfirio Díaz.

THE PORFIRIATO AND OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION

The Mexican Revolution was the direct result of the social and political tensions that emerged from decades of rule by Porfirio Díaz, a period known as the Porfiriato. Díaz had risen to national prominence as a military leader who helped bring an end to French intervention in Mexico, which lasted from 1861 to 1867. However, he also initiated several rebellions against his own elected government. Díaz formally entered political life as a representative to Congress from Veracruz. He became president after leading an armed rebellion that toppled the government in 1876 and presented himself as a liberal reformer. After generations of warfare within Mexico and against foreign invaders, he paved the way for the so-called Pax Porfiriato, much needed by the entire nation. As has happened the world over, though, that kind of peace demanded the trading away of personal and civil liberties. Díaz curbed factionalism, which included making some groups enemies of the state, created a strong central regime with himself at the center, and built up a network of regional strongmen and appointees who owed their power and prestige to him alone.¹⁵ He also realized that the restrictions placed on the Catholic Church were deeply resented by many Catholics. Díaz earned the favor of some Catholics by choosing not to enforce such restrictions rather than abolish them. Ironically, activism rooted in social Catholicism would come to play a significant role in challenging Díaz, especially in the northern state of Chihuahua.¹⁶

One of Díaz’s signature achievements was the launch of large-scale industrial and economic development, but that development came at a high cost. Major investment in industry by foreign firms was accompanied by the massive displacement of indigenous communities in Mexico’s north. Water was appropriated for industrial development, thereby affecting the livelihood of rural, indigenous people, and workers who labored on industrial or mining projects often suffered under dangerous, deplorable working conditions. U.S. companies played an important part in this displacement, and their continued activity in Mexico was directly supported by President Howard Taft’s administration. As critics became more vocal, some of whom fled to the United States to escape Díaz, Taft’s and Wilson’s administrations increasingly supported Mexico’s efforts to track down dissidents and either return them to Mexico or imprison them in the United States.

Some of the opposition to Díaz arose out of the rapidly changing labor environment within Mexico as the country became more industrialized. For example, mutual aid societies, or mutualistas, came to play a role in supporting workers and their families after confraternities and guilds had been abolished by the 1857 constitution.¹⁷ Following the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, many women-led mutualistas formed to provide social and financial support for revolutionaries and refugees who settled in Texas and elsewhere in the southwestern United States. Also, rising educational levels across Mexico fueled demand for a lively press, some of which turned against Díaz. Newspapers and broadsheets made for an easy means of communicating discontent about working conditions and political developments. Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, for example, founded a protest newspaper, Vésper: Justicia y libertad, as a means of challenging Díaz and was forced underground—with her printing press in tow—in order to carry forward her work. Teresa Urrea, too, challenged the Díaz government indirectly, making her a target of both the U.S. and Mexican governments.

The tide began to turn against Díaz around 1900 and worsened with a worldwide economic crisis in 1907. Alongside the steady opposition of presses from around the country and within Mexico City, and worker agitation coming from all directions, moderate liberals regrouped and attempted to challenge Díaz’s hold on power through the creation of political clubs. The Flores Magón brothers, with their socialist and anarchist bent, found supporters in some sectors, while Francisco Madero, with his more moderate and measured brand of the liberal opposition, found backers in others. Ultimately, Madero’s upper-class connections helped him gain a following among Mexico’s landed establishment. Madero ran for office in 1910 against Díaz, but Díaz had Madero jailed to prevent his participation in the election. Madero escaped while he was under house arrest and fled across the border to Texas. From his base in San Antonio, Madero and his supporters hatched the Plan de San Luis Potosí in early October 1910 to overthrow Díaz. Armed rebellions subsequently broke out the following month, marking the start of the Mexican Revolution. Just as quickly as major rebel coalitions emerged, so too did women soldiers and leaders appear among their ranks. Less than a year into the revolution, a U.S. paper, the Washington Herald, featured a story with the headline: Mexican Rebels Have Girl Leader. After noting that the entire state of Morelos, except the city of Cuernavaca, rose up against the government, the article calls out Margarita Neri and Esperanza Echevarría for their command of more than a thousand indigenous troops.¹⁸ Off the battlefield, women arranged for the smuggling of money and arms as well as communications across the U.S.–Mexico border.

As Mexicans rebelled against Díaz and his allies, they tried to overturn a deeply entrenched legacy of political and social injustices. A point worth underscoring is that while discontent with Díaz and his decades of rule was widespread, there was considerable disagreement among his opponents about which features of Mexican life and politics were most in need of fixing. Was it the influx of foreigners and foreign investment in infrastructure? Regional rule by caudillos, or strongmen? Mistreatment of indigenous people? The outsized influence of the Catholic Church? Legal, educational, and reproductive freedoms for women? The rejection of the liberal reforms in the post-independence decades? Unjust appropriation of land and natural resources? What had begun as a regime change with Francisco Madero’s election and attempts to unseat Díaz devolved into civil and military chaos. Within less than a year of the outbreak of the revolution, Emiliano Zapata and his supporters issued their Plan de Ayala, challenging Madero’s authority and commitment to genuine reform. Madero’s forced resignation and assassination in 1913, followed by the dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, marked the start of the civil war that plagued Mexico on and off for the next seven years. During the war, many women, like Cristina Jimenez Sosa and Leonila Barrios Ortiz, fled Mexico with their children and set up businesses in Texas and elsewhere.

The ascendancy of Venustiano Carranza to the presidency in 1915 and the remarkable fact that he remained alive and in office for five years given the short tenures of his predecessors brought a measure of political stability in the midst of chronic warfare. The promulgation of a new constitution in 1917 was a tentative sign of a return to political normalcy, but Mexico was still battered and broken—and would be for years to come. Although women made considerable strides in pressing for their rights at the national level, their demands were not reflected in the new constitution. Zapata was assassinated in 1919, thereby removing one rebel leader from the national scene. Carranza survived an assassination attempt but was either killed, or committed suicide, during an ambush in 1920. That same year, Pancho Villa agreed to cease his rebellion and largely retreated from public life, but he would be assassinated in 1923. Estimates of the revolution’s toll vary, but it is likely that more than 1.5 million people died as a result of warfare.¹⁹ To put this number in context, it is more than twice the total number of all casualties during the U.S. Civil War.²⁰

THE CRISTERO WAR

The early 1920s saw only sporadic fighting, but the presidency of Plutarco Calles marked the return of open warfare.²¹ One of Carranza’s signal achievements was the Constitution of 1917, but it carried forward old resentments, especially with regard to the role of the Catholic Church in Mexican society. The liberal Constitution of 1857 had sharply limited Catholic influence, especially in the sphere of education. Díaz had largely chosen to ignore the constitution’s restrictions on the church, leaving regional and local leaders to exercise discretion. The Constitution of 1917 reaffirmed the free exercise of religion, but article 3 declared that education should be compulsory at the elementary level, democratic, free, and entirely secular. Church and state were to be unequivocally separate, to include a prohibition on clerics or consecrated religious holding office of any kind or inheriting property, except close relatives. Women such as María Concepción Acevedo de la Llata were caught up in this battle and fought back. Also, the state reserved the right to appropriate church lands (article 24) or declare them part of the national heritage. A holdover from Mexico’s colonial era, the church was the single-largest landholder in Mexico, which allowed