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INTRODUCTION

The Daughters of La Malinche:

Gender and Revolutionary

Citizenship

B
Woman is a living symbol of

the strangeness of the universe and

its radical heterogeneity.

—Octavio Paz,

‘‘Los hijos de la Malinche’’∞

In late January 1936, some 250 peasant women and their children invaded
the Hacienda Santa Bárbara, the estate of Mexico’s former president and
political puppeteer Plutarco Elías Calles. Led by the intrepid activist and
erstwhile Communist Party militant Concha Michel, the campesinas (rural
women) claimed the ranch for a women’s school for vocational and political
skills, delivering the benefits of Mexico’s 1910–17 revolution. They imme-
diately faced Calles’s menacing guardias blancas, the private militia charged
with preventing such challenges. According to Michel’s account, she as-
suaged the women’s fears by explaining that Calles would find it ‘‘inconve-
nient’’ to massacre women and children.≤ A general in the revolution’s Con-
stitutionalist army and the jefe máximo (supreme chief) of postrevolutionary
politics, Calles publicly aligned himself with the masses; surely he would
not allow this encounter to degenerate into bloodshed by campesinas stand-
ing up for their revolutionary rights. As tensions mounted, Calles o√ered
to negotiate, and Michel steeled herself to confront the man she had re-
cently likened to Joseph Stalin for their shared betrayal of popular revolu-
tions.≥ She viewed mass mobilizations as critical to revitalizing Mexico’s
receding revolution and, sensing imminent victory, hoped to inspire future
land invasions. While Michel conferred with Calles, however, his guards

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forcibly removed the invaders, unilaterally terminating the negotiations.
Participants and observers alike understood the episode as a gender inver-
sion. Challenging the jefe máximo by assuming the masculine personae of
land invaders placed the campesinas outside the gender conventions of polit-
ical action. Submitting photographs of the incident to Washington,U.S.
Ambassador Josephus Daniels characterized the episode as ‘‘amusing but
pathetic’’ and awkwardly translated Calles as saying, ‘‘Yes, in Mexico, when
there is an issue to be made wherein the men have not the courage to sustain
it, they invariably send out the women and children.’’∂ Calles, rather than
attributing manly traits to the campesinas, impugned the masculinity of
those he assumed had put them up to the act. Still, Michel relied on prevail-
ing gender codes and Calles’s own self-image as postrevolutionary pater-
familias to restrain his henchmen from using violence, as they presumably
would have against a group of men. Pointing to the regime’s own e√orts to
fashion campesinas into revolutionaries, Michel proclaimed that the school
strove ‘‘not to divide the sexes in the class struggle but rather to link them
more closely, raising consciousness about women’s social responsibility for
reproducing the species.’’∑
Less than two years after this confrontation, in September 1937, Presi-
dent Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) called on Congress to amend Mexico’s
constitution, granting women the right to vote and to hold public o≈ce.
Responding to a vocal and mobilized women’s su√rage movement, the pro-
posal inspired magnanimous speeches on the chamber floor, as one law-
maker after another emphasized the revolution’s debt to women. The con-
stitutional amendment, which contained a modest change to specify that
‘‘mexicanos’’ referred to both men and women, unanimously passed both
houses of Congress. By mid-November 1938, enough states had ratified the
amendment that the ruling party’s newspaper carried a banner headline
trumpeting, ‘‘Today the Declaration of the Feminine Vote Will Be Made.’’∏
Exploiting a constitutional loophole, however, legislators refused to publish
the vote counts in the congressional record, rendering the amendment a
dead letter. Despite repeated su√ragist protests, women would not vote in a
federal election until 1958.

2 introduction
 Making sense of these two episodes and their resolutions calls for an ex-
cavation of the meanings of citizenship in postrevolutionary Mexico and, in
particular, during the pivotal Cárdenas presidency. Bridging the authoritar-
ian period of Calles’s maximato (1928–34) and the conservative presidency of
Manuel Avila Camacho, the Cárdenas government has earned the reputation,

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both in scholarship and in popular memory, as the presidency that most hon-
ored revolutionary ideals.π While this characterization remains subject to de-
bate, most observers would agree that the historical conjuncture of January
1936—the crisis of capitalism manifest in a worldwide Depression, the dawn
of the Communist International’s Popular Front campaign, and the growing
appeal of both fascism and populism—made it a propitious moment for pop-
ular mobilization. Cárdenas fell within this international current, encourag-
ing government-sponsored mass organizing to contain the e√ects of the
global economic upheaval. He broke with Calles in June 1935, purging the
Callista cabinet members and taking a sharp left turn in political style and sub-
stance. At the time of the Santa Bárbara incident, Calles was ‘‘between exiles,’’
having returned from a six-month absence at the end of 1935 before leaving
again in April 1936. His banishment continued until Cárdenas’s successor,
Avila Camacho, invited him to return. Thus, rather than an attack on the
governing regime, the assault on Calles’s property would have appeared to
the Cárdenas government as endorsing its support for popular mobilizations.
Pierre Bourdieu has famously observed the permeability between formal
politics and the quotidian practices that give them meaning, between con-
juncture and habitus.∫ Episodes such as the Santa Bárbara invasion set in
relief the articulation between high and low politics, o√ering particular in-
sights for women’s interventions and their place in defining both formal citi-
zenship and what we have come to think of as civil society.Ω The actors who
take center stage in this story of the mobilization and consolidation of post-
revolutionary women’s activism, progressive and radical women like Concha
Michel, struggled to make the revolution meaningful for ordinary Mexicans.
To be sure, these women stood apart in many ways; greater numbers of
women supported the Catholic and conservative movements that celebrated
women’s domestic roles.∞≠ However, progressive and radical women’s dis-
proportionate representation among Mexico’s ‘‘organic intellectuals’’—
especially teachers, journalists, and government employees—helped define
postrevolutionary political culture. Like their ideological opposites in Cath-
olic and conservative organizations, these women pushed the boundaries of
women’s organizing and political activities more generally.

introduction 3
 Women activists faced a compounded challenge: they claimed revolu-
tionary citizenship at a moment when the meanings of both citizenship and
womanhood remained unstable and contested. As in other postrevolution-
ary societies, in Mexico debates over citizenship rights served as proxies for
defining the parameters of the revolution itself, underscoring the contin-

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gency of this supposedly static, natural right.∞∞ Between the signing of the
1917 Constitution and Cárdenas’s 1934 inauguration, the attributes of revo-
lutionary citizenship underwent significant changes and reversals. And al-
though the Constitutionalists came to power under the banner, ‘‘E√ective
Su√rage, No Reelection,’’ it quickly became clear that e√ective su√rage re-
mained limited to those who supported the governing regime, and no re-
election often remained true only in the most literal sense. Arguments over
the meanings of and qualifications for citizenship turned on two questions
that have framed these debates for centuries: what is the proper balance
between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, and to what extent is
citizenship a status versus a practice? In postrevolutionary Mexico, these
deliberations played out against a backdrop of an established tradition of
political patronage, which, in quotidian practice, often trumped competing
imaginaries of citizenship with its promise of (uneven) reciprocity.
Observers on all sides of the ‘‘woman question’’ assumed that the encoun-
ter between ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘politics’’ would have some identifiable e√ect
similar to two solid objects colliding. Disagreements centered on whether
women would redefine Mexican politics or political involvement would alter
women’s nature. Su√ragists often contended that women would make po-
litical life less fraudulent, more family-oriented, and more humane, while
antisu√ragists insisted on the reverse e√ect—that politics would corrupt
women, wrench them from their homes, and render them more callous. In
short, the su√rage debate largely swirled around the question of whether
women would feminize politics or political involvement would masculinize
women.
Embedded within these deliberations lay the unspoken question of what
these two categories—‘‘women’’ (or, more often, the singular ‘‘woman’’)
and ‘‘politics’’ (also singular, la política)—meant in everyday practice. At a
moment witnessing the international emergence of the ‘‘new woman’’ and
the ‘‘modern girl,’’ along with welfare states and fascist-style corporatism, the
definitions of women and of politics remained far less distinct, less solid,
than contemporary observers implied. Interactions between women and
politics more closely resembled a roughly choreographed dance than a colli-

4 introduction
sion. Most participants recognized certain moves; those less schooled in the
political arts might misstep but still draw nearer to their objectives. Dancers
changed partners and at times moved to entirely di√erent rhythms. The
increasing participation of a wide variety of women in a world formerly
closed o√ to them as ‘‘civic life’’ or the ‘‘public realm’’ did not precipitate a

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political ‘‘big bang’’ but, rather, proceeded as a complex interplay that cre-
ated new possibilities, further troubling the categories of ‘‘women’’ and
‘‘politics’’ even through their strategic invocation as clearly defined entities.
Through the 1920s and ’30s—even as governments around the world
granted women either partial or full citizenship rights and as articulate, well-
placed Mexican women argued strenuously for women’s su√rage, land and
labor rights, and even mothers’ wages—public intellectuals and policy-
makers highlighted the cognitive dissonance between Mexican womanhood
and the citizen statesman. ‘‘The woman is called upon to intervene as an
element of action and opinion in national endeavors,’’ the ruling party’s
newspaper editorialized in 1931. ‘‘But while she prepares herself and orga-
nizes herself, we men prefer to continue ceding our seats on the buses,
finding the soup hot in the household olla, and listening to the broom
dancing under conjugal songs, than to hear falsetto voices in Parliament or
to entrust the su√ragist ballots to poetic hands.’’∞≤
Feminist theorists and historians have exposed the masculinist assump-
tions of both liberal and civic-republic conceptions of citizenship, pointing
to the ideological divide between public and private (or between the politi-
cal and the nonpolitical), the insistence on universalism and impartiality,
and the extent to which citizenship practices often conflict with women’s
customary duties.∞≥ However, the political and economic uncertainty of
postrevolutionary Mexico o√ered a shaky foundation for constructing the
type of citizenship that appears in political theories and histories based on
Anglo-European or U.S. experiences. For if the rise of the nation-state gave
birth to the citizen-subject, and the onset of industrial capitalism sharpened
the public-private divide, then we must consider that Mexico, even by the
1930s, remained a tenuously consolidated nation-state and unevenly incor-
porated into capitalist production. As ideological conflicts heightened long-
standing regional, ethnic, and political rivalries, the universal citizen-subject
seems like a caricature. Men and women moved constantly between subsis-
tence and market production and between households and meeting halls,
ignoring the demands of a public-private divide. And at a moment when no
one could agree on what constituted citizenship, the demands of women’s

introduction 5
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Map 1. ‘‘México.’’ By Natalie Hanemann.

reproductive-labor duties constituted just one of many impediments to ex-

ercising it.
Any e√ort to make sense of secular women activists’ frustrated bids for
citizenship must first examine how they imagined this objective. This book
argues that Mexicans—men and women alike—experienced revolutionary
citizenship as contingent, inhabited, and gendered. In other words, the
practice of citizenship depended on specific historical and political contexts,
which had local and regional characteristics as well as national and trans-
national ones. Furthermore, people inhabited citizenship less as a collection
of specific laws and exclusions than as a set of social, cultural, and political
processes that both shaped and refracted contemporary political discourses
and practices. Finally, deliberations over citizenship served as a battleground
amid rapidly destabilizing gender ideologies. This perspective takes us some
distance toward unraveling the riddle of Mexican women’s su√rage bid. In
the context of postrevolutionary Mexico, voting rights represented only a

6 introduction
small slice—and a relatively unimportant one—of the ways in which people
lived citizenship. The many collective, public, and deliberative ways in which
men and women exercised revolutionary citizenship took precedence over
this individual and well-circumscribed right. Women activists insisted, how-
ever, on revolutionary citizenship—on material revolutionary benefits, rec-

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ognition as political, ‘‘public’’ actors, and o≈cial appreciation of their cen-
trality to the new regime’s revolutionary project.

‘‘Many Mexicos’’ and the Contingencies of

Revolutionary Citizenship

The language of citizenship dominated postrevolutionary political discourse,

where the title ciudadano (citizen) designated one as a legitimate revolution-
ary, but the term’s significance hinged on competing interpretations of the
revolution’s history and objectives. As Hannah Arendt chillingly reminds us,
the ‘‘duties of a law-abiding citizen’’ do not stand above politics, culture, and
history but, rather, remain firmly embedded within them.∞∂ If citizenship
marks a boundary between those included and excluded from the polity,
between those who enjoy representation and those who do not, then this
designation of ciudadano carried more than symbolic weight. The revolution
opened the possibility for moving the boundary that delineated, in the politi-
cal theorist Sheldon Wolin’s terms, the ‘‘circumscribed space in which like-
ness dwells,’’ expanding the pool not only of those enjoying formal political
rights but also of those whose actions registered as political interventions
rather than simply chaos or criminality.∞∑ The ‘‘essence of State sovereignty,’’
the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben contends, lies in the power to
define—and constantly redefine—where that line of legitimacy falls.∞∏ Con-
tenders for control over the postrevolutionary regime sought to seize that
power of exclusion, the right to draw the lines of legitimacy.
But the authority to decide this exclusion—to designate, for example,
certain land invasions as revolutionary and others as criminal—underscores
citizenship’s historical contingency. In the wake of the Santa Bárbara inva-
sion, the minister of government declared that the guilty would ‘‘be brought
to justice.’’∞π Unlike many land invasions orchestrated by men, this ‘‘amusing
but pathetic incident’’ had crossed the bounds of revolutionary legitimacy.
However, as Wolin argues, ‘‘revolutionary transgression is the means by
which the demos makes itself political.’’∞∫ In transcending conventional lim-
its, Michel sought both rights and political visibility for women; through

introduction 7
such ordinary and extraordinary transgressions, Mexicans participated in
defining the revolution from the bottom up.∞Ω
A process of negotiation ensued between the constant drawing and trans-
gressing of these boundaries, reflecting both Mexico’s national history and
the world-historical moment of the 1920s and ’30s. First and foremost, revo-

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lutionary citizens demonstrated patriotic loyalty, distinguishing themselves
from the cosmopolitan vendepatrias (traitors) of the Porfiriato (1876–
1910)—the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz characterized by European tastes in
culture and Anglo-American tastes in capital. Factions competed to define
the terms of revolutionary nationalism, but, at minimum, they questioned
loyalties not only to foreign governments and investors but also to inter-
national entities such as the Catholic church and, later, the Communist
Party.
Second, the national and the international climates fostered class-centered
discourses that structured both popular and legislative politics. If race has
framed political debates in the post–Reconstruction United States—not
only in discussions about segregation, miscegenation, and a≈rmative action
but also in less explicitly racialized debates over poll taxes, gerrymandering,
and diversity—class assumed an analogous place in postrevolutionary Mex-
ico. The Depression fostered the intellectual ascendancy of historical mate-
rialism, and activists strove to identify themselves not only as nationalist but
also as struggling on behalf of Mexico’s ‘‘proletariat,’’ a category that in
popular usage extended to everyone from peasants and miners to teachers,
tailors, and even, on occasion, housewives. The 1938 restructuring of Mex-
ico’s governing National Revolutionary Party (pnr) into the corporatist
Party of the Mexican Revolution (prm) formally inscribed class-based politi-
cal discourses by structuring interactions with the state into four political
sectors: the peasantry, the military, organized labor, and a more nebulous
‘‘popular’’ sector. Joining an a≈liated organization such as the Mexican La-
bor Confederation (ctm) or National Peasant Confederation (cnc) meant
automatic membership in the party, where decisions resulted not from indi-
vidual votes but, rather, from negotiations among corporate representatives.
Although women also joined these organizations, they remained at the mar-
gins, leading many women activists to demand women-only organizations.
In other words, individuals exercised citizenship based on their ascribed
class identity but with an implicit male subject; the workers and peasants of
the corporatist imaginary were obreros (workingmen) and campesinos, not
obreras (workingwomen) and campesinas.

8 introduction
 Finally, national and transnational currents placed a premium on modern-
ization e√orts, including everything from industrialization and public educa-
tion to sanitation and anticlerical campaigns. The emphasis on moderniza-
tion—or ‘‘developmentalism,’’ as the historian Alan Knight puts it—pulled
against the emphases on class-based politics and revolutionary nationalism.≤≠

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Although modernization e√orts predated the revolution by at least a century,
their postrevolutionary variant drew on international developments in the
social sciences and welfare-state formation. Much like their predecessors,
postrevolutionary policymakers generally saw themselves—overwhelmingly
Anglo-European men of means—as embodying modernity and directed
their e√orts at remaking the poor, nonwhite, and female in their image. But
modernization e√orts did not remain the exclusive purview of white-shod
statesmen; communists, labor organizers, peasant leaders, and schoolteach-
ers all called for a more ‘‘modern’’ Mexico. Activists like Michel, agitating for
a school to instruct women in political and vocational skills, tapped into this
impulse to transform rural mestizas into productive citizens.
Unsurprisingly, given Mexico’s notorious regional fragmentation, con-
tingent citizenship reflected local and regional experiences and ideologies as
well as national and transnational ones.≤∞ As the cases under consideration in
this book demonstrate, the meanings of citizenship reflected local upheavals
such as the Cristero Rebellion’s (1926–29) challenge to postrevolutionary
anticlericalism in the center-west, the 1936 general strike in the Comarca
Lagunera, and postrevolutionary Yucatán’s political maneuverings. Political
fault lines followed locally defined courses, and even labels such as agrarista
(agrarian radical) took on di√erent connotations in these di√erent settings.
The political philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag has demonstrated that ‘‘high’’
political theory, despite its pretense toward abstraction, rests on particular
historical narratives, and the political theorist Seyla Benhabib draws on psy-
choanalytic theory to argue a similar point on a personal and community
level.≤≤ ‘‘We are born into webs of interlocution or into webs of narrative,’’
Benhabib asserts, ‘‘from the familial and gender narratives to the linguistic
ones to the narratives of one’s collective identity. We become who we are by
learning to become a conversation partner in these narratives.’’≤≥ Mexico’s
organic intellectuals fashioned their own political theories—their political
‘‘common sense’’ in the Gramscian vein—out of local narratives that as-
sumed their own boundaries of exclusion.
In the context of Mexico City’s modernizing interventions, however,
these ‘‘webs of interlocution’’ could not remain local. While some activists—

introduction 9
most notably, those seeking to protect religious freedom—viewed the new
regime as an imperialist juggernaut, others anthropomorphized the revolu-
tion, incarnating it in the postrevolutionary state and its agents. The Cár-
denas government, bent on fostering a unified national identity, came to
appreciate the importance of regional concerns and power structures that

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limited the federal government’s power. Local actors alternately resisted
Mexico City’s policies and invited the federal government into their commu-
nities to defend them against arbitrary local caciques (bosses); federal agen-
cies’ attempts to enforce the rule of law appealed to popular actors who
persistently found themselves on the short end of local power struggles.≤∂ In
particular, communications to Cárdenas, much like those to his U.S. coun-
terpart Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often took on a ‘‘letter to the king’’
quality, indicating that once he realized that the revolution had not yet
arrived in a certain village, he would rectify matters by distributing land,
opening schools, and building irrigation systems. Many di√erent actors at
varying points in Mexico’s political power structure—centralizing statesmen
in Mexico City, regional political leaders, and local activists—sought, within
the continual play between conjuncture and habitus, to define the contours
of both revolution and citizenship.
If revolutionary citizenship hinged on place, it also depended on time. In
his study of abolitionism in the postrevolutionary United States, the histo-
rian David Brion Davis points to the ‘‘perishability of revolutionary time’’
in which the ‘‘power of Revolutionary ideals depended upon the sense of
a continuing Revolutionary time—a time not simply of completion and
rounding out, but a time of creation, marked by the same contingency, fears,
and openness of the Revolution itself.’’≤∑ Similarly, in postrevolutionary
Mexico the new regime’s architects struggled not only to paint themselves as
the revolution’s legitimate heirs but also to depict the revolution itself as
ongoing and simultaneously both stable enough to inspire confidence and
imperiled enough to justify extreme measures in its defense. Activists ex-
ploited o≈cial concerns about the revolution’s recession into history, argu-
ing that support for their e√orts—for land reform, health clinics, or corn
mills—would prolong the revolution by signaling its long-awaited arrival in
their communities. Particularly after Cárdenas’s 1935 break with Calles, peti-
tions frequently indicated that Cardenismo promised a revolutionary renais-
sance. Practical conceptions of citizenship, then, depended on these specific-
ities, on the competing narratives and webs of interlocution through which
individuals imagined and reimagined themselves as revolutionary citizens.

10 introduction
Inhabited Citizenship and the Political Culture of Organizing

These contingencies of time and place, however, tell us little about how
ordinary Mexicans enacted that role. The historian Nancy Cott describes
citizenship as ‘‘a political fiction, an identification that can be put on like new

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clothing by the properly readied wearer.’’ Rather than seeing citizenship as a
falsehood, she depicts it as ‘‘purposefully constructed,’’ indicating that ‘‘the
rewards and obligations it conveys may vary over time and among citizens.’’
Citizenship, she continues, ‘‘represents an attachment to a political commu-
nity, di√erent from membership in a kinship group because the bonds are
only figurative.’’≤∏ Citizenship, then, requires not only that one fulfill the
contingent requirements of legitimate membership but also that one inhabit
citizenship, donning its garb and giving it meaning. Mexican activists drew
ecumenically from three seemingly contradictory modes of citizenship—
liberal invocations of su√rage, traditional expectations of patronage, and
revolutionary commitments to popular mobilization—to pursue an array of
tangible benefits.
Lawmakers at the 1917 Constitutional Congress restricted citizenship to
those who, ‘‘having the quality of being Mexican, also fulfill the following
requirements: being eighteen years of age if married or twenty-one if not,
and having an honest way of life.’’≤π Leaving the state considerable latitude in
determining who possessed ‘‘the quality of being Mexican’’ and an ‘‘honest
way of life,’’ this article also reflected the new constitution’s purpose in obli-
gating the state and its citizenry rather than simply restricting them, as its
1857 predecessor had done. In the balance between rights and obligations,
the new regime came down heavily on the side of obligations for both state
and society. Revolutionary citizens would perform citizenship on a daily
basis, and the new regime, in turn, would fulfill its revolutionary commit-
ments. Both the performance and the commitments, of course, remained
contested.
The performance of revolutionary citizenship derived from three tradi-
tionally masculine activities that purportedly instilled the consciousness of
‘‘sincere’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ revolutionaries and promoted a citizenship cen-
tered on collective well-being: military service, civic engagement, and labor.
Military leaders dominated both formal and informal politics and prized
military socialization. Similarly, participation in congresses and political or-
ganizations, the formation of political parties, and involvement with state
agencies constituted civic engagement and indicated political consciousness.

introduction 11
Finally, the emphasis on workforce participation—meaning remunerated
labor such as agricultural work, artisanal production, or industrial wage
labor—reflected the widely held commitment to historical materialism and
economic modernization. Across a broad range of ideologies, the notion
that labor inculcated revolutionary consciousness became axiomatic. Revo-

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lutionary citizens, in addition to exhibiting the traits of nationalism, class-
consciousness, and modernity, would engage in these three activities: mili-
tary service, civic engagement, and paid labor.
For its part, the postrevolutionary state cultivated an institutional infra-
structure upon which to hang this citizenship. Although this infrastructure
did not always adhere to the state or the ruling party (which often became
indistinguishable), o≈cial support promoted a mobilization-centered polit-
ical culture that created both the ideological climate and the material condi-
tions to facilitate activism. As Knight has pointed out, ‘‘Cárdenas’ constant
theme was, like Lenin’s, ‘organize.’ ’’≤∫ Cardenista organizing programs ex-
plicitly sought to structure and ‘‘modernize’’ Mexican society in preparation
for broader participation in governance. As paternalist and patronizing as
these tactics appear in retrospect, they fostered mass political engagement
and gave political voice to historically marginalized groups. This emphasis
on mobilization and collective organizing over individualism and competi-
tion constituted one of Cardenismo’s defining aspects within debates over
revolutionary citizenship.
However, the Santa Bárbara episode and its disheartening denouement
underscore the possibilities and limitations of this political culture of orga-
nizing. On one hand, the revolution itself—with its rhetoric of ‘‘land and
liberty’’ and of popular enfranchisement—legitimated such mobilizations as
the enactment of revolutionary citizenship. On the other, ‘‘organizing’’ im-
plies not only mobilization and representation but also order and discipline.
‘‘Democracy carried along by revolution,’’ Wolin reminds us, ‘‘comes to
appear as surplus democracy when revolutions are ended and the permanent
institutionalization of politics is begun.’’≤Ω Cárdenas and his allies encour-
aged mass organizations to secure the more radical gains of agrarian reforms
and industrial nationalizations but endeavored to maintain strict control
over those organizations. The ruling party forbade, for example, labor radi-
cals from organizing peasants into their ranks, fearing that such an alliance
would create too strong a bloc, a proscription that provoked intense con-
flicts over organizational jurisdiction as people moved among agricultural
and industrial production and between wage and subsistence economies.≥≠

12 introduction
 The two aspects of organizing—mobilization and discipline—informed
how people inhabited revolutionary citizenship. Policymakers struggled
to di√erentiate ‘‘sincere revolutionaries’’ from ‘‘subversive agitators,’’ find-
ing particularly unsettling the idea that regime-supporting revolutionaries
might become subversive agitators or that the two might even remain in-

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distinguishable. To channel popular organizing in directions that regime
leaders considered both revolutionary and ‘‘safe,’’ they adroitly cast any gains
made through popular struggle—whether in women’s rights, land reform,
or labor conditions—as the result of state benevolence and the victory of the
‘‘institutionalized revolution.’’
Still, organizational infrastructures, including o≈cial unions, party com-
mittees, and agrarian leagues, could only provide the warp into which was
woven the woof of local experiences, producing a variegated and multi-
textured political culture of organizing. Many foot soldiers of state for-
mation—teachers, social workers, and agrarian- and labor-department rep-
resentatives—sympathized with both local and national concerns and sought
to mediate between the postrevolutionary regime and diverse communities.
These men and, increasingly, women understood their jobs in multifaceted
ways, as livelihoods, vocations, and missions. While the new rural federal
schools provided many young women with professional identities and mod-
est incomes (although they frequently protested that they did not receive
their pay), as long as teachers faced violent assault and even assassination at
the hands of ‘‘socialist’’ education’s opponents, and as long as Agrarian De-
partment agents endured harassment by landowners’ guardias blancas, gov-
ernment posts did not always o√er comfortable sinecures.
Government employees often entered communities with the condescen-
sion of the educated and the insensitivity of outsiders, but they also har-
bored a sense of purpose and the conviction that the Cárdenas government
o√ered, at last, the opportunity for ordinary people to reap the dividends of
a quarter-century of civil war and political strife. Amid the political currents
of the 1930s, these activists and organic intellectuals regarded themselves not
as agents of a leviathan state but, rather, as catalysts of revolutionary change
and facilitators of revolutionary citizenship. They provided logistical and
material support, o√ering not only personal contacts but also navigation
through the emergent state bureaucracy, assisting locals with everything
from typing petitions and recognizing solicitation protocols to framing peti-
tions for land, credit, and social services.
Furthermore, these e√orts bore the markings of individual teachers’ and

introduction 13
organizers’ preferences and ordinary Mexicans’ appropriations and reinter-
pretations. A teacher, for example, absorbed her normal-school training
through the lens of her own values and ideologies, perhaps blending the
Education Ministry’s modernizing impulse with homegrown elements of
communism or folk Catholicism.≥∞ She might practice her vocation in a

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cultural context quite foreign to her or encounter local political leadership
that remained deeply ambivalent about federal interventions. The commu-
nity where she taught would pick and choose from her agenda, supporting
those activities that seemed sensible to its members and rejecting others;
comuneros (collective landholders) might embrace the consumer cooperative
and rebu√ the sanitation committee. If the teacher seemed too strident in her
‘‘anti-fanaticism,’’ the community might dismiss her altogether as a threat to
one of its most dearly held institutions, the parish church. In short, organiz-
ing e√orts emanating from Mexico City faced a long and tortuous road to
reach their intended audiences and underwent many transformations en
route, with uneven and unpredictable e√ects.
Activists and government agents also helped popular groups gain access
to public space, which, as the Santa Bárbara invasion indicates, became a
crucial marker of citizenship. Women activists stressed this demand, peti-
tioning repeatedly to take over cantinas, billiard halls, and churches to trans-
form them into schools, cooperatives, and child-care facilities. Controlling
public space, after all, tangibly marked women’s presence in the public realm
not as itinerants or imposters but, rather, as permanent fixtures in civil
society—as citizens. The Catholic church had traditionally provided women
with their most important public venue, and new-regime Jacobins hoped to
lure women away from the church by acceding to their entreaties. However,
these reallocations, which often involved recoding masculine spaces as femi-
nine, provoked some of the bitterest and most violent community conflicts.
The ruling party’s 1938 restructuring emphasized the disciplinary aspects
of organizing, reining in the ‘‘surplus democracy’’ generated by revolution-
ary citizenship. It also reinscribed the importance of labor, civic engagement,
and military service as the activities that ‘‘properly readied’’ one to don
the clothing of citizenship, mapping these activities onto the party’s four
branches—the peasant union, a labor confederation, the military, and the
popular sector—and informing the relationship between citizenship and
subjectivity, as all political identities now passed through its prism. Al-
though the transformation did not take place all at once, e√orts to remain

14 introduction
outside of this construct increasingly resulted in relegation to a political
hinterland beyond the reciprocal obligations of revolutionary citizenship.

Malinchismo and the Gendering of Citizenship

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Arguably, nothing placed one outside citizenship’s boundaries as surely as
accusations of disloyalty to the patria and the revolución, but disloyalty as-
sumed a particularly feminine guise. In the Mexican popular imagination,
Hernando Cortés’s mistress and translator La Malinche signifies, alternately,
the victim of Spanish conquest, the betrayer of indigenous peoples, and the
mother of the Mexican ‘‘race.’’≥≤ As Mexico’s own iteration of the woman as
victim/betrayer, layered over more universal archetypes such as the virgin/
whore, La Malinche retains considerable force as a gender marker in Mexi-
can culture, equating feminine with ‘‘fascinated, violated, or seduced.’’≥≥ The
sons of La Malinche, in Octavio Paz’s formulation, are the mestizo people—
José Vasconcelos’s raza cósmica. Born of this unequal marriage of European
empires and American colonies, they spring from betrayal, tragedy, and
exploitation. As popular groups and political leaders alike wrestled to define
the legacy of Mexico’s revolution, the question of betrayal hung in the air.
Identifying the revolution’s betrayers, after all, would go some distance to-
ward defining the significance of the revolution itself.
Who were the Malinches of Mexico’s new regime? Were these teachers,
organizers, and activists Malinche’s daughters, repeating her errors by trans-
lating the language of an imperial Mexico City into the lingua franca of
Mexican communities, facilitating the co-optation of women’s activism?≥∂
Or were they defiant daughters disdaining their mother’s passivity and abjec-
tion, exerting control over this unequal encounter by preempting violent
domination, only to find that they could not fully escape the world their
mothers created? As in the Malinche narrative, women’s purported revolu-
tionary betrayal assumed both literal and metaphorical links to sexuality.
Concerns that women might be ‘‘fascinated, violated, or seduced’’ by free-
loving communists or lecherous clergy permeated public debate. Anticlerical
periodicals ran cartoons and essays depicting lascivious priests enticing and
even raping young, vulnerable women, while anticommunists accused their
rivals of succumbing to the ‘‘concupiscence of foreigners.’’≥∑
The faithless La Malinche did not monopolize depictions of femininity,
however. Abnegación—selflessness, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, an erasure of

introduction 15
self and the negation of one’s outward existence—became nearly synony-
mous with idealized Mexican femininity and motherhood. Factions on all
sides of the ‘‘woman question’’ claimed abnegación to advance their causes,
and arguments often turned on assumptions about women’s essentially self-
sacrificing nature. Opponents of women’s political rights argued that passive

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and subjugated women did not merit the title of citizen, pointing to their
domestic devotion as evidence of their unsuitability to the public realm.
Advocates of women’s rights, meanwhile, contended that precisely this sacri-
ficing nature made women ideal citizens. A feminist editorial in the rul-
ing party’s newspaper argued, ‘‘The emancipation of woman prevails. Her
weapons? Perseverance, study, work, sacrifice, and abnegación, and the prin-
cipal of all these, her own femininity.’’≥∏ A su√ragist government employee
reassured her audience in 1938 that the female voter ‘‘would not leave o√
being a loving mother and an abnegated wife.’’≥π An internal Communist
Party memo advised local committees to form cells of ‘‘the most abnegadas
and active laboring and peasant women of the revolutionary movement.’’≥∫
Members of the Popular Front women’s organization contended that pre-
cisely their qualities as long-su√ering abnegadas made Mexican women the
model of femininity the world over, while an opposing women’s group
maintained that it represented the true mujer abnegada.≥Ω The largest Catho-
lic women’s organization defined womanhood as ‘‘the paradigm of purity,
abnegación and sublimity.’’∂≠
While the practical implications of this feminine archetype varied among
communities, classes, and ethnic groups and fluctuated over time, the per-
sistent invocation of the mujer abnegada undeniably informed the ways that
ordinary Mexican women constituted themselves as political subjects, simul-
taneously elevating and subjugating them. ‘‘By abnegación we should under-
stand not the acceptance of poor treatment, nor the complacent tolerance of
ruinous vices,’’ explained the schoolteacher and former Communist Elena
Torres. ‘‘Woman’s constructive abnegación consists in renouncing comforts
in favor of other family members.’’∂∞ Often paired with the word ‘‘wife’’ or
‘‘mother,’’ abnegación indicated not only personal characteristics but also
reproductive-labor obligations, and gender disruptions of the term drew
notice. In a congressional debate, for example, a su√rage proponent’s re-
peated references to ‘‘compañeras abnegadas’’ provoked a rival to ask sar-
donically whether undereducated and apathetic male peasants should be
dubbed abnegados.∂≤
The common language of abnegación reflected not the stability of gender

16 introduction
identities but, rather, mounting anxiety about fragmenting conceptions of
femininity. Both advocates and opponents of women’s activism overwhelm-
ingly sensed that Mexico stood at the threshold of dramatic changes. Wom-
en’s revolutionary participation had added new archetypes, including the
soldadera (camp follower) and the soldada (armed combatant), to La Ma-

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linche and la madre (mother) abnegada as available models of feminine
identity, and the rise of la chica moderna (modern girl) and la mujer nueva
(new woman) sparked controversy about the entire postrevolutionary mod-
ernization project.∂≥
Women’s intrusion into activities normally construed as masculine, such
as wage labor, military engagement, and political machinations, provoked
attacks against the instability of gender roles. Referring to the nefarious
influence of ‘‘North American flapperismo,’’ one editorialist lamented that the
‘‘most disconcerting e√ect that feminism produces through the current cus-
toms, styles, and manners is to feminize the masculine mentality. It can
almost be said that today man thinks in the feminine. . . . Today, social ideas
have no foundation in the power of rough, strong, deep, and transcendent
virility. Everything is softness, fear, suspicion, and dread. There is a growing
tendency to group together and find strength in numbers, to think socially
and develop overly sentimental theories.’’∂∂ Women activists faced accusa-
tions not only of feminizing the masculine but also of masculinizing the
feminine. Questioning the demands of abnegación quickly earned one the
unfeminine label marimacho, a tomboy of dubious sexuality (dyke or butch
in more contemporary parlance), as distinct from a ‘‘genuine’’ woman. Al-
ways used in the masculine form to highlight the gender subversion, the
su√ragist or feminist marimacho stood as an unmistakable counterpoint to
the madre abnegada in depictions of women’s activism.
The latter image proved far more palatable to most men and women
alike; the former not only challenged traditional family formations and pa-
triarchal control but also devalued time-honored ideas about femininity and
women’s social roles. Even the most radical women activists remained reluc-
tant to forgo the legitimacy and recognition that accompanied this feminine
ideal. However, while maternalist strategies promised an expedient route to
political and economic opportunities, they also reinforced the expectation
that ‘‘women’s interests’’ remained indistinguishable from those of their
families and communities. The persistent conflation of women and children
in welfare policies, labor law, and public discourse perpetuated this convic-
tion, compelling activists to invoke maternal obligation when formulating

introduction 17
programs and leading even some public o≈cials to note the pitfalls of mater-
nalist strategies. The secretary of public assistance boasted in a 1939 Moth-
er’s Day pamphlet that ‘‘the Mexican mother synthesizes the highest virtues,’’
but he cautioned against ‘‘allowing her innate resignation to convert her into
a slave or her abnegación to make her endure the indi√erence with which she

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is treated on repeated occasions.’’∂∑
Despite the prevalence of abnegación and maternalism, the endless dis-
putes that fractured women’s congresses and the sheer proliferation of wom-
en’s organizations during the 1920s and ’30s—from mothers’ clubs, con-
sumption cooperatives, and temperance leagues to women-only militia,
motorcycle clubs, and labor unions—testify to the impossibility of establish-
ing a common conception of womanhood. As the feminist theorist Judith
Butler observes, e√orts to ‘‘establish a normative foundation for what ought
properly to be included in the description of women would be only and
always to produce a new site of political contest. That foundation would
settle nothing, but would of necessity founder on its own authoritarian
ruse.’’∂∏ For Butler, this ‘‘permanent openness and resignifiability’’ of identity
constitutes the democratic promise of feminist politics, the ‘‘ungrounded
ground of feminist theory.’’ However, activists on the ground in postrevolu-
tionary Mexico, even those who welcomed a challenge to the ‘‘authoritarian
ruse’’ of abnegación, struggled to fix a coherent feminine identity for the
purposes of political interventions.∂π
Conflicts inevitably arose over what constituted something as subjective
and intangible as ‘‘femininity.’’ Even an identity as seemingly fixed and bio-
logical as motherhood varied significantly in its content between urban and
rural women and wage earners and housewives, and across generational and
cultural divides. Groups petitioned as women for items ranging from weap-
ons to maternity clinics. Despite their e√orts at unity, activists promoted
heterodox gender ideologies, drawing selectively from images of modernist
North American flapperismo or the traditional Mexican abnegación to de-
fine themselves as political subjects. These divisions often manifested them-
selves rhetorically as groups varied their names to reflect agendas and a≈lia-
tions. The simple choice among the nearly synonymous adjectives femenino
(feminine), feminista (feminist), and the more neutral femenil (women’s)
indicated orientation within the emerging debates over gender and politics.
Masculinity remained no less contested. Prerevolutionary dissonances
persisted between elite and popular conceptions of masculinity and among
various ethnic expressions of masculinity, remaining unresolved after the

18 introduction
revolution.∂∫ During the 1917 Constitutional Congress and after, lawmakers
deliberated over how to eliminate Mexico’s ‘‘barbaric’’ masculine traditions,
including cockfighting, pulque drinking, and wife beating. Like government
e√orts to discourage pious femininity by o√ering women alternatives to the
church as spaces of sociability, o≈cials promoted ‘‘cultural Saturdays’’ and

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non-blood sports such as baseball and basketball to encourage a more mod-
ern and refined (read ‘‘Anglo-European’’) masculinity. By the 1930s, bureau-
cratic and professional stature had begun to overtake military prowess as the
hallmark of revolutionary masculinity, and professional statesmen replaced
revolutionary generals as the country’s political leaders.
This semantic and cultural instability served as a backdrop for the articu-
lation between the unstable ideologies of gender and citizenship. Claiming
revolutionary citizenship required women activists on the one hand to blunt
accusations of malinchista disloyalty—to the church, the Communist Party,
even placing one’s family above the revolution—and on the other to fit
themselves into the prevailing masculinist ideology of citizenship by appro-
priating and reshaping its terms. Although the 1917 Constitution did not
explicitly exclude women from full citizenship rights, political practice did.
Policymakers deliberated about the nationality of Mexican women who mar-
ried foreigners, about whether female lawyers could serve as notaries, and,
most prominently, about whether women could vote and hold public o≈ce.
The 1917 Law of Family Relations gave women more control within their
households but sparked conservative resistance. One legal scholar, referring
to the law as a ‘‘destructive virus of the first order,’’ saw it as another symp-
tom of U.S. imperialism. ‘‘The growing feminism that is palpable to every-
one is Yankee feminism; the rudeness and insolence of a certain part of the
proletariat are also Yankee; the khakis and cowboy hats of the army demon-
strate the sartorial impulses from the other side of the Bravo,’’ he elaborated,
underscoring the connections many conservatives made among di√erent
manifestations of social and cultural instability. ‘‘Our national way of life
is evaporating and being substituted by a very dubious culture and moral-
ity, with the aggravation that we perhaps imitate the defects without the
strengths.’’∂Ω Article 2 of the 1928 Civil Code stated bluntly that ‘‘juridical
capacity is equal for men and women; the woman cannot be subjected, by
reason of her sex, to any restriction in the acquisition and exercise of her civil
rights.’’∑≠ Yet the Civil Code also allowed husbands to prevent their wives
from working outside the home if it interfered with their ‘‘mission’’ of direct-
ing and caring for the household.

introduction 19
 Mexican women activists, like their counterparts throughout the world,
disagreed over whether and how to deploy notions of gender di√erence
with regard to citizenship. Within the gendered division of cultural labor,
women—particularly rural, indigenous women, wrapped in colorful huipiles
(indigenous dress) and grinding corn on the traditional stone metates—

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embodied a bona fide mexicanidad that would seem to entitle them to revo-
lutionary citizenship.∑∞ Although they faced commonplace representations
as benighted peasants and Indians, rural women frequently claimed an ‘‘au-
thentic’’ Mexican femininity, distinguishing themselves from the bobbed-
hair flappers of the urban middle class. Further, women throughout Mexico
raised the banner of feminine morality to argue that they would sanitize
Mexico’s notoriously dirty politics. Policymakers and public intellectuals
celebrated Mexican feminine domesticity as part of the Mexican national
patrimony, a treasure to be protected from the threat of foreign ideas. ‘‘From
the moral perspective, the Mexican home is moral by tradition,’’ boasted one
ruling-party o≈cial. ‘‘Stability, vitality, and even maternal sacrifices are indis-
putable characteristics of the Mexican home, placing it above nearly all other
homes in the world.’’∑≤ Cárdenas’s populist commitment to indigenismo (cel-
ebration of indigenous cultures) and ethical commitment to political trans-
parency seemed to give these claims considerable weight.
However, rather than trying to secure revolutionary citizenship through
claims of gender di√erence, the more common strategy was to destabilize
the exclusively masculine nature of its three cornerstones: military service,
labor, and civic engagement. Much like their counterparts in postrevo-
lutionary France, women activists in Mexico practiced citizenship through
activities that, as the French historians Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B.
Applewhite explain, ‘‘identified [them] as members of a sovereign body
politic—citoyennes notwithstanding their exclusion from codified political
rights of citizenship.’’∑≥ Mexican women activists sought to recode the cul-
tural meanings of women’s labor and community involvement, reframing
them not as private, particular matters that left women unsuited for citizen-
ship but, rather, as public, civic duties that demonstrated their political
capacity. Such e√orts pressed against the boundaries of revolutionary citi-
zenship, expanding its foundation to support a broad range of women’s
customary activities.
Women activists also laid claim to military service, the most conspicu-
ously masculine practice of citizenship, not only underscoring their wide-
spread presence in the revolutionary armies but also creating networks of

20 introduction
women’s leagues intended to have the same socializing function as men’s
compulsory military service.∑∂ Organizations such as the Ejército de Mujeres
Campesinas (Army of Rural Women) adopted military rhetoric, and mem-
bers of a Michoacán Women’s Resistance League prefaced their political
demands by emphasizing that they ‘‘have fought in the ranks of the Revolu-

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tion in the purest sense of the word.’’∑∑ The Confederation of Revolutionary
Women asserted that ‘‘in no way should the feminine element be left on the
margin in matters where the defense of the Patria are concerned, since, apart
from underestimating her valuable qualities of sacrifice, abnegación, and
ability, she would be left deserted by her lack of preparation.’’ The group
went on to call for women’s compulsory military service, including firearms
training.∑∏ Women who had served as armed combatants made claims as vet-
eranas, and, particularly after the prm’s formation, women also demanded
benefits as the wives, widows, and orphans of revolutionary veterans, high-
lighting the fluidity between roles of combatants and noncombatants during
the revolution’s armed phase.∑π
Women activists similarly highlighted their participation in congresses
and ‘‘revolutionary’’ political organizations and parties to showcase their
capacity for civic engagement, often casting this engagement as constitutive
of, rather than merely incidental to, revolutionary citizenship. As one former
militant recalled, ‘‘The women’s leagues were the vanguard of the revolu-
tion, the custodians of the revolutionary process.’’∑∫ Although far more likely
to engage in the informal politicking of patron-client relationships, women
activists emphasized their involvement in ‘‘modern’’ political entities that
would form the backbone of a more transparent, progressive, and demo-
cratic regime. The collaboration between activists and functionaries in these
endeavors underscores both policymakers’ perceived exigency to ‘‘prepare’’
women for citizenship and activists’ understanding that their cooperation
would secure political recognition.
Finally, women raised questions about what constituted ‘‘labor.’’ Although
many activists pointed to women’s participation in wage labor, the vast
majority of women spent most of their time performing the unremunerated
household labor—or reproductive labor—on which Mexico’s economic
modernization depended. Juridically, civil codes and labor laws reinforced
the importance of women’s domestic labor, prohibiting wives from working
outside the home without their husbands’ permission and making women’s
primary labor responsibility to their families. When working-class women
campaigned to secure membership in unions and ‘‘resistance’’ groups with-

introduction 21
out their husbands’ consent, middle-class critics dubbed the campaign ‘‘Bol-
shevik’’ and ‘‘smelling of su√ragism,’’ arguing that woman ‘‘as queen of the
household should always be subject to the dispositions of her husband,
sometimes out of a√ection and other times out of obedience to the head of the
household.’’∑Ω

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The postrevolutionary regime’s vision, emphasizing commodity rather
than subsistence production, demanded both a clear public-private divide
and an active reproductive labor force. The ideal of feminine domesticity pro-
vided more than just stability and continuity amid rapid social change; it
promised the everyday labor required to reproduce Mexico’s modern labor
force. Within prevailing gender codes, female wage earners ‘‘passed’’ in manly
territory rather than subverted the distinction between the gendered spheres
of productive and reproductive labor. Even the most progressive commenta-
tors contended that women must transform themselves from ‘‘factors of
consumption’’ into ‘‘factors of production’’ to fashion the ‘‘more constant,
more disinterested’’ modern woman.∏≠ In this formulation, women could
transgress the boundaries of traditional womanhood, but labor traditionally
marked as feminine remained either invisible or an impediment to political
consciousness.
Rank-and-file members of women’s organizations saw matters quite dif-
ferently. To them, recognition of their reproductive labor—and the new
regime’s rhetorical commitment to improve its conditions—constituted the
revolution’s realization. Opportunities to secure child care, health clinics,
and especially mechanized corn mills generated considerable enthusiasm,
particularly among rural women; for o≈cials and campesinas alike, corn
mills became feminine emancipation. A corrido (ballad) printed in the Public
Education Ministry’s magazine called on women to abandon the ‘‘slavery’’ of
the metate. ‘‘The metate is more jealous than your husband Miguel,’’ the
lyrics intoned, ‘‘after giving you no rest, it wants you to dream of it.’’∏∞
Ordinary women and government agents alike cast emancipation from slav-
ery to the metate as a precondition for inhabiting revolutionary citizenship.
Placing reproductive labor on par with industrial and agricultural labor as a
foundation for citizenship claims carried truly revolutionary implications
not only in legitimating women as revolutionary citizens but also in securing
the benefits and protections enjoyed by other (paid) workers. E√orts to
redefine ‘‘labor,’’ therefore, sought more than an abstract notion of revolu-
tionary a≈rmation; they sought the material and political gains that the new
regime promised Mexico’s ‘‘producing classes.’’

22 introduction
Cardenismo and the Co-optation of Revolutionary Citizenship

Considering the multifaceted, often creative ways women claimed revolu-

tionary citizenship raises anew the nagging question of why this period of
extraordinary mobilization within the women’s movement also witnessed its

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co-optation, its blunting through absorption into the ruling party’s ma-
chinery. As diverse groups of women increasingly organized as women, vo-
cally demanding political and labor rights, welfare provision, and protec-
tion of religious freedom, o≈cials sought to manage this activism as they
did other popular mobilizations. Given the pace of social change in Mexico
and abroad, Cárdenas most likely saw the writing on the wall for issues such
as women’s su√rage and religious tolerance and wanted the federal govern-
ment to control the terms of those reforms. The Cárdenas government—in
many ways the watershed between revolutionary political chaos and post-
revolutionary regime consolidation—endeavored to fashion a hegemonic
project that would incorporate competing factions under a unified, national-
ist agenda.
In Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mou√e’s formulation, hegemony
emerges ‘‘precisely in a context dominated by the experience of fragmen-
tation and by the indeterminacy of the articulations between di√erent strug-
gles and subject positions,’’ and it fashions ‘‘chains of equivalence’’ to link
subordinated groups, creating an internal frontier within a society.∏≤ The
postrevolutionary regime, confronting fragmentation and indeterminacy,
sought to connect popular groups together in a common project—over-
shadowing political rivalries, regional identities, religious convictions, sex-
ual di√erence, and ethnic distinctions—to create a frontier between the
‘‘revolutionary’’ and the ‘‘antirevolutionary’’ or ‘‘counterrevolutionary.’’∏≥
But the creation of this frontier raised the stakes of demonstrating one’s
loyalty and of vanquishing Malinchismo.
The hegemonic e√ort presented women activists with both an oppor-
tunity and a hazard. Over the course of the 1920s and ’30s, the postrevolu-
tionary government’s vast array of modernization and reform programs came
to rely on women’s support to transform Mexico into a more e≈cient and
productive society. Mothers would decide whether or not to send their
children to the new federal schools. Within their homes, they could choose to
cultivate what the regime dubbed modern values of e≈ciency, progress, and
independence or, conversely, so-called traditional values of piety, patronage,
and conservatism. ‘‘Women’s support, both as students and as mothers, was

introduction 23
decisive in the rural organizers’ e√orts,’’ explains the historian Alicia Civera
Cerecedo. ‘‘In some pueblos and rancherías (settlements), the women re-
fused even to talk to the agents. . . . To win over the women meant to enter the
community, where they filled a fundamental role not only as those responsi-
ble for child-rearing but also as the nucleus of unity.’’∏∂ As Cárdenas himself

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often pointed out, women shaped future citizens. ‘‘Women’s participation in
the social struggle,’’ he asserted, ‘‘is indispensable to making the Revolution
follow its ascendant trajectory with new generations.’’∏∑
Defining ‘‘chains of equivalence,’’ however, also called the question of
how secular women activists would resolve the relentless tensions within the
concept of revolutionary citizenship. They struggled to demonstrate mobili-
zation and consciousness on the one hand but loyalty and discipline on the
other. They drew on the assertively internationalist ideologies of feminism
and communism but invoked revolutionary nationalism and patriotic com-
mitment. With the ascendancy of historical materialism, they emphasized
women’s participation in the ‘‘productive’’ labor force but also celebrated
their maternal abnegación and morality. Amid far-reaching modernization
e√orts by state agencies and popular organizations, women simultaneously
situated themselves as agents of progressive change and embodiments of
cultural traditions.
To understand how women managed these tensions, this book follows
the wrangling over postrevolutionary women’s organizing—and, by exten-
sion, over the legacy of the revolution itself—during the period of ‘‘long
Cardenismo,’’ stretching from Cárdenas’s 1928 investiture as Michoacán’s
governor until the 1940 inauguration of his successor, Avila Camacho, who
abandoned radical politics and purged Communists from government and
public education. While hewing closely to a conventional time line, this
study is not strictly chronological. Other scholars have established the basic
narrative of the Cárdenas presidency, and no single, unified thread would
capture the diverse experiences recounted here.∏∏ Research beyond Mexico
City reveals the jerky, stuttering, uneven progress of provincial women’s
organizing, and the standard periodization falls apart in places where major
events in the center—such as the ruling party’s restructuring or the battle
over women’s su√rage—mattered little in local politics. Moreover, women’s
activism developed in a nonlinear fashion, responding to shifts in the local
political climate and to opportunities and obstacles in the realm of women’s
rights, rather than on a direct course of constant gains. Defeats and triumphs
often looked strikingly similar, making them di≈cult to distinguish from

24 introduction
one another. A narrative focusing too explicitly on the end—the defeat of
the women’s su√rage campaign and the co-optation of a vibrant women’s
movement—would ignore the small and large victories and their legacy for
women’s organizing.
Alternating between national perspectives and regional case studies, the

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chapters follow a loosely chronological sequence, although the case studies
all include material covering the entire period. Rather than ethnohistorical
vignettes or close social histories, these local studies illuminate the dynamic
nature of revolutionary citizenship—the contingent, inhabited, and gen-
dered aspects that made it a practice and a tool rather than simply a juridical
structure of exclusion. The first chapter considers the roots of Mexico’s
national women’s movement, beginning with the First Feminist Congress in
1916 in Yucatán and ending with the national women’s congresses of the
early 1930s, which exposed fault lines within activist circles and disagree-
ments about not only ideology and tactics but also the very meanings of
womanhood. The second chapter turns to Michoacán and the enduring
imprint of conflicts between secular and religious radicals. The third chapter
examines who populated the women’s movement by the 1930s, giving par-
ticular attention to schoolteachers and Popular Front activists who strove to
unite disparate factions of women’s organizing. Chapter 4 investigates the
labor mobilizations in the Comarca Lagunera, where, much in the way that
religious violence defined women’s organizing in Michoacán, labor conflicts
did the same, creating opportunities for women’s activism while closely
defining its terms. Chapter 5 explores the militant but ultimately unsuccess-
ful su√rage campaign, during which the ruling party transformed the mean-
ing and practice of voting with its corporatist reorganization and eclipsed
the su√rage battle with its internal political disputes. The final chapter, on
Yucatán, considers how dramatic shifts in political climate and an often
combative relationship between local and federal government agencies chal-
lenged activists’ e√orts to navigate the di≈cult and unpredictable political
terrain, underscoring the contingencies of citizenship.
The fates of Concha Michel’s Santa Bárbara invasion and the 1937 suf-
frage amendment demonstrate the stakes of the push and pull between pop-
ular e√orts to exercise revolutionary citizenship and state e√orts to con-
tain ‘‘surplus democracy.’’ Michel and her supporters practiced revolutionary
citizenship—contingent, inhabited, and gendered—in both discourse and
action, taking advantage of a particularly propitious opening and making
demands squarely in line with o≈cial priorities. Having left the Communist

introduction 25
Party but remaining somewhat aloof from the ruling party, Michel lacked the
institutional allies who would have not only given her greater leverage but
also rendered her more legible within the postrevolutionary political land-
scape.∏π However, despite Calles’s dismissal—using the well-practiced tech-
nique of simultaneously undermining and negotiating with popular organi-

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zations—the Cárdenas administration honored the group’s request eighteen
months later but changed the terms and conditions. In July 1937, Cárdenas’s
mentor, the radical elder statesman Francisco Múgica, endorsed the project
and called on Cárdenas to support it via the bureaucratic structures of the
Agrarian, Education, and Indigenous A√airs departments. Indicating that
the e√orts resulted from ‘‘the impulses of your doctrine and the program
that the Agrarian Department developed in the Comarca Lagunera,’’ Múgica
informed Cárdenas, ‘‘I think you would find it very satisfying to see the
fruits of the actions you initiated in [the Comarca Lagunera]; the enthu-
siasm of these women merits your respectable attention.’’∏∫ By this time,
Michel served as the Mexican Peasant Confederation’s ‘‘women’s action’’ sec-
retary, demonstrating her party loyalty and capacity for political discipline.
Múgica’s imprimatur and Michel’s new status transformed the project
from one of rebellion that fell outside the boundary of legitimate, legible
political activity, channeling it through structures of personal and bureau-
cratic patronage and discourses of regime loyalty. Like the successful su√rage
amendment of the 1950s, which e√aced its ties to the radical su√rage move-
ment of the 1930s, Múgica’s involvement and the time lapse after the Santa
Bárbara incident separated the school’s creation from the mobilization that
inspired it, linking it instead to the paternalist wisdom of ‘‘the Revolution,’’
as embodied in men like Cárdenas and Múgica. The new genealogy led back
not to the campesinas at Santa Bárbara in January 1935 but, rather, to Cár-
denas and the Agrarian Department’s employees in the Comarca Lagunera
in October 1936, itself an appropriation of a radical popular mobilization.
Such a revision carried political implications, narrowing the boundaries of
revolutionary citizenship and undermining women’s claims to it.

26 introduction