Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

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Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

Between Losing and Killing Fear

Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War Ta b e a A l e x a L i n h a r d

University of Missouri Press

Columbia and London

Copyright c 2005 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Linhard, Tabea Alexa, 1972– Fearless women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War / Tabea Alexa Linhard. p. cm. Summary: “Study of the role women played in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Examines female figures such as the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War and the intersection of gender, revolution, and culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1611-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8262-1611-0 (alk. paper) 1. Mexico—History—Revolution, 1923–1924—Women. 2. Women revolutionaries—Mexico. 3. Spain—History—Civil War, 1936–1939— Women. 4. Women revolutionaries—Spain. I. Title. F1234.L74 2005 946.081—dc22 2005016913 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: Kristie Lee Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc. Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Adobe Garamond and Bronx The University of Missouri Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Washington University and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities in the publication of this book.

Para Guillermo, Emilio, y Aitana

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 Pa r t I : T h e Ha u n t i n g Pa i n o f a Ph a n t o m L i m b 1. Between Losing and Killing Fear 23 2. Discursive Battlefields 58 Pa r t I I : De a t h St o ri e s 3. Adelita’s Death 91 4. The “Trece Rosas” and Other Death Stories 117 Pa r t I I I : Wri t i n g V i o l e n c e 5. Dancing with Pancho Villa’s Head: Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho 161 6. In the Shadows: María Teresa León’s Short Stories 186 Pa r t I V: A Re m a i n d e r a n d a Re m i n d e r 7. To Remember Is a Ghostly Verb 223 8. Who Will Talk about Us When We Are Dead? 251 Bibliography 257 Index 271

Acknowledgments

As I write these pages, more than sixty years have passed since thirteen minors were executed in Madrid, becoming the “Trece Rosas” shortly afterward. My first thoughts go to their memory. The initial reflections on these young women’s stories turned into my doctoral dissertation, and I wish to express my gratitude to my adviser, Teresa Vilarós, and the other members of my committee, Miriam Cooke, Ranjana Khanna, Alberto Moreiras, and Gabriela Nouzeilles, who guided me through that process with great insight and patience. I am also thankful to Amy Carroll, Ryan Long, Desirée Martín, and Amy McNichols for reading my chapters, for their support, and above all for their friendship. Very special thanks go to my friends and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis—Daniel Chávez, Dana Katz, Stephanie Kirk, María Fernanda Lander, Rebecca Messbarger, Margarita Muñoz, Elzbieta Sklodowska, Pepe Schraibman, and Akiko Tsuchiya—as I could have never finished this project without their advice. I greatly appreciate the generous support I received from Assimina Karavanta, Jo Labanyi, Mauricio Tenorio, and Michael Ugarte, who always helped me out along the way. Many thanks go to the University of Missouri Press, for believing in this project, and to Annette Wenda, for her careful editing of the manuscript. The large amount of research and international travel that this book demanded was made possible by grants from the Tinker and Mellon Foundations, the Program of Latin American Studies and the Graduate School at Duke University, and the Program of Cultural Cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities. I am particularly grateful to my dear friends at the Taller de Crítica Literaria “Diana Morán” in Mexico City. I thank my family on both sides of the Atlantic, my sister Mirjam Mahler, and especially my parents, José and Karin Linhard, for their love, their support, and for always being there. Finally, I thank Guillermo Rosas who has turned my life around, who has stood by me, and without whom this entire project would have never come true, just like everything else I have ever dared to hope and dream. And, of course, Emilio and Aitana, patiently waiting when first the dissertation and later the book were, like them, ready to see the world. ix

x

Acknowledgments

Portions of this book have been published previously as the following articles: “Adelita’s Radical Act of Counter-Writing,” in Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and the Literature of War, edited by Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam, 127–44 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2000); “The Death Story of the ‘Trece Rosas,’” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 3:2 (September 2002): 187–202; and “A Perpetual Trace of Violence: Gendered Narratives of Revolution and War,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 25:3 (Fall): 30–47.

Abbreviations

Cartucho

Libros Memoria “Miedo”

Morirás “Mujeres”

Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico, by Nellie Campobello, translated by Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews (Austin: University of Texas Press,1988) Mis libros, by Nellie Campobello (Mexico City: Factoría Ediciones, 1999) Memoria de la melancolía, by María Teresa León (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2000) “La mujer que perdió el miedo,” by María Teresa León (Nueva Cultura, Información, Crítica y Orientación Intelectual [ January 1936]: 153) Morirás lejos, by María Teresa León (Buenos Aires: Americalee, 1942) “A las mujeres españolas,” by María Teresa León (El Mono Azul [November 1936]: 93)

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Introduction

The story of Fearless John, the youth who went forth to learn what fear is, or “Juan sin Miedo” in Spanish, is a popular folktale. The main character’s predicament is well known: in spite of facing the most terrible and frightening appearances, he does not sense an ounce of dread or terror. Yet Juan envies the sensation that everybody who surrounds him seems to know all too well but that he has never experienced. Secretly, he suspects that learning what terror or dread is will open up a whole new world of sensations. Unacquainted with fear, Juan also lacks feelings, emotions, and curiosities. The young country lad therefore embarks on a journey to discover the missing sensation. Juan finally stumbles upon fear when he least expects it: as a leaf falls from a tree and lands on his nose, or as a raindrop wakes him into cold sweat and horror. Finally, the feelings he never knew but that he had been longing for open up to him thanks to a trivial event. The story’s end is happy one, as the young man’s restored fear makes him experience an entire array of emotions he had not known before. Yet not all stories of fearlessness share such a comforting conclusion. Women participating in revolutionary struggles in the early twentieth century—particularly the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)—became fearless, a quality that undoubtedly had two contradictory meanings. Losing fear connotes courage, as fearless women are not afraid to participate in a violent and uncertain revolutionary struggle. Yet lacking fear also connotes insensitivity, as exposure to the brutality of revolution and war bereaves fearless women of feelings and emotions. Rather than being antagonistic, both understandings of fearlessness represent two sides of the same coin. Thus, the expression “fearless women” at the same time refers to emancipating possibilities and domesticating gestures that permeate most representations of revolutionary women. The term emancipation refers to the ways in which ideological narratives ascribe to women participating in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War possibilities, responsibilities, and access to the public domain. Within discourses of emancipation, the traditionally domestic, private, and feminine domain is no longer understood as separate from the traditionally public and masculine domain. Moreover, revolutions also reveal that the boundary between the public realm and the private or domestic realm is a gendered construction. Dis1

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courses of domestication, on the other hand, imply a radical redrawing of the boundaries that were challenged during revolutions and wars. Within discourses of domestication, three mechanisms that subdue and often erase women’s political agency can be identified: the exaltation, the silencing, and the demonization of revolutionary women. Juan sin Miedo, of course, is male, and even though his quest for fear leads him to a series of adventures, he does not participate in the above-mentioned conflicts. Yet Juan sin Miedo is still relevant for this discussion: he appears in a brief essay that Spanish writer María Teresa León (1908–1988) published in Valencia in the journal Nueva Cultura, Información, Crítica y Orientación Intelectual (New Culture, Information, Criticism and Intellectual Orientation) in January 1936, after a yearlong stay in Mexico and Central America.1 León, who was extraordinarily active during the Spanish Civil War as a militia woman, or miliciana, cultural ambassador, and writer, dedicates this piece titled “La mujer que perdió el miedo” (The Woman Who Lost Fear) to the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. In her essay, León describes how Juan begs for fear to appear, as though it were tangible, as though it could materialize out of nothing. “And that is what man mostly yearns for, mostly covets, that path to the unknown, the need to feel that one exists, adventure, and its vehicle, curiosity” (Y es que lo más clamado por el hombre, lo más reclamado es ese paso a lo desconocido, la necesidad de sentirse existir, la aventura, y su vehículo, la curiosidad, “Miedo”).2 Given the popularity of Juan sin Miedo in folklore, León wonders why he does not have a female counterpart, a Juana sin Miedo. But León, of course, already has a female representation in mind: the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, women who have lost fear, even have killed fear, who have suffered what León calls a mutilation. Lost fear haunts these women like the pain of a phantom limb. Understanding and articulating the implications of the haunting pain of a phantom limb—not only for the Mexican soldaderas or the Spanish milicianas but more generally speaking for women participating in revolutions in the early twentieth century—are the purposes of this book. Like a specter, the pain of a phantom limb is absent and present at the same time: it is the present incarnation of a past loss, or even the memory of a loss that cannot vanish. In a far more 1. Coincidentally, the entire January issue of the journal is devoted to the relationship between the Spanish republic and the Mexican postrevolutionary state. 2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. Because “La mujer que perdió el miedo” is only one page in length, appearing on p. 153 of Nueva Cultura, Información, Crítica y Orientación Intelectual, future page numbers will not be cited.

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recent text, Manuel Rivas’s novel The Carpenter’s Pencil, the author provides an even more succinct definition of the pain of the phantom limb. The novel begins in the years that precede the war and moves to present-day Spain. The bulk of the text, however, takes place in a prison in Galicia during the war years, and it is here where the spectral voice of an executed artist remembers that suffering from a phantom limb is the worst of all pain. “Apparently it’s the worst pain you can get, a pain that becomes unbearable. The memory of pain. The pain of what you have lost.”3 The memory of the pain, which consistently manifests itself in the heterogeneous corpus that emerges from the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, is ultimately at stake here. A close reading of said corpus that includes literary texts, popular ballads, oral histories, letters, and images, from and about the two struggles, traces the ways in which the itineraries of gendered subjects in these two conflicts appear written in and out of literature and other forms of cultural production. During these two struggles women’s roles were so new and, to an extent, challenging that female revolutionaries were assimilated into literary, historical, or popular discourse through preexisting discursive conventions. More significantly, a series of icons, symbols, and myths has taken the place of women’s often marginal and forgotten histories, providing a sharp contrast to the emancipatory discourses of change and renewal that revolutions convey. Thus, a comparative study of literary and cultural production emerging from the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War focuses on the transmutations of the icons, symbols, and myths that take place in women’s writing. Such transmutations are the remainders of women’s stories of revolution and war, stories that for the most part continue to be marginalized from literary canons, official histories, and popular memories. Even though the subsequent chapters refer to both female- and male-authored texts, the analysis centers on discursive struggles in women’s writing. This does not mean that women’s writing provides the sole possible access to a particular female experience of revolution and war. Following Joan Scott, experience is always radically heterogeneous, as it emerges from complex discursive processes, marked by the question of who has the right and the responsibility to fight, to narrate, and to write revolutions and wars. Any reference to the term experience is based on Scott’s understanding of the term.4 3. Rivas, The Carpenter’s Pencil, 91. 4. Scott argues in her essay “Experience”: “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political” (37).

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The analysis centers on a series of mostly nonmainstream and forgotten texts, ranging from letters to short stories, that reveal the marginalized and often subalternized positions that women occupy in armed conflicts. Women’s writing on revolutions and wars appears localized in similarly marginal positions. Maleauthored texts, particularly literature, have been read, understood, and even justified to be representations of a legitimate experience—sometimes even more legitimate than historiography—of both the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Female-authored texts, on the other hand, tend to be absent from official canons in Mexico and in Spain. Moreover, most analysis of women’s participation in and women’s writing on revolutions usually centers on the role of female figures as noncombatants, thereby effacing women’s agency and women’s engagement with the multilayered violence of revolutions and wars. Women participated in both struggles in a variety of ways, yet it is necessary to challenge such binaries as combat experience and civilian experience in order to reveal the radical heterogeneity of women’s participation, and to show that the aforementioned “legitimate” experience of war, as it appears in hegemonic narratives, represents only an extremely limited and usually patriarchal perspective. During the Mexican Revolution, numerous women, usually labeled soldaderas, found themselves in the battlefields, performing tasks that ranged from procuring food to prostitution, loading arms, and firing arms. Some followed their husbands, lovers, fathers, or brothers into war. Others, among them a limited group of capitanas and coronelas (female captains and colonels), eventually led women and men into battle. During the Spanish Civil War, young women like Rosario Sánchez Mora joined the Republican militias in Spain, challenging the patriarchal authority of fathers, husbands, or even employers.5 Some women’s homes were destroyed by bombs; other women’s bodies were violated by soldiers. Some survived, scraping food together for their starving children. Other women’s children, like the young narrator in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico, turned a revolution into child’s play and child’s play into a revolution. Some died. Others killed. Some believed in a cause deemed political and worthwhile, while others believed in completing the tasks they had been assigned: Encarnación Jiménez, a Spanish laundress, received the death penalty, guilty of washing the bloodstained clothes 5. For more information on the role of capitanas and coronelas during the revolution, see Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History. Ingrid Strobl narrates the struggles of Rosario Sánchez Mora and other young Republican women in her book Partisanas: La mujer en la resistencia armada contra el fascismo y la ocupación alemana (1936–1945).

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of the enemy. She became a heroine. Others, like the Spanish anarchists belonging to the group Mujeres Libres (Free Women), believed that a revolutionary struggle also had to be a woman’s struggle: they organized, opened up schools, published a newspaper, and attempted to eradicate prostitution. These few instances should suffice at this point in order to show that women’s participation in national conflicts is complex and multifaceted; such participation also acquires different, often highly contradictory meanings in the cultural production emerging from revolutions and wars. Miriam Cooke argues in Women and the War Story that women’s writing on war often redefines the lines between combat experience and civilian experience. Referring to the “many little war stories” that Lebanese, Bosnian, Iraqi, Algerian, and Palestinian women are telling today, Cooke argues that in these stories, “women assign their own meanings to what they have felt and done. What used to be labeled civilian experience—being bombed, raped, expropriated, and salvaging shreds of living in a refugee camp—some name combat experience.” In a later chapter, Cooke explains the ways in which the binary combat and noncombat is linked to a particular gendered understanding of war. Cooke cites Cynthia Enloe: “Women, she writes, ‘as women must be denied access to “the front,” to “combat,” so that men can claim a uniqueness and superiority that will justify their dominant position in the social order. And yet, because women are in practice often exposed to frontline combat, the military has to constantly redefine “the front” and “combat” as wherever “women” are not.’”6 The critical reading strategy delineated in these chapters is therefore concerned with the ways in which the meanings of combat or violence are negotiated and challenged. Instead of isolating a particular female experience of revolution, my analysis gestures at alternative narratives that always oscillate between resistance and accommodation. The chosen texts range from testimonies that narrate the experience of subaltern subjects who found themselves involved in both revolutions, usually pieced together a posteriori by others who enjoyed more privileged positions, to literary texts written during as well as in the aftermath of both conflicts. The life story of Tomasa García, a veteran soldadera, discussed in Chapter 3, would be an example of the former. Josephina Niggli, whose play Soldadera is discussed at length in the same chapter, was an educated Chicana playwright. In her one-act play she projects a particular feminist subjectivity on a group of women who never had the chance, the time, or even the skill to write and to 6. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 41, 113.

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publish. The play is an example of the latter. Already mentioned Spanish writer María Teresa León also stems from an upper-class background, and her short stories are a clear attempt to represent the struggles of working-class and peasant women during the years of revolution and war in Spain. But León was not just an observer: as an active member of the Communist Party, she performed a variety of tasks during the war, repeatedly putting her life in danger. She also carried a gun, and her political activities and affiliations forced her into exile at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. With few exceptions, most of the authors of the texts discussed in the chapters that follow find themselves in ambiguous positions. They move in and out of combat, in and out of violence, in and out of silence; their writings reflect a similar movement. In women’s writing the conflicts between social transformations and the discursive continuities that come across in literary, historical, and popular discourse on revolutions are most visible; it is also in women’s works where the incommensurability between a traumatic event and its representation in language comes across most clearly. In women’s writing, finally, the contradictory implications of a lost fear are evident. Fearlessness also has another, maybe unexpected, corollary: a story that is under erasure when a subject is forced to lose or even kill fear. In other words, women’s stories of revolution and war always bear the mark of an absence. The thread that unifies my readings of fearless women therefore is the disappearance of a female corporeality inscribed by the violence of revolution and war or, more concretely speaking, the female bodies that literally and figuratively disappear from the Mexican and Spanish landscapes during and after both revolutionary struggles. Such a corporeality, of course, speaks to a ghostly presence, and ghosts, following Jo Labanyi’s reading of Jacques Derrida, “are the traces of those who were not allowed to leave a trace; that is, the victims of history and in particular subaltern groups, whose stories—those of the losers—are excluded from the dominant narratives of the victors.”7 Ultimately, numerous women’s writings—and sometimes the authors themselves—vanished from hegemonic narratives of revolutions, so all that is left is a remainder, a trace, a specter. Like the pain of a phantom limb, this is to say, the pain of a limb severed from a body, the traces of a spectral female corporeality inhabit and haunt the textual bodies that emerge from both revolutionary struggles. The phantom-limb metaphor is no accident here, since I am talking not about a secret to be unveiled, a hidden story to be told, or a wronged history to 7. Labanyi, “Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain,” 2.

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be corrected, but about a corporeal presence that like the “memory of pain” or like a specter can be neither seen nor apprehended. Following Derrida’s definition, a specter is a “paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit”—in other words, “some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other.”8 Derrida emphasizes the corporeality of the specter; so will the different analyses in this book. The women that appear throughout these pages are no longer alive. Some of them, like the “Trece Rosas” (thirteen roses), thirteen minors executed at the end of the Spanish Civil War, died in an untimely and violent manner. Others, like Mexican writer Nellie Campobello and Spanish writer María Teresa León, passed away after long and productive lives, forgotten and in seclusion. Although these words will never be able to undo the enormous injustices done to these women’s lives and their works, I still aim to follow what Labanyi has called Derrida’s ethical imperative and give these ghosts “a hospitable memory . . . out of a concern for justice.”9 The goal, therefore, is to set free their ghosts, to gesture at something that, like a specter or a phantom limb, cannot be seen, much less apprehended. Identifying the remainder of this spectral presence is no easy task, as it can be found only in flawed representations or figures that are always already inscribed with political meanings and roles in the respective conflicts. The chapters that follow are therefore inhabited by the remnants of a spectral corporeality: scraps of bloodstained clothing, female bodies that unsettle the space “where only heroes and martyrs tread” and quickly metamorphose into beautiful flowers in the battlefields, or hidden weapons that find their way into women’s hands.10 Briefly, it is a corporeality permanently inscribed by the violence of revolution and war. A review of the now relatively extensive corpus of texts devoted to describing and analyzing women’s experiences in revolutions and wars shows that women’s participation implies radical changes and challenges to established gender roles. My analysis of two case studies reveals that these changes and challenges are for the most part articulated through preexisting discursive conventions that tend to homogenize and often silence women’s experiences, and ultimately efface the multilayered violence that participating in revolutions entails. These discursive 8. Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, 6. 9. Labanyi, “Engaging with Ghosts,” 12. 10. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 15.

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conventions are part and parcel of a “shared medium of a master code” that informs cultural production in both revolutions. Even though women’s roles and status changed dramatically during the years of revolution and war in Mexico and Spain, women’s actions remained inscribed in this “common language” of the Republican Left in the Spanish case and revolutionary nationalism in the Mexican case.11 Yet this “common language” is everything but transparent or politically innocent, as it contains countless contradictions, fissures, gaps, and silences. These locations are also where traces of the itineraries of female subjects appear displayed. Considering this, the use of the term subject does not describe an autonomous or even essential female subject, neither a “homogenizing subject nor a conception of a fixed social totality.” Thus, my use of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s expression “itinerary of the gendered subject” refers to a discursive event that comes into being in a moment of struggle. Understanding the itinerary of the gendered subject to be a discursive event does not aim to identify and isolate women participating in war as ahistorical subjects or to reify their experiences, disregarding the process of discursive construction. Rather, it represents an exercise in, following Ranajit Guha, “bending closer to the ground in order to pick up the traces of a subaltern life in its passing through time,” or in exploring the scars that are left behind, after a limb has been severed and the throbbing pain of the phantom limb has taken its place.12 As the references to Guha and Spivak indicate, such an exercise is undoubtedly indebted to the area of subaltern studies. Thus, a perspective of subalternity, or, to use Alberto Moreiras’s term, perspectival subalternity, is what allows for the recognition of this spectral presence, the phantom limb that painfully haunts the body of texts that emerge during revolutions. Analyzing representations of fearless women from a perspective of subalternity does not imply that all women who participated in revolutions should simply be labeled as the gendered subaltern. Rather, this indicates that revolutionary upheavals, and the different attempts to foster a revolutionary culture, imply certain processes of subalternization that explain why women’s presence and participation in the battlefields have become the haunting pain of a phantom limb. After all, phantom limbs cannot be cured, not even with pros11. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 88; William Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” 361. 12. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lowe and Lloyd, 17; Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 272; Guha, “Chandra’s Death,” 36.

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theses, in the same way in which the subaltern cannot speak. Moreiras puts forth “an understanding of the subaltern position in merely formal terms, as that which stands outside any given hegemonic articulation at any given moment.” He opposes this perspectival or relational notion of subalternity to its essentialist counterpart “whereby the position of the subaltern could always be determined in advance out of some specific positivity.” This is necessary in order to further understand the remainder that haunts the selected texts that have become the canon in Mexico and in Spain. Moreiras consequently understands subaltern consciousness, citing Spivak, as “the absolute limit of the place where history is always narrativized into logic.”13 Although essentialist subalternism might imply classifying all voices of revolutionary women as subaltern and by definition silent, a perspectival subalternity makes it possible to study women’s presence and women’s agency in national conflicts, which have survived only as repetitive, sometimes obsessive references to the remainder of a female corporeality, always inscribed by the violence of revolution and war. It is now necessary to take a few steps back in order to further clarify the ways in which a perspectival subalternism relates to this discussion of fearless women. The first underlying question here is whether women who participate in revolutions are subaltern, or subordinated, subjects who during the process of a revolutionary struggle embark on an itinerary that in one way or another allows these subjects to question their subordination and ultimately challenge and undo certain power and knowledge structures. The notion of an itinerary evokes the work of Antonio Gramsci as well as Spivak’s critique of Gramsci. Spivak uses Gramsci’s notion of a “phased development” of the subject. But Spivak also criticizes Gramsci for ignoring the ways in which the imperial enterprise complicates this same process, especially when considering the Third World gendered subaltern. The itinerary of the gendered subaltern subject, be it in the context of colonial and postcolonial India or revolutionary Spain and Mexico, is never a straight path from disfranchisement to empowerment, but rather a discontinuous process that comes to us only in fragments, implying that representing or even tracing this very itinerary can quickly become an alienating history, plotted by somebody else. Spivak maintains in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present: “For the (gender-unspecified) ‘true’ subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can now speak itself; the intellectual’s 13. Moreiras, “Hybridity and Double Consciousness,” 377, 388, 391.

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solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been left traced so as to offer an object of education to the representing intellectual.”14 Spivak’s point leads us to an aporetic moment: if the subject’s itinerary has not been left traced, how is it possible to pick up the pieces and identify the remainder of the passage of a subaltern life through time without plotting a revisionist history that ultimately might be just as alienating as those icons, tropes, myths, and images that have taken the place of women’s stories? A summary of what has been argued so far should address this question. Following Spivak, abstaining from representation is not an option, even though the subaltern cannot, by definition, be represented. My analysis does not solve this contradiction; instead, the reading itself and, with it, my own position are caught in this conflict. The relationship between subalternity and representation lies at the core of my analysis of a number of myths and icons, stemming from a common, patriarchal language, that have taken the place of women’s histories in the battlefields of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. These images, myths, and icons originate in dominant discourses of gender and for the most part underscore women’s traditional roles, silencing the full-fledged complexity that participation in a revolution entails. Nevertheless, the fact that female authors themselves draw from these images or textual conventions is not merely a sign of internalized oppression. In their texts, women do not simply reproduce or reiterate these discursive conventions. Instead, these authors use preexisting gendered discursive conventions because they are the available, understandable, and overlapping layers of culture and history that the present analysis aims to unfold. The very first layer is the already mentioned essay that Spanish writer María Teresa León published in 1936, as it serves as a starting point to discuss historical and cultural contingencies in Mexico and in Spain, which also are the subjects of this book’s Part I. There, Chapter 1 focuses specifically on soldaderas and milicianas, cultural and symbolic figures that in many ways epitomize women’s participation in both struggles. A subsequent analysis of the intersections among revolution, gender, and representation explores the gaps between the social transformations that revolutions entail and the discursive continuities that frame representations of revolutionary women. The second chapter presents a cross section of literature and other forms of cultural production from the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. One of the main points at stake here is that fos14. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 272.

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tering revolutionary culture implies a paradigm shift as far as the roles of artists, intellectuals, and writers are concerned. Even though this paradigm shift might imply a change in objects of representation, most of the texts that emerge out of revolutionary struggles do not radically alter existing conditions of power and subordination. Whereas Part I and Part IV consider both the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, Part II and Part III focus on particular instances within the respective struggles in the context of two theoretical threads: “death stories” (Chapters 3 and 4) and the intersections of gender, writing, and violence (Chapters 5 and 6). In Part IV I discuss the ways in which the memory of fearless women operates in both contexts. The notion of a “death story” emerges from the contesting meanings that female heroic deaths attain in popular discourses of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Chapter 3 centers on the Mexican popular figure Adelita; Chapter 4 analyzes the representation of the deaths of the Trece Rosas. The discussion of Adelita centers on Soldadera, a one-act play that Mexican American author Josephina Niggli staged for the first time in 1936. At the end of that text, Adelita, the young protagonist, sacrifices herself for the sake of the revolution. She throws a bomb down a mountain path and shouts, “This is the Revolution. The Sun will shine in my face. Long live the Revolution,” before plunging to her death.15 Adelita also kills a troop of federal soldiers, and so manages to save six other soldaderas as well as valuable arms and ammunition. Now that it has a new heroine, the revolution can go on—over her dead body. Yet Adelita’s heroic death also allows for alternative interpretations, as her sacrifice in the play represents an attempt to articulate a counternarrative. Unable to use the written word in order to tell her story, Adelita’s body, as it is reduced to thunder and bones in the explosion, becomes her text. Three years after Niggli’s play was published, and only a few months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, thirteen young female members of the Juventud Socialista Unificada (JSU), the Unified Socialist Youth, were executed in the Ventas Prison in Madrid. Shortly after their deaths, they received the name Trece Rosas. The exact charge that led to the women’s execution remains unclear today; different sources cite a number of crimes they had allegedly committed. It also remains unclear exactly who named them the Trece Rosas, yet at least three poems that other imprisoned women wrote on the occasion of the execution of 15. Niggli, Soldadera, 45.

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Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

the thirteen minors are available today. The deaths of the Trece Rosas appear narrated in a small group of texts that consist of poems, testimonials, letters, and also the words that form the name Trece Rosas. This name and the poems reflect images, tropes, and icons that have already appeared in the cultural production of the Republican side of the civil war, particularly poems that center on other heroines. The repeated appearance of such icons, images, and tropes hardly precludes the possibility of a counternarrative but still gestures at the disappearance of women’s complex and heterogeneous stories in the magma of history and memory. It is crucial to bear in mind here that within the classical Homeric paradigm that in many ways informs the War Story, mourning the death of the hero and recognizing his sacrifice remain women’s tasks.16 Thus, the term heroines appears to be an oxymoron, precisely because the concept of a hero cult itself precludes the possibility of a woman’s heroic death. The implication is that whereas any kind of heroic death would emerge out of a patriarchal tradition, a heroine’s sacrifice also has the potential to undermine traditional and accepted representations of revolutionary women. Yet this does not automatically imply that women’s heroic deaths on the battlefield will always challenge patriarchal narratives of revolution and war. Rather, analyzing women’s heroic deaths allows us to study the exact moment when subaltern subjectivities clash with the preexisting discursive conventions that epitomize and conceal the implications of women’s participation in revolutions and wars. This is also the moment when death stories emerge, and both Adelita’s heroic demise and the execution of the thirteen minors are “death stories.” They are narratives that appear situated between memory and oblivion, between accommodation and resistance, between myth and history, between inscription and the possibility of counterwriting, between master narratives and resistance to them. The expression “death story” is a conscious play on two terms: War Story, as defined by Miriam Cooke, and life story, as commonly used in the field of oral history. Whereas the War Story “gives order to wars that are generally experienced as confusion,” life stories also order confusion in providing a particular life with a coherent narrative. Moreover, studying the intersections (and sometimes the unbridgeable gaps) between the “War Story” and gender allows us to “recognize the strangeness of the unchanging metanarrative that the War Story has always been.” Thus, understanding the construction of the War Story—an endeavor that 16. Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, 188.

Introduction

13

can be precisely carried out by studying women’s multiple war stories in whatever shape or form they might find their way to different audiences—might radically change our understanding of violence and war. Whereas women’s multiple “war stories” provide alternative narratives to the “War Story grid,” life stories ideally provide challenges to more conventional historiographic practices.17 The “stories” on which Chapters 3 and 4 focus are, without being the exact opposite, perhaps best understood as the other side of life stories. The term death story refers to narratives about specific subjects whose deaths are politically and ideologically inscribed. Deaths, once narrated as a text, critically interrupt—and at the same time engage in a dialogue with—dominant discourse. Moreover, a focus on women’s “death stories” (women writing about women’s deaths) allows us to question whether these stories are necessarily narratives of resistance. Like the study of life stories, the study of “death stories” involves recognizing contradictions and conflicts among dominant myths, narratives, and themes, as well as alternatives and resistances to them. However, unlike life stories, death stories cannot be told in the first person, as they consist of fragmented narratives that others piece together a posteriori, not altogether unlike dirges, elegies, or eulogies. Such texts are usually written to remember the deceased person in a more or less formal and public setting, often at a funeral or in a commemorative ceremony. Some of the poems discussed in Chapter 4 certainly are elegiac in their subject matter. Even though “death stories” might share these common elements with dirges, elegies, or eulogies, they still emerge in a more circumlocutory fashion. They are an amalgam of different and often marginalized genres, of surviving texts. Death stories appear traced on scraps of paper that might easily vanish from history. They consist of poems, letters, or simple testimonies that honor, mourn, and remember those deemed not worthy of the honor of a eulogy or dirge, those who did not have a funeral and whose deaths are often mourned or commemorated (if at all) in secrecy or in private. From this it follows that death stories will always be incomplete narratives. As different as the respective death stories appear to be, particularly bearing in mind that at least in Niggli’s play Adelita is a fictional character whereas the Trece Rosas are, of course, historical figures, the respective stories can still be articulated only once historical, literary, and popular forms of discourse fuse. However, Niggli’s Adelita is never just a fictional character: she is based on a mythified figure that in many ways romanticizes and homogenizes women’s heterogeneous 17. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 15, 43, 16.

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Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

experiences during the Mexican Revolution. Although Adelita’s sacrifice in Niggli’s play does not commemorate the death of a particular historical subject—as in the texts that address the deaths of the Trece Rosas—the author’s choice to name her main character Adelita unvaryingly connects her subject matter with the literature, the history, and the memory of the Mexican Revolution. Thus, in this particular death story the limits and even failures of the heroine’s fearless and radical act of counterwriting are at stake. The actual reading of the figure “La Adelita” takes the young woman’s dead body as a starting point in order to unravel the discursive structures that turn this Adelita into a heroine of the Mexican Revolution. In Niggli’s text the young soldadera’s death represents an aporetic moment: if subaltern subjects can penetrate literary and historical discourse as well as memory, these subjects do so only conditionally, as lifeless, docile bodies who neither hear nor speak, much less write. The narrative of a heroic death marks women as participants in combat at a point when women’s histories of revolution and war are already articulated and narrated via preexisting and often hegemonic discursive conventions. These conventions mask the complexities that women’s participation in revolution and war entails: this is the exact problem that Adelita’s suicide in Niggli’s play addresses but cannot resolve. Adelita’s suicide at the end of Niggli’s play suggests that a heroic death allows certain female revolutionaries to enter historiographic as well as literary and popular discourse through the back door, yet this does not automatically imply that Adelita’s death can be exclusively read as a radical act of counterwriting. Similarly, thirteen young women who in 1939 became the Trece Rosas also entered history through the back door once an exemplary execution turned them into reluctant heroines. Yet this death story is more than just a narrative of resistance against the Francoist government, which in those years was still in the making. Rather, it reflects a negotiation with discursive paradigms from both mainstream Republican cultural production as well as a Francoist writing of history that attempted to demonize all politically active leftist women. Moreover, literary discourse is what ultimately provides cohesion to this death story: the poems, the letters, and, last but not least, the name Trece Rosas insert this execution—which was only one among the many that took place in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War—into a history of resistance against the Nationalists and later the Francoist regime in Spain. The precise images and tropes that generate the death story of the Trece Rosas emerge out of the discursive battlefields that during the years of revolutionary fervor and civil war had represented women’s heroic presence in battle.

Introduction

15

Different incarnations of the same discursive battlefields also inform the narrative fiction I discuss in Chapters 5 and 6. Here I move from the previous analysis of more collective bodies of writing to particular works of women writers, concretely, Nellie Campobello’s novel Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico (1931) and María Teresa León’s short stories belonging to two collections, Cuentos de la España actual (Tales from Contemporary Spain) (1935) and Morirás lejos (You Will Die Far Away) (1941). The relevance of the “gendered cultural and symbolic imagery” that marked the circulation and inscription of the figures and texts discussed in the earlier chapters will also become obvious in the two chapters that follow.18 In the actual texts it is also possible to recognize tensions between preexisting discursive conventions and challenges to them. Moreover, the gendered subjects that appear in both authors’ writings mirror their own trajectories through the literary histories of their respective nations. For a number of years, their work remained absent from the canon of revolutionary literature in Mexico and Spain. Even though more recent critiques have shown a renewed interest in Campobello’s and León’s work, it is my contention that the authors’ engagement with the multilayered violence that women’s participation in war entailed has not been sufficiently analyzed. My reading therefore centers on the uncomfortable relationship among emancipation, political agency, and violence, or, phrased differently, it investigates whether engaging in violent behavior or perpetuating violent acts is necessarily a sign of agency or political emancipation. This relationship becomes particularly evident in the following examples, stemming from Cartucho and one of León’s short stories, “Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas” (Light for the Peaches and the Girls). In the former, a general of a revolutionary army invades a woman’s home and attacks her in front of her children. Years later, the woman’s daughter who witnessed the event still wishes to kill the man, yearning for a gun that would fire a hundred shots. In the latter, after being confronted with the pain of a mother who lost her child in a bombing, an enraged woman slaps a soldier’s face and cries out: “That’s it. You give us babies only to kill them later” (Eso es. Nos hacéis hijos para luego matarlos, Morirás, 150). Nothing in these two brief examples is all too unusual in any given representation of fearless women’s attitudes during revolutionary struggles. There is, however, one particular aspect that marks these scenes as women’s narratives of 18. Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War, 49.

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Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

revolution. Inscribed with a perpetual trace of violence, Campobello’s novel and León’s short story speak to the incommensurability between a traumatic event and its representation. The use of the term trace consciously invokes the work of Jacques Derrida. A trace, notes Spivak commenting on Derrida, is a track “of a previous differentiation and a continuous deferment.”19 The analysis that follows seeks to identify such a trace in the texts. I will suggest that the precise rhetorical maneuver in Campobello’s novel and León’s short stories is a constant “setting off ” and “pushing away” of the question of violence. Male authors’ engagements with violence certainly share some of these issues, yet in women’s representations the discontinuities among violence, political emancipation, and agency during revolutionary struggles in the twentieth century come across most clearly. The above-mentioned examples from Cartucho and “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” reflect the ways in which different forms of violence circulate and intersect in the texts. The allusion to the mother’s rape, the daughter’s desire for retribution, the dead child, and even the slap in the soldier’s face are, at one level, acts of explicit physical violence. Similar acts, whether committed in the public or the domestic sphere, are common; indeed, they are sometimes “horribly banal” or even inconsequential in any given revolutionary struggle. A particular governing body—or those who aim to overthrow that same governing body—usually sanctions acts of violence committed in the public arena. Its victims can be men, women, and children, civilians and soldiers, who are codified as the enemy to be injured, conquered, and even annihilated. But violence also occurs in the domestic domain, and though not officially sanctioned, its manifestations are usually tolerated and sometimes even encouraged. The victims of this violence are, almost always, women and children, whereas its culprits only rarely need to face the consequences of their actions, since “the trouble has been that men do in war what they do in peace, only more so, so when it comes to women, the complacency that surrounds peacetime extends to wartime, no matter what the law says.”20 A further analysis of such acts of explicit physical violence, as they appear narrated in Campobello’s novel and León’s short stories, reveals that separating what takes place in the domestic domain from what takes place in the public domain effaces the political and ideological dimensions of women’s participation in revolutions and wars: acts of violence perpetrated in the domestic domain, the space that women traditionally occupy, are often not deemed to be political. Campo19. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 423. 20. Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 150; Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,” 53.

Introduction

17

bello and León address this issue by disavowing the “repose of the warrior,” a concept that Jean Franco explains vis-à-vis guerrilla warfare and state-sponsored repression in Latin America. In her essay “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, and Children,” Franco explains that the origin of the “repose of the warrior” relies on the separation between the public space and the private space “of the house (brothel), home and convent, that is spaces which were clearly marked as ‘feminine.’ These spaces gave women a certain territorial but restricted power base and at the same time offered the ‘felicitous’ spaces for the repose of the warrior.”21 Whereas both authors’ texts reveal the oppressive nature of what Franco calls a “felicitous” space, they also show that either leaving or even destroying the repose does not automatically imply an undeviating path toward women’s emancipation and enfranchisement. Moreover, the compulsive need to construct the “repose of the warrior” as a space separate from the violence of revolution and war silences women’s multifaceted participation in revolutionary struggles. Elaine Scarry has argued that “the main purpose and outcome of war is injuring,” and although this main purpose is, according to Scarry, usually omitted, redescribed, or held in a visible but marginal position in military histories and militarized language, the disowning of domestic violence and thereby domestic injuring during revolutions and wars prove to be even more persistent.22 The problem with this kind of violence is not only that such acts, at least until very recently, have been difficult to identify: the path to both disclosure and justice has also been thorny and meandering. The issue of rape and sexual assault during armed conflicts is a case in point. The problem moves beyond the frequency of rape “both within and between all sides”; even the ways in which women choose to disclose or conceal the trauma of sexual violence radically challenge perceptions of silence and agency. In the aftermath of the war in the former Yugoslavia, victims of rape “are exercising agency in choosing to remain silent. They, like women everywhere, understand that speaking out can have unintended consequences, and may result in either natural or formal justice.”23 Physical violence intersects also with other less explicit forms of violence in the texts. Epistemic violence elides women’s participation in revolutions and wars, thereby effacing women’s agency in representations of such struggles. Both León 21. Franco, “Killing Priests,” 12. 22. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 62. 23. MacKinnon, “Rape, Genocide, and Rights,” 48; Liz Kelly, “Wars against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics, and the Militarised State,” 54.

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Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War

and Campobello are in many ways writing from within and against a taboo that prevents women writers from fully engaging with different levels of violence. In most representations of fearless women, preexisting discursive conventions silence and erase the complexities that women’s participation in these struggles implies. Thus, women writers frequently articulate stories of revolution, war, and violence using recognizable images, metaphors, and tropes, not because they have internalized hegemonic narratives but because these narratives emerge out of the discursive battlefields that do not account for the complexity of women’s struggles. Finally, the cyclical violence of trauma is what gives structure to these texts. Both Campobello’s novel and León’s short stories are marked by a constant tension among a traumatic past, a haunted present, and an impossible future inhabited by the specters of the revolution and war. Following recent work on trauma theory, particularly Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, I consider trauma not necessarily a particular event, but rather the act of putting into words an unsettling experience that has not been assimilated. In order to further understand the relationship among language, trauma, and violence, Caruth emphasizes the cyclical nature of trauma. She argues that a distressing experience is often not known as such; instead, a trauma comes into being once its victims experience its effects in a belated manner, oftentimes over a prolonged period of time. I quote Caruth’s definition of trauma, since that definition also lies at the heart of my understanding of trauma and its relationship to the cyclical violence that appears in these texts. In its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares or other repetitive phenomena. Traumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness. The repetitions of the traumatic event—which remain unavailable to consciousness but intrude repeatedly on sight—thus suggest a larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can be known and what is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing.24

The important point here is not to consider Campobello’s and León’s works as mere chronicles of the struggles they narrate. Rather, both authors’ writing 24. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 91–92.

Introduction

19

brings the representation of revolutionary struggles into crisis. Even when young Nellie, the narrator of Cartucho, describes events that seem to bear no relation to fighting, blood, or death, violence has invaded her language the same way it has invaded her mother’s home: to never leave, never let go.25 Similarly, León’s short story emphasizes the moments of peace in war and the moments of war in peace, as the author represents war in a fragmented language that reveals that even in the most distant and idyllic settings, the threat of violence and war is always looming. The boundaries among physical, epistemic, and cyclical forms of violence are sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to establish. Rather than isolating them in the texts, my analysis shows how they intersect. Moreover, the different acts of violence discussed in the chapters that follow are unmistakably related to women’s agency and emancipation. Thus, in order to understand the itineraries of gendered subjects in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, it is crucial to engage with the perpetual trace of violence that marks the discursive intersections of gender, revolution, and war. My analysis of Campobello’s and León’s work carries out this exact task. In Chapter 5, the analysis of Cartucho is attentive to three core issues: the author’s own revisions of her text between 1931 and 1960, the experience of trauma that comes across in the narrator’s idiosyncratic perspective, and the language of violence that penetrates the narrator’s home and her daily life. I argue that Cartucho undoes the sheer possibility of representing an event like the Mexican Revolution in any language but one that speaks to the incommensurability between a violent and traumatic event and its representation. Chapter 6 centers on four of León’s short stories that unequivocally gesture to fearless women, to subjects whose stories will remain marginal and most probably forgotten in the broader spectrum of Spanish history, memory, and literature. Although León’s stories insert themselves in the aesthetic and political doctrine of socialist realism—thereby underscoring a call for social change that can be carried out only with a violent overthrow of the old social order—they also reveal that the possibilities, responsibilities, and access to the public arena that a revolution conveys always exclude 25. Even though Campobello’s text has been considered an autobiographical or even a testimonial narrative (see Doris Meyer, “The Dialogics of Testimony: Autobiography as Shared Experience in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho”), and even though the author herself has made similar claims in the introduction to her collected works, Mis libros, I emphasize that young Nellie in the novel is a narrator and a character: the narrator’s childlike voice therefore is a strategy and not, as some would argue, the transparent representation of a young girl’s experience during the years of revolution in northern Mexico.

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certain subjects. These fearless women’s actions also disavow the existence of a peaceful “repose of the warrior,” a private and domestic sphere. The women that disown this same space (and the way it has been politically inscribed) do so with counterhegemonic, nonrepresentational acts of subaltern insurgency unevenly written into the history of the revolutionary Left in Spain. As already mentioned, the last two chapters of the book, in Part IV, pull the relevant issues from both conflicts together in order to discuss the relationship between the discursive struggles that marked the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War and the ways in which memory operates in both national contexts. In Chapter 7, I emphasize that representations of fearless women are always inscribed with the threat of their own disappearance. In addition to addressing contemporary debates on the representation of memory in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts, this chapter also discusses four novels that narrate women’s struggles in revolutionary Mexico and civil war Spain. I emphasize the ways in which Elena Poniatowska’s Here’s to You, Jesusa (1969), Ángeles Mastretta’s Lovesick (1996), Jesús Ferrero’s Trece Rosas (2003), and Dulce Chacón’s Voz dormida (Sleeping Voice) (2002) display different strategies in an attempt to remember the struggles of fearless women. The four novels gesture at the absences and silences that necessarily mark fearless women’s uneven entry into remembrance. Ultimately, I argue that the discursive production of these four novels is a consequence of the prior effacement of fearless women in both national contexts. My concluding remarks begin with a reflection on Agustín Díaz Yanes’s 1996 film Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (Nobody Will Talk about Us When We Are Dead). I use this apparently self-defeating motive that gives the film its title in order to emphasize the radical—and deadly—interruptions that mark fearless women’s stories. Their presence in literature and other forms of cultural production is a remainder and a constant reminder of the ways in which certain narratives of women’s participation in national conflicts have always strengthened or affirmed those communities that at the same time concealed women’s relationship with the multilayered violence of revolutions and wars. The pages that follow therefore reveal that the studied conflicts are far from over when the last bomb is dropped, the last shot is fired, and the last peace treaty is finally signed.

Pa r t I

The Haunting Pain of a Phantom Limb

1 Between Losing and K illing Fear

Women’s Struggles in Early-Twentieth-Century Mexico and Spain In February 1936, after two years of conservative and often repressive rule in Spain, the leftist multiparty coalition of the Popular Front won a massive electoral victory. Only five months later, on July 18, Francisco Franco, together with three other generals, rebelled against the legally elected government. The rebellion, initially supported by strong segments of the army, the church, and other conservative sectors—including monarchists, conservative Republicans, members of the Falange Española (a fascist party), and the Carlist traditionalists—set the stage for the final outbreak of a social revolution that had already been in the making in the years that preceded the electoral victory of the Popular Front, a coalition of leftist parties that included Socialist, Communist, and Republican components. The outbreak of a civil war, of an armed and popular movement that fought against what in Republican cultural and political discourse was often framed as a fascist menace, exacerbated the revolutionary fervor that had already taken over Spain in the previous years. Even though the Falange Española, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera in 1933 and partially modeled after Italian fascism, fought against the Republicans, the support that Nationalist forces received from this particular fraction does not mean that the Nationalist cause was equivalent to fascism. Yet the fact that the Nationalists were backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy partially explains recurrent appeals to a struggle against fascism along the wide spectrum of the Republican sector. Moreover, the conflict polarized Spain in such a way that the split between both groups resulted in a Manichaean worldview that informed the discourse produced on both sides. Yet the different struggles that collided during the years of conflict reveal that the war was far more complex than the confrontation between the 23

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so-called two Spains. My reading of women’s roles in the revolutionary struggle and war should at least partially reveal the implications and intricacies of a conflict that moved far beyond a struggle between fascists and Bolsheviks, even though the respective sides that fought in the war often defined the struggle in those terms. The particular case of María Teresa León’s work brings forth some of these intricacies. The civil war, as well as the years of revolutionary fervor that preceded and also accompanied the war, permanently inscribed Leon’s life and work, yet the author’s actions and words also marked the terms in which this struggle was fought. Particularly in León’s stories belonging to the collection Tales from Contemporary Spain, she narrates the struggles of mainly women and children in the years that led up to the war. An analysis of these stories vis-à-vis the work she produced during and after the war reveals that unlike the strict pattern the War Story imposes, wars are often far too messy to establish when they begin or when they end, or when a revolution becomes a war and a war a revolution. In January 1936, León returned from a yearlong stay in Mexico. There she had witnessed the forging of a postrevolutionary culture as well as a new sense of nationhood, both of which were outcomes of a very different social upheaval. The Mexican Revolution consisted of a series of struggles, from a bourgeois revolution that purported to put an end to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to peasant insurgencies in the North and South of the country, as well as workers’ uprisings in the more urban areas. The so-called armed phase of the revolution extended from 1910, when Francisco I. Madero successfully led a revolt against the dictator Díaz, to 1917, the date that marked the approval of a new constitution. However, political violence as well as a succession of caudillos continued until 1928–1929 when Plutarco Elías Calles achieved stability by unifying the political elite through the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana and defeating the Cristero revolt in central Mexico. This period covers the years of upheaval, and thus the transition from the nineteenth-century oligarchic order to the stability of one-party rule after 1930. While President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) managed to carry out some of the initial demands of the 1910 revolution, particularly land reform and state-sponsored organization of trade unions and peasant associations, the regimes that followed were less progressive. Both revolutions implied radical yet at the same time uneven transformations of women’s lives. Moreover, women’s writing from and about both struggles bears witness to such transformations, but at the same time reveals certain discursive continuities that remained uncontested during the years of revolutionary up-

Between Losing and Killing Fear

25

heaval. The transformations and the continuities come across in León’s aforementioned essay “The Woman Who Lost Fear.” An image of Mexican workers illustrates León’s piece. In the photograph, women clad in long skirts and wearing signs with unidentifiable writing attached to their hats are marching, possibly during a strike or a protest. The women in the illustration, however, are not the fearless women to which the titles alludes. Instead, they are “women with fear: fear of hunger, fear of prison, fear of repression. With conscious courage, with conscious femininity, with hope” (mujeres con miedo: al hambre, a la cárcel, a la represión. Con valor consciente, con feminidad consciente, con esperanza, “Miedo”). In the brief essay, León contrasts these fearing workers to a very different group: women who have lost fear, women who have killed fear, the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. “When in the years between 1910 and 1921 irregular armies moved across the Mexican plains and mountains, the ‘soldadera’ was feared like a crazed jaguar. She had killed fear” (Cuando en los años de 1910 a 1921, ejércitos irregulares se movían en las planicies y montes mexicanos, la ‘soldadera’ era temida como un jaguar loco. Había matado el miedo). Even though León contends in this essay that participation in the Mexican Revolution did not result in a transformation of political consciousness, the shift from “losing fear” in the title to “killing fear” in the text should not be taken lightly. Whereas losing fear connotes an unconscious act, thereby precluding agency, killing fear implies intent as well as violence. Despite this trace of agency, in León’s essay the soldaderas’ loss of fear speaks to the women’s invisibility and subalternity: they lack political consciousness, and their shadows vanish from the battlefields and the pages of history: “And so they come and go, through the fields of hatred and rage, now without rage, without hatred, without a shadow” (Así van y vienen por los campos del odio y de la ira, ya sin ira, ni odio, ni sombras). In “A las mujeres españolas” (To Spanish Women), a later essay aired on the radio on November 16 of the same year, León purports a far more emancipatory vision of women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War. She praises the Spanish women who have stepped out into the streets and the battlefields in order to participate in the war effort. “The popular woman has lifted herself up over our fields, claiming her prestigious right to intervene in Spanish History” (La mujer popular se ha levantado sobre nuestros campos con el prestigio de su derecho a intervenir en la Historia de España, Mujeres, 93). She compares these women to a popular folk heroine, the doncella guerrera, or warrior maiden, who “squeezes her heart, drains it dry, so that it might fit in the armor of her courage” (que aprieta su corazón, estruja su corazón, para que quepa en la armadura de su

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valor, 93). Whereas the fearless soldaderas disappear from history, the doncellas guerreras become fearless women in order to intervene in history. A closer exploration of León’s essays serves to further illustrate the ongoing conflicts between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication that mark representations of fearless women and women’s writing on revolutions. León’s reference to Fearless John in her earlier essay is hardly a coincidence in a text mainly concerned with the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution: the soldiers of the different revolutionary troops in Mexico often received the generic name Juan. León contends that—not only in Mexican history—there have also been countless “Juanas sin Miedo.” They are, according to León, the women who lost fear, the women who killed fear, and also the women who have disappeared from the pages of history to be substituted by “the terrible women that later appear in epic poetry” (las mujeres terribles que luego llegan a la épica, “Miedo”). León explains that the soldaderas are both the soldiers’ property and an inheritance; being a soldadera ultimately represents the lowliest and most abject position women have ever occupied: “If one Juan dies, another Juan picks her up” (Si un Juan muere, otro Juan la recoge). Yet in spite of these negative connotations, the soldaderas still move León. I am moved by the absence of normal desires and fixed virtues and that firm and crystal-like impurity and that need for home, among the shots and the agony, and that indifference. All these negative virtues piled up together, forming a picturesque heroism. Life, among the absence of life. She also takes her gun and shoots at what she does not understand, trusting her Juan’s truth. She fires against destiny. (Me conmueve la ausencia de deseos normales y de virtudes convenidas y esa impureza firme de cristal de roca y esa necesidad de hogar, entre los tiros y la agonía, y esa indiferencia. Todas las virtudes negativas juntas y amontonadas, formando el heroísmo pintoresco. La vida, dentro de la ausencia de la vida. También coge el fusil y dispara contra lo que no entiende, fiándose en la verdad de su “Juan.” Dispara contra el destino.)

One cannot fail to notice here the exoticizing gaze that fixes the soldaderas as unchanging, passive, yet also romantic figures. The Mexican landscape appears to exist in a distant and sometimes even primitive temporality. “The countries far away from Europe maintain an elemental purity” (Los países lejos de Europa conservan una pureza elemental), asserts León, and this essential purity also saves the soldaderas from becoming prostitutes or adventurers, as their European counterparts might have done in earlier centuries. She therefore situates the soldaderas

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and their struggles in a distant past: they have killed fear and with it any remote possibility of transforming their political consciousness as a consequence of their participation in the revolution. These women without fear have become the numbed yet rancorous soldaderas Josephina Niggli describes in her play Soldadera. They are “broken shells whose only desire was revenge for all they had suffered during those horror-ridden years before 1910. For them there was no beautiful past, no glorious future. Their only consolation was to weep over the graves of their dead. Unfortunately there are no graves for dead dreams.” Yet fearless women do not appear only in Mexico: for the narrator of Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet, who serves as an ambulance driver in France during World War I, “killing” fear becomes the sole strategy of survival at the front in France and the home front in England: “I am content to drift along in the present. The past has gone; I have no future. . . . I want no future. With this mental atrophy my physical fear has vanished, for fear cannot exist when one is indifferent to life.”1 Unlike these women who killed fear, the unemployed workers that appear in the illustration do fear hunger, prison, and repression. According to León, they have experienced a transformation of consciousness; they are conscious that they are workers, that they are women, and that they are struggling. This same transformation of consciousness, argues León, is also what could save Europe from the menace of fascism and war. León ends her essay with the following warning: “Europe would die of coldness and indifference, die because fear and doubt are dead, and that is the most philosophical terror itself ” (La muerte de Europa sería por frío, por indiferencia, por muerte del miedo y de la duda, que es el terror filosófico por excelencia, “Miedo”). Even though “The Woman Who Lost Fear” centers on soldaderas, the essay is actually much more concerned with developments in Europe than with the events in Mexico: the soldaderas function as a negative example, a warning for the future. But the crucial issue here is that León is aware of the limits and even shortcomings of her own essay, as well as of any attempts to trace the lost stories of the soldaderas. She explains that soldaderas— as well as women who have suffered a similar fate—are doomed to disappear from the pages of history and even the realm of collective memory, while only symbols, myths, or romantic fantasies take the place of the stories of women who lost fear. These fearless women are barely talked about. Or they are discussed in a wrong and official manner. They are the terrible women that later appear in epic poetry. 1. Rodolfo Usigli, “Playmaker of Mexico,” x; Smith, Not So Quiet, 217.

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The Haunting Pain of a Phantom Limb Revolution and war have taken them from their positions of normal women. This is not about dreams. They are real, just like blood opening up its way. Without them, the rest of us women would live without history. (De estas mujeres sin miedo casi no se habla. O se habla mal y oficialmente. Son las mujeres terribles que luego llegan a la épica. La revolución y la guerra las levantan de pronto de su silla de mujer normal. Aquí no se trata de sueños. Son verídicas, igual que la sangre al abrirse camino. Sin ellas, las demás mujeres viviríamos sin historia.)

Fearless women are not the heroines of history, as they disappear behind myths and legends. Yet with her essay, León stresses the need to dwell on the conflicts and contradictions that participation in revolutions and wars entails for women. Contrary to the soldaderas, the doncellas guerreras addressed in her second article do not kill their fear; they fight, they struggle and challenge traditional roles, but ultimately they will be allowed to reclaim and recover fear, sensibility, and compassion. In the later essay, for the women who squeezed into their armors of courage, the end of the war implies a return to normality. Now the women are allowed to weep; nevertheless, their tears should be tears of joy. Unlike the soldaderas who no longer feel fear, hatred, or rage, the doncellas guerreras will be able to reap the benefits of their toils. They do so, however, only among women, and they are not celebrated as heroines in the struggle. And the Catalonian women, who sent their sons to defend Madrid, will come, and women from the Levant, who reaped the harvests, and those who delicately thread the needles, and who tended the herds will come. All those who were sisters in the gray days will come, and then, only then, will we be allowed to cry tears of joy. (Y vendrán las mujeres catalanas, que mandaron sus hijos a defender Madrid, y vendrán las levantinas, que recogieron las cosechas, y las que enhebraron las agujas mansamente, y las que guardaron los rebaños. Vendrán todas las que fueron hermanas en los días grises, y entonces, sólo entonces, se nos permitirá llorar de alegría.) (Mujeres, 96)

Even though the women perform tasks that are expected of them—once again tasks that would be deemed trivial or ordinary in traditional narratives of war— for them there is a future. León’s use of the first-person plural, “will we be allowed,” speaks to the author’s personal identification with the doncellas guerreras. Contrary to the Mexican Revolution, León is still optimistic, as here she antic-

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ipates solidarity and cohesion among all Spanish women. A second look at this essay reveals, however, that it is directed not at the popular women, peasants, or workers, but at women who much like León herself had a more privileged upbringing. Like the soldaderas, the doncellas guerreras also become a symbol that ultimately stands for something else. However, both “The Woman Who Lost Fear” and “To the Spanish Women” still represent crucial examples of the ways in which women writers display strategies of accommodation and resistance to dominant narrations and representations of women in revolutions and wars. León conveys women’s experiences in such conflicts in a traditional manner, turning women into icons, symbols, or myths and writing or speaking for them. Yet she simultaneously expresses the need to rethink the ways in which fearless women have been assimilated and politically inscribed in history and memory. As Joan Scott puts forth in her essay on the concept of experience, an analysis of a text like León’s would not disclose a female, essential, and homogeneous experience; such an exercise would instead expose the mechanisms that lie underneath the discursive production of a female experience.2 Generally speaking, three recurrent problems surface in most representations of fearless women: they appear articulated through preexisting discursive conventions that elide and silence the changes and challenges that women’s presence in the streets and battlefields of revolutions entails; female revolutionary figures function as symbols or icons, aiming to elicit either support for or rejection of particular aspects of revolutionary struggles; and finally, fearless women are usually not the authors of their own stories. What follows is a list of the factors that explain the discursive construction of women’s experiences of revolution and war in the contexts of Mexico and Spain. This list also serves as an outline for what remains of this chapter. The first factor entails the historical and cultural particularities of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Rather than comparing these two very different struggles, the point here is to explore the ways in which they are interrelated and how both cases illuminate one another. Following Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal’s work on transnational feminism, in my reading of women’s writing from the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War I do not take an essential female voice or experience, or, rather, the “metaphysics of voice and experience,” for granted.3 Instead, the historical and discursive constructions of 2. “For that we need to attend,” notes Scott, “to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences” (“Experience,” 25). 3. Kaplan and Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” 356.

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women’s experience in Mexico and in Spain in both hegemonic and counterhegemonic narratives are under examination here. The second factor is concerned with particular female figures and icons that emerge during revolutions, with particular attention paid to the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution and the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War. The third factor is the discursive and theoretical intersections among revolution and gender, representation, and the presence and absence of the subaltern. Even in those revolutions within which women do not manifest an altered political consciousness, it is still possible to read women’s challenges to dominant narratives in the interstices of the discursive battlefields that these revolutions produce. These challenges, however, need to be read and understood from a perspective of subalternity, yet it will be possible to develop such a perspective only once the discursive battlefields from which representations and narrations of revolutionary women emerge are taken into consideration. This analysis is carried out in Chapter 2. Both armed conflicts took place in a crucial moment in the early twentieth century, when the paradigms that marked the ways in which revolutions would be fought and narrated dramatically changed. Preceding the Russian Revolution by seven years, the Mexican Revolution was the first major popular upheaval of the twentieth century, not only in Latin America. Ending the same year World War II started, the Spanish Civil War was a complex struggle in which some of the conflicts that would mark the world war were already present. The war in Spain lay at the crux of pulsating ideologies, the confrontation of which defined those conflicts that shaped the development of the twentieth century. Contrary to other revolutionary struggles, the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War are hardly mentioned in transnational discussions of the intersections of gender and revolutions. At first glance this may appear self-evident: women participating in the Mexican Revolution were mostly deemed passive camp followers; in Spain, the victory of the Nationalists implied severe setbacks for an emancipatory process that was in the making in the years that preceded the war. I therefore situate these two struggles in a context of transnational and feminist approaches to the study of revolutions in order to show that women’s emancipation and domestication during revolutions are multilayered and ambiguous processes. Moreover, studying a revolution that was defeated and one that officially triumphed reveals that emancipatory possibilities and domesticating gestures during revolutions are intrinsically related to the actual process— and not necessarily the respective cause or consequence—of a revolution.

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In the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, relatively large numbers of women were mobilized, yet their participation was for the most part not officially recognized, and keeping track of the actual numbers of women who fought in these conflicts is a daunting, if not impossible, task. The problem is not only that women were usually not tracked, or even considered in official records that eventually became part of historiographies or archives, but also that what participation in revolution actually entails already is, as Miriam Cooke shows in Women and the War Story, a conflictive issue. Finally, because revolutionary women usually made their entrance to historiographies or archives only in the form of icons, metaphors, or myths, discussing their roles in these struggles necessarily leads to a space between history and literature, between fact and fiction, or between myths and the complex histories that lurk underneath. Moreover, one could say that even though both revolutions implied significant changes in the lives of Spanish and Mexican women, these changes were for the most part not manifested, articulated, or narrated in the form of an altered political consciousness. The expression “altered political consciousness” refers to the ways in which women participating in revolutions define and articulate the changes and challenges that revolutions imply for them in gender-specific terms. We can talk about altered political consciousness when the potential advancements that a revolution might entail for women are not subordinated to a greater cause (that is, class struggle or antifascism) but are understood as struggles in and of themselves that need to be fought on all fronts. “Altered political consciousness” does not necessarily involve feminist consciousness, particularly bearing in mind that the term feminist carried bourgeois and therefore alienating connotations for most working-class or peasant women in the early twentieth century. Last but not least, both conflicts fostered new forms of cultural production that would eventually turn male and female protagonists into particular national or even nationalist symbols and icons that usually reflected traditional gender roles and rules. Although the specific political, cultural, and historical contingencies in Mexico and Spain are certainly significant, the differences that mark both case studies are not an impediment for this analysis. The majority of texts discussed throughout these chapters appeared in the 1930s, the decade when the Spanish revolution and civil war were taking place. Even though the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution had finished by the 1920s, it was in the 1930s and under the leadership of President Lázaro Cárdenas that the Mexican postrevolutionary government saw its most progressive phase. It was in these years that the Mexican Revolution identified its own

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struggles with the Second Republic in Spain (1931–1936).4 In the particular case of literary and cultural production, the outbreak of revolution and war in Spain implied a “boom” of literature and the arts, whereas what is today known as the literary and cultural production of the Mexican Revolution was produced in the postrevolutionary phase and under state sponsorship. There are, of course, certain exceptions: Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs appeared as a serial in a Texas newspaper in 1915, and oral and popular traditions like the corridos (popular ballads) accompanied the revolution from the time the first shot was fired. Needless to say, the fact that most of these texts did appear in the 1930s is anything but a coincidence. In Spain, a leftist intelligentsia played a preponderant role during the years of revolution and war, defending the use of cultural production or even “culture” as a weapon in the antifascist struggle. The defeat of the Spanish republic entailed the vanquishing of such an understanding of cultural production and “culture” after 1939. In Mexico, the triumph of a revolution, mostly carried out by uneducated and often illiterate peasants and small landowners, resulted in the official sponsoring of a revolutionary and nationalist culture in the decades that followed the armed struggle. The Russian Revolution of 1917, and the consequent fostering of Soviet and proletarian art, radically influenced new understandings of the role of artists, intellectuals, and writers in revolutionary societies. Thus, Marxist doctrine and Soviet iconography oftentimes marked the production of high and popular culture in both the Mexican and the Spanish contexts. The discussion of María Teresa León’s—albeit critical—adoption of socialist realism in Chapter 6 further reveals how important this influence was. Yet not all cultural production necessarily carried a Marxist imprint: the discussion of anarchist poet Lucía Sánchez Saornil’s poetry in Chapter 4 and my reading of Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho in Chapter 5 prove that cultural production from the 1930s in Mexico and Spain always implied complex negotiations that moved beyond the adaptation of the cultural trends that the Russian Revolution propagated. Finally, literary and cultural production in Mexico and Spain were often interconnected in much more personal and even intimate ways. The aforemen4. Sebastiaan Faber explains these connections in Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939–1975: “The ousting of the Spanish king in 1931 and the abolition of monarchy were celebrated by them as a triumph. Specifically in Mexico, [Friedrich E.] Schuler writes, ‘revolutionary politicians felt a special kinship to the . . . Second Spanish Republic’ (56), with which they appeared to share many concerns: agrarian reform, social justice, and separation of church and state” (12–13).

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tioned essay by María Teresa León is just a very small example of these connections. León spent the year that preceded the civil war in Mexico, where she wrote Tales from Contemporary Spain, a collection of short stories first published by Editorial Diálectica, a Marxist-oriented publishing house, in Mexico City in 1935. Mexican writer Nellie Campobello encountered Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca in Cuba, and his work undoubtedly influenced her writing in Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands. Moreover, an important contingent of Mexican artists, intellectuals, and writers traveled to Spain during the war (among them Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, and Silvestre Revueltas), and some, like artist José Clemente Orozco, fought for the Spanish republic. These links have been widely studied, but rather than establishing the legitimacy of this comparative approach on these connections, I will ultimately show that the radical differences between both struggles ultimately make this analysis possible. I will not list these differences, as they will naturally come across in these chapters.

The Mexican Revolution During the first decade of the revolution, a series of different groups and armies participated in the struggle, sometimes in coalition and sometimes fighting against one another. Yet already in the years that preceded the revolution, Mexican women—albeit mostly upper-middle-class, educated women—had slowly but consistently begun to challenge the boundaries between a private and domestic domain and a public domain. The revolution functioned as a major catharsis that signified the massive penetration of women into the public sphere, as well as the possibility of incorporating women’s concerns into the political and cultural landscape of a dramatically changing country. At the end of the nineteenth century, a number of female journalists and teachers began to make a name for themselves by publishing in magazines and newspapers that were still mostly geared toward a female audience.5 Yet these publications still speak to the ways in which women started questioning sexual inequality and articulating the initial steps toward emancipation.6 In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, women consciously adopted a more political role, especially supporting working-class women and 5. These publications include La Mujer, La Mujer Mexicana, El Álbum de la Mujer, El Correo de las Señoras, and Violetas de Anáhuac. 6. Martha Eva Rocha Islas, “Presencia de las mujeres en la Revolución Mexicana: Soldaderas y revolucionarias,” 185.

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challenging the rule of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Ana Lau and Carmen Ramos Escandón argue that women’s participation in the struggle certainly determined women’s emancipation. The economic change that the revolution implied also influenced women’s citizenship status. Moreover, the authors see a direct link between the revolution that was changing the country and women’s rebellion against established gender norms.7 Once the revolution broke out, some of these politically active women joined the different revolutionary battalions; their experiences often depended upon the battalion and the revolutionary leader they happened to follow. Women’s participation shows that the influence of a revolutionary vanguard is not necessarily a prerequisite for the development of an altered political consciousness, which certainly does not mean that the positions that these Mexican women defended were any less ideological. Even though extremely heterogeneous groups of women took part in different ways, articulating different political aims, women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution is still epitomized by the presence of the soldaderas and camp followers, and especially by the figure La Adelita. In contrast to the Spanish Civil War, where in spite of the differences and conflicts that marked the Republican forces it is clear who was fighting whom, studying the lives and experiences of revolutionary women in Mexico proves to be far more difficult and problematic. Soldaderas appeared among most of the different armies that fought in the revolution. Officially, the soldaderas had the task of carrying the domestic realm, literally on their backs, to the battlefields. However, the circumstances and the urgency of battles, together with the daily violence, rendered the divisions between the public and the domestic domains obsolete. In 1925, policy makers for former presidents Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón attempted to rid the Mexican army of the soldaderas, accusing them of revealing a “lamentable backwardness” in the army and even of making it “the butt of all writers on the subject.” Soldaderas were also considered the “chief cause of vice, illness, crime and disorder,” reflecting very similar reasons to those that made the Republican government during the Spanish Civil War force the mili7. In their book Mujeres y revolución, 1900–1917, Lau and Ramos Escandón mention some of these women: Dolores Jiménez y Muro (1848–1925), Carmen Serdán (1873–1948), Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875–1942), Sara Estela Ramírez (1881–1910), Elisa Acuña y Rossetti (1875–1946), and Hermila Galindo (1875–1946). The authors explain that these were educated middle-class women who with their writing and their actions rebelled against the limitations that Porfirian society imposed upon women and so broke new ground for women’s struggles in Mexico.

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cianas to return to the home front in 1937.8 It was not until the 1930s, however, that the meaning of the word soldadera was fixed as female relatives of soldiers, whereas women in the army were named soldadas. The fact that soldaderas were present in the revolutionary armies as well as in the federal army suggests here that it is not the outcome, or even the causes, of a revolution, but the conditions that unfold during the struggle itself that shape discourses on gender. As with the milicianas of the Spanish Civil War, it is next to impossible to establish how many women participated as soldaderas in the revolution or to define the lines between a passive camp follower and a woman warrior. Moreover, new myths emerged that would forever inscribe the representation of revolutionary women and make it very difficult to distinguish soldaderas from other women who participated in the revolution. Although soldaderas consistently appear in the mainstream cultural production of the Mexican Revolution, particularly corridos, novels, and murals, most of the actual soldaderas were illiterates who never had the chance (or the time) to tell their own stories of war and revolution. Even oral histories, life stories, and testimonials of soldaderas are limited, and it rarely happens that a woman herself says that she was a soldadera. This is clearly visible if we examine excerpts from the Archivo de la Palabra (Archive of the Word), a series of interviews that compose a mosaic of Mexican oral history in the twentieth century. The archive contains more than two hundred interviews with participants in the revolution. About a dozen of these participants are women. They include Pancho Villa’s four widows, the widows of a few other honored generals, and finally Coronela María de la Luz Barrera. However, the transcript of her interview is disjointed, if not unintelligible. It remains unknown whether the bad quality of the recording or the coronela’s own speech was what made the transcriber fill the gaps in her discourse with the word incomprensible (incomprehensible) in parentheses, interrupting almost every single sentence. The fact that the term grosería (crude language), also in parentheses, conceals what might have remained as a comprehensible part of the transcript suggests the limitations of this particular oral history project.9 Moreover, none of the interviewed women calls herself a soldadera. Each of Villa’s widows always refers to herself as the general’s only real wife and considers the other women to be merely his soldaderas. For the women themselves then, 8. Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 48. 9. Luz Barrera, interview by Rosalind Beimler y Anita Aguilar, PHO 1/206, Archivo de la Palabra del Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, Mexico City.

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the term soldadera often even implied negative connotations, since it seems that once a woman has the chance to speak for herself, she is not a soldadera anymore and that by definition—like the subaltern—the soldaderas cannot speak.10 Before further exploring the ways in which the soldaderas’ presence in the battlefields has been assimilated into mainstream (and alternative) culture and cultural production in Mexico, I will contextualize the revolution and civil war that took place in Spain in the 1930s.

The Spanish Civil War Many of the Spaniards loyal to the republic who took to the streets and battlefields were certain not only that they were resisting a new authoritarian and conservative regime but also that the time had come to start a massive social revolution. Anarchists and left-wing socialists collectivized land and factories in the North of Spain. Yet not all Republicans were in favor of this massive change in society. Other segments of the Republican side merely wanted to reinstitute and maintain a liberal democracy. The very different political aims of the different constituencies that formed Republican Spain implied serious conflicts that would dramatically influence the outcome of the civil war. The Republicans were certainly not a monolithic group—nor were the Nationalists, even though the various components of the Nationalist side shared more or less similar goals—and the constant conflicts between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary rhetoric and politics among the wide spectrum of the Republican Left certainly had an impact on women’s participation in the struggle. The particular case of women’s mobilization in Republican Spain needs to be considered in the wider context of early-twentieth-century Europe. Helen Graham links women’s potential liberation and emancipation before and during the war to general developments in the early twentieth century, including industrialization and the dissemination of leftist ideologies that made the massive presence of women in the public sphere possible. Moreover, a small number of women actively participated in the political domain already before the war, during the Second Republic. Anarchist Federica Montseny became the first female cabinet minister in Spain, the second in all of Europe. The radical socialists Victoria Kent and Clara Campoamor and the socialist Margarita Nelken were members of the Spanish Parliament during the Second Republic, and Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria, who had already become an 10. I am, of course, paraphrasing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

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important voice for the Communist Party, was also a member of Parliament and later became the most important leader of Spanish communism, if not the Republican cause as a whole. It is during the war, however, that gender roles changed even more radically. Women in Republican Spain were rapidly mobilized, with activities ranging from the more traditional ones such as the procuring of food, child care, and nursing to work in factories or running the transportation system. Certainly, only a small number of Spanish women joined the front, yet this kind of mobilization is what provided alternatives for women that up to that moment had been unthinkable. Women’s participation in the struggle consequently “opened up significant mold-breaking possibilities and spaces for women’s direct action and initiatives.” Shirley Mangini and Mary Nash agree that without radically challenging patriarchy, the war certainly offered the possibility for women’s emancipation, yet an altered consciousness was for the most part not manifested or even articulated.11 However, the lack of a gender-specific language does not imply that women’s emancipation was completely absent in the struggle. In her book Nash clearly differentiates between a feminist consciousness and political awareness that women develop once they become socially and politically involved when a war breaks out: “Although specific gender demands were subordinated to the overall struggle to eliminate fascism, the difficulties encountered, the responsibilities undertaken by women, and women’s growing perception of their own capacities led to a gradual heightening of consciousness not yet overtly expressed, but nonetheless present among a growing sector of women.”12 The fact that this heightened consciousness was for the most part not overtly expressed during the Spanish Civil War does not mean that it did not exist. Rather, it was not articulated as such. The anarchist group Mujeres Libres needs to be taken into consideration as an example of altered political consciousness. Founded in 1935 under the leadership of Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Dr. Amparo Poch y Gascón, and Mercedes Comaposada, the libertarian women’s organization 11. Helen Graham, “Women and Social Change,” 110. In Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War, Mangini coins the term flash of freedom, referring to the ways in which women experienced an until then unknown freedom during the war that would, however, vanish with the victory of the Nationalists. In Defying Male Civilization, Nash repeatedly emphasizes that even though the war heightened women’s political consciousness, it was for the most part not articulated in such terms (76). 12. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 76.

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clearly articulated an agenda that—even though the women themselves did not accept the term—today would be considered feminist. The organization, explains Nash, operated “with the clearly articulated feminist goal of female liberation from the ‘triple enslavement to which (women) have been subject: enslavement to ignorance, enslavement as women and enslavement as workers.’”13 This explicit feminist goal, undoubtedly related to the anarchist emphasis on individualism, shows that this group overtly called for and expressed, at least in the initial months of war, the need for an altered political consciousness. The triumph of the Nationalists and the institution of Franco’s dictatorship would signify a definite setback for women’s emancipation. A renewed emphasis on women’s traditional roles within a patriarchal family structure became an essential aspect of the new Francoist state. The Civil Law Code of 1889 was reinforced, prescribing women’s economic and social dependence upon their fathers, husbands, or brothers.14 Furthermore, an array of laws, established by the Nationalists already during the war, annihilated the advances that the Second Republic had made possible. These include, among others, the Fuero del Trabajo (March 9, 1938), which prohibited women from working at night or in factories, and the Ley de Bases (July 18, 1938), which guaranteed nonworking women subsidies for families with more than two children, payable to the male head of the family. In March 1946, families with working women would not receive any subsidies at all. Already in September 1936, coed education was made illegal along the Nationalist sector. As soon as enough female teachers were qualified, men, with the exception of priests for religious education, would no longer teach young females. In March 1938, the law that during the republic recognized civil matrimony was repealed, and only those who could profess a religion other than the Catholic faith were not required to be married in church. In 1941, severe penalties for abortion were established, and in 1944 the Penal Code was reformed and penalties regarding such crimes as divorce or adultery, abolished during the republic, were reinstated.15 Nevertheless, before the Francoist rhetoric and legislation reversed the advances that had been made during the years of the republic and the war, a revolution in women’s roles had already taken place. Women’s presence and 13. Ibid., 78. 14. Mangini, Memories of Resistance, 102. 15. Geraldine Scanlon explains the importance and implications of these laws in “La mujer bajo el Franquismo” (5–8).

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participation in the public arena changed much faster and much more radically than ever before. Women’s experiences during the revolution and war in Spain were certainly diverse and were contingent upon the different political affiliations and political philosophies. Compared to the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and the Socialist Party of Spain (PSOE) anarchist groups like the National Confederation of Labor/Anarchist Federation of Iberia (CNT/FAI) appeared to be more sympathetic to women’s emancipation. The libertarian group Mujeres Libres vindicated women’s emancipation and sexual freedom as a fundamental part of the social revolution that was to take place in Spain. However, even the members of this seemingly most radical group moderated their slogans during the process of war, returning to a much more traditional understanding of women’s roles and emphasizing motherhood and women’s qualities as nurturers. In the initial months of the war, a relatively small number of women decided to join their male counterparts at the front, becoming the milicianas. Concurrent with the militarizing of the Republican forces, the milicianas who had enthusiastically gone to the front in July 1936 were sent back to the home front only three months after the outbreak of the war. Mary Nash explains that attitudes toward women’s presence at the front rapidly changed, and all political parties supported women’s return to the home front. The very dominant notion that women were simply more useful performing different roles at the rear guard was strongly supported by the fact that the milicianas had little or no military training. Yet the fact that the milicianas’ presence at the front was often associated with both prostitution and the spread of venereal disease certainly contributed to the change in attitudes regarding them. Moreover, it is important to point out that politically active women also defended the return to the home front. None of the women’s organizations supported women’s direct participation in warfare by July 1937. An article that appeared in the July 1937 issue of Mujeres Libres, a magazine published by the libertarian group of the same name, clearly spells out that the only group that had initially supported what Nash calls women’s “double militancy” radically tamed their slogans and goals as the struggle against the advancement of the Nationalist troops became more and more desperate.16 The article describes the unfortunate experience of a young seamstress who became a miliciana. The text begins by referring to the first moments of war, when “the seamstress resisted the tyranny of the needle in order to make her dreams 16. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 9. “The dominant mobilizing slogan—‘Men to the War Front, Women to the Homefront’—evoked little opposition, even among militant women” (101).

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of adventure a reality” (la modista se resistió a la tiranía de la aguja para hacer realidad sus sueños de aventura). This seamstress lacked political ambitions and motivations, and she wished only to exchange the needle for a gun in order to live an adventure, reflecting the stereotypes about the adventurous and even frivolous miliciana that quickly emerged during the war. The article then continues: And she offered her young life, filled with juvenile illusions in the first days of the heroic struggle, when every man was a hero and every woman was equivalent to a man. But it is not all about courage, in this long and continuous fight between two classes that hate one another to death. After she understood this, she thought it over and understood that the street brawls are very different from the methodic, regular and exasperating warfare in the trenches. She understood this and recognizing her own courage for what it was, as a woman, she preferred to exchange the gun for the industrial machine and the combative energy for the sweetness of her Woman’s soul. (Y ofreció su vida joven, pletórica de ilusiones juveniles, en las primeras jornadas de la lucha heroica, en que cada hombre era un héroe y cada mujer equivalía un hombre. Pero no todo consiste en el valor; en esta lucha larga y continua de dos clases que se odian a muerte. La mujer comprendiéndolo así, recapacitó y comprendió que las escaramuzas callejeras distan mucho de parecerse a la lucha metódica, regular y desesperante de la guerra de trincheras. Comprendiéndolo así, y reconociendo su propio valor, como mujer, prefirió cambiar el fusil por la máquina industrial y la energía combativa por la dulzura de su alma de Mujer.)17

The change in tone in this piece shows that in spite of the radical break that the revolution and war presupposed in Spain, even active and militant women often went so far as defending a redrawing of the separation between the domestic and the public domains. Thus, even though participation in revolution and war radically altered many women’s lives, these changes were often understood to be exceptional moments. Normalcy, this is to say, the status quo, would return once the conflict was over. This should show that the different roles that women’s organizations played during the war were, at the end, far more ambiguous that it may appear at first glance. The fact that during the war many women’s lives and political consciousness were radically altered remains without a doubt. These changes, however, were articulated (both by men and by women) in the constant negotiation between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication. The ambiguity was 17. Strobl, Partisanas, 46.

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hardly an exclusive phenomenon in Republican Spain; the fact that the situation for women in revolutionary Mexico was comparable lies at the heart of my argument. However, a brief look at women’s involvement in the war on the Nationalist side also reveals a similar, though possibly less visible, negotiation between these two discourses. Helen Graham points out that women’s participation in the Nationalist side differed “quantitatively and qualitatively” from what took place on the Republican side. These divergences, explains Graham, were not only the result of ideological differences between the two sides. Whereas women on the Republican side were mobilized in order to supplement a missing labor force (women worked in the fields, in the factories, even as tram drivers), this was not necessary in Nationalist Spain.18 The ideological differences, the fact that in conservative (and, needless to say, Catholic) Spain domesticity and women’s submission were not only idealized but also taken for granted as women’s inherent destiny, should not be taken lightly. However, it is also true that there was some room for ambiguity as far as emancipation and domestication were concerned, particularly if we briefly consider the Sección Femenina de Falange (Women’s Section of Falange). Founded in 1934, and led by Pilar Primo de Rivera (daughter of dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera and sister of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founding father of the Falange), this group certainly emphasized a separate sphere for women. This became particularly prevalent when the Francoist dictatorship was established, as the Sección Femenina was put in charge of all charitable and social work via the Auxilio Social (Social Aid), of female education, and of women’s issues in general. Both the rhetoric and the different programs of the Sección Femenina were ultraconservative, strongly influenced by Catholicism and the fascist ideology in which the Falange was grounded. Yet, not unlike what happened in many leftist organizations, women’s agency within this group ended up contradicting the terms in which it was framed. In an analysis of the speeches of both José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Pilar de Primo de Rivera, and the novels of female fascist activists, Jo Labanyi differentiates women’s involvement in the Sección Femenina before and during the war from its aftermath. She argues that when this group was established, for some women joining it could often be considered a choice, even an emancipating choice, not just a blind act of subservient and innate female obedience. Not only did women active in Sección Femenina play an important and visible role in the public arena, immediately disavowing the separation between the public and private spheres, but in these years of 18. Graham, “Women and Social Change,” 114.

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revolutionary struggle and war being part of Sección Femenina also implied risking one’s life.19 The discursive conflicts between emancipation and domestication also lie elsewhere. Quoting José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s speeches, Labanyi reveals a slippage “between ideals of male and female behavior.” The founding father of the Falange grounds the virtues of his followers in qualities that at the same time are considered to be military and female qualities: sacrifice of the self, service, and submission. Even though military and female virtues are not exactly equivalent, as “the soldier, unlike woman, never surrenders, even in defeat or death,” this slippage still makes it possible for women to define the meaning of their own involvement and activism. “The appropriation of this militaristic rhetoric by women allows them to resemanticize traditional female entrega as masculine ‘firmness.’ Conversely, men’s adoption of a masculinized version of the feminine virtues of service, submission, and entrega allows them too to have it both ways, claiming to be at their most masculine when behaving as women are supposed to.”20 This ambivalent rhetoric does by no means imply that involvement in Sección Femenina, particularly after the war when it become almost compulsory for all Spanish women, was equivalent to women’s involvement in any leftist party. Yet Labanyi’s essay still demonstrates that women’s agency within and through Sección Femenina often did not correspond to women’s representation and selfrepresentation of female activists. Moreover, even though Pilar Primo de Rivera advocated a traditional understanding of gender roles and rules, her own political activity during the Francoist years (Labanyi reminds us that she was in public service for forty-three years, even longer than the generalísimo himself) certainly shows that her own adamant redrawing of the boundaries between the domestic and the public domains was an artificial, if not futile, gesture.21 Sección Femenina certainly did accomplish a series of legal and social battles and furthered 19. See Labanyi, “Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender: Cross-Gender Identifications in the Writings of Spanish Female Fascist Activists.” In Mujeres en el Franquismo: Exiliadas, nacionalistas y opositoras, Carmen Alcalde cites the case of María Paz Uncitti who in 1936 had organized Socorro Azul (Blue Aid), which later became the Auxilio Social. She was executed that same year (58). 20. Labanyi, “Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender,” 76, 77. Labanyi explains: “Indeed, when the word entrega is used in Falangist discourse (of male and female activists), it does not have its normal meaning of ‘surrender’ but signifies the opposite: unswerving dedication to a cause such that, if one has to go down, one goes down by fighting” (76–77). 21. Ibid., 76. Also, Alcalde comments that many of the women who held posts within Sección Femenina later held positions in different ministries in the first years of the transition to democracy (Mujeres en el Franquismo, 54).

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women’s rights. One should, however, not jump to conclusions too easily and simply take Sección Femenina for granted as an advocate for all Spanish women. After the end of the war, the kind of control Sección Femenina had over women’s lives led to the fact that this group was the only one that would defend, in their own particular terms, women’s education and legal rights. “Las chicas de la Sección Femenina” (the girls of Sección Femenina) were also the only ones allowed to speak to and for women during the Francoist years, which implies that women’s roles and women’s agency were necessarily imprinted with a traditional and National-Catholic mark. Even though many women growing up in these years may have benefited from the efforts and initiatives of Sección Femenina, this group certainly did by no means not care for the well-being of female leftist activists, many of whom had been imprisoned, tortured, or executed or were living in hiding and fear; Sección Femenina did not promote the literature of exiled women writers such as María Teresa León, Mercè Rodoreda, or Rosa Chacel, much less vindicate some of the legal rights that women had acquired during the years of the republic, such as divorce and the right to vote. The ambivalence between Nationalist and fascist women’s representation and self-representation and their agency is also visible in the different forms of cultural production from the war years and its aftermath, and I will briefly refer to conservative and Falangist women novelists in Chapter 2. However, a full-fledged analysis of the theoretical implications of the intersection of conservative rhetoric, fascism, and gender in these years would require the examination of a somewhat different primary and secondary corpus than the one at stake here.22

Soldaderas and Milicianas Female figures are numerous in most forms of cultural production of the Spanish Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Yet these figures normally function as symbols or icons that bear little relationship to women’s actual experiences in revolutions and wars, often eliding the challenges that women’s presence in the battlefields implied. Soldaderas and milicianas are neither always already domesticated nor always already emancipated figures; they represent women in revolutions and wars neither 22. See María Teresa Gallego Méndez, Mujer, Falange y Franquismo; Rosario Sánchez López, Mujer española, una sombra de destino en lo universal: Trayectoria histórica de Sección Femenina de Falange (1934–1977); and the more recent essay by Victoria Lorée Enders, “Problematic Portraits: The Ambiguous Historical Role of the Sección Femenina de Falange.”

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exclusively in terms of emancipation nor exclusively in terms of domestication. Rather, in most representations, these figures circulate around these two extremes. It should also be clear here that both terms, milicianas and soldaderas, are not equivalent, but a symmetrical list of similarities and differences between these two groups would not be productive here. Rather, in both cases a particular figure takes the place of women’s experiences in revolution and in war, and these figures, soldaderas and milicianas, are always conflictive because they belong to, to use Nash’s terms, a “gendered cultural and symbolic imagery” in an era when women’s roles were constantly being redefined.23 During the Mexican Revolution, large numbers of soldaderas participated in the struggle, performing domestic tasks away from their own homes. The boundaries between the domestic and the public became blurred in the battlefields. The weapons of the revolution quickly found their way into women’s hands. Soldaderas became smugglers, spies, soldiers, and sometimes even capitanas and coronelas. Popular representations of soldaderas, however, transform these women’s extremely diverse stories of war into more or less formulaic stories of love; they become the “Adelitas.” Made famous by corridos, stories, and films, Adelita is a stock character, a young and lively soldadera who is sometimes picaresque, sometimes promiscuous, and sometimes selfless. But she remains, as Elizabeth Salas suggests, the soldadera with a “heart of gold” and the “sweetheart of the troops.”24 She never steps out of her role or challenges her place. Political motivations and ambitions, daily violence, and the emancipatory possibilities of revolution do not seem to play a role in Adelita’s life as a soldadera. Adelita is most well known through the already mentioned corrido of the same name. Salas explains that the corrido exists in several versions that range from the story of a woman who disguises herself as a “Dorado,” a member of the elite corps of Pancho Villa’s army, the División del Norte, to accounts of a real Adelita, who “was said to have told the soldiers that if they were afraid, they should stay in the camp and cook beans.”25 Even though Adelita functions mostly as a normalizing figure in Mexican popular culture, minimizing or even erasing the challenges that the presence of the soldaderas in the battlefield entailed, a close exploration of the tradition of the corrido and of the different Adelitas in Mexican popular culture suggests potential sites of resistance to the 23. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 49. 24. Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 82. 25. Ibid., 92.

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dominant narrative. Nevertheless, the most famous verses are those that describe Adelita as the soldier’s love, and therefore as the kind of woman the revolution is worth fighting for: If Adelita left with someone else, I would follow her tracks unceasingly By steamboat or battleship, And by land on a military train. (Si Adelita se fuera con otro le seguiría la huella sin cesar si por mar en un buque de guerra, si por tierra en un tren militar.)26

Yet not only corridos succeeded in turning the soldaderas into acceptable and accepted myths of idealized femininity. Photographs of soldaderas from the Casasola Archive can still be purchased in Mexico as postcards at bookstores, kiosks, and newspaper stands.27 These images have become a very visible remainder of women’s presence in war. Yet the lack of captions, names, or descriptions that could accompany the images implies that it is not possible to reconstruct the lives of the women who look back at us from the other side of the camera. Although the most famous image is popularly known as “La Adelita” (fig. 1), the photographs certainly reveal an entire array of women’s lives and experiences in war.28 In some of the images, the soldaderas are performing more traditional and expected tasks, such as bidding farewell to soldiers departing on the trains (fig. 2). Yet not all soldaderas are unarmed. In other pictures, anonymous soldaderas sometimes proudly, sometimes inadvertently, carry bandoliers and weapons yet still maintain feminine attire: they wear skirts, their hair is long and braided, and they have a fearless look on their faces (fig. 3). Finally, there are series of pictures in which soldaderas have cross-dressed, even though it is impossible to know whether the goal of this cross-dressing was sheer parody or a consequence of the women’s participation in war (fig. 4). Although only very 26. María Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis, 99. All translations of the corrido are quoted from Herrera-Sobek’s book. 27. For more information on the archive as well as a critique of the myths that surround this archive, see John Mraz, “El Archivo Casasola: Historia de un mito.” 28. In Chapter 3 I will return to this image: the picture reproduced here is complete, yet the famous “Adelita” is actually a cropped version.

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 1. The woman on the left is popularly known as “La Adelita.” (Courtesy Fondo Casasola, Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo ©5754.SINAFO–Fototeca Nacional)

few images actually display women firing guns, at least one image shows soldaderas shooting in what looks like a training exercise (fig. 5). Whether this picture was staged or shows an actual training exercise for soldaderas can only be speculated. Investigating the stories behind these photographs moves away from some of the issues at stake here, yet the heterogeneity of the images bears witness to a similar heterogeneity as far as these women’s tasks and experiences are concerned. In spite of the variety, the women dressed up for war become soldaderas in these pictures, revealing again that the term camp follower is an extremely inadequate translation for soldaderas. In contemporary Spain, the iconographic presence of milicianas can hardly be compared to the soldaderas’ presence in Mexico. The militarization of the Republican army, the later defeat of the republic, and the dictatorship that followed precluded the possibility that milicianas could become national symbols as sol-

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Figure 2. Soldaderas, saying farewell. (Courtesy Fondo Casasola, Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo, ©33541.SINAFO–Fototeca Nacional)

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 3. Has she lost or killed fear? (Courtesy Fondo Casasola, Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo ©276226.SINAFO–Fototeca Nacional)

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Figure 4. Cross-dressing? (Courtesy Fondo Casasola, Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo ©186652.SINAFO–Fototeca Nacional)

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 5. In a (staged?) training exercise. (Courtesy Fondo Casasola, Fototeca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Pachuca, Hidalgo ©63945.SINAFO–Fototeca Nacional)

daderas would in Mexico. However, in the cultural production of the civil war, particularly war posters and poems, the presence of the milicianas is undeniable. When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, a number of women chose to wear the mono azul—the blue overalls that symbolized the Spanish working class and quickly became the unofficial uniform of the militia—and join their male counterparts at the front. A photo montage that was part of the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World Fair in 1937 reveals the ways in which milicianas almost immediately attained symbolic value (fig. 6). Here, an image of a woman clad in a traditional peasant dress is placed next to the image of a miliciana. The obvious contrast between these two figures speaks for itself: in the past women were silent and enslaved by tradition and superstition; exchanging one’s clothes, one’s posture, an event that takes place only with the advent of revolution and war, allows, the caption of the images says, a new woman who is in charge of her own future to be born.29 29. The caption of the image reads: “Emerging from her shell of superstition and wretchedness, for the time-honoured slave is born the WOMAN capable of playing an active part in the

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 6. Exhibit from the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair. (Courtesy Foto Kollar, Paris)

elaboration for the future” (Graham, “Women and Social Change,” 112). This image also illustrates Graham’s essay “Women and Social Change,” and in her reading of the exhibit the author emphasizes the contrast between the “triangular shape of the ornately dressed peasant girl [which] echoes that of popular images of the Virgin” and the “militiawoman’s uniform [that], by contrast, allows her to move freely” (112).

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It is also in the early years of war that images of women clad in the mono azul and slinging guns over their shoulders appeared on posters as well as in magazines and newspapers. Even though these images certainly implied a break with traditional female images, representations of milicianas were, according to Nash, a “symbol of the mobilization of the Spanish people against fascism,” not a call for women’s emancipation or a sign of an altered political consciousness. The images of the milicianas were directed not toward a female audience but rather toward men, “exhorting them to undertake their duty and participate in the antifascist military resistance.” Thus, even though these images appear to portray an entirely new sense of femininity, these posters often did not reflect women’s actual activities. Female figures on war posters usually had symbolic or even allegorical functions, and the milicianas were quickly identified as the symbol for the struggling republic. As Patricia Greene explains in her analysis of women’s iconic representation in civil war posters, the figure of the miliciana is directly associated with the iconic representation of the republic as female.30 Moreover, as both Nash and Greene argue, images of milicianas were often geared toward a male audience, luring the soldiers into an almost attractive and certainly heroic battle. A popular poster (fig. 7), signed by Cristobal Arteche, was inspired by a British poster from 1914 titled Your Country Needs You. The poster shows a blond and voluptuous miliciana, possibly modeled after film idol Marlene Dietrich.31 This eroticized figure proclaims, “Las milicies us necessiten” (The militias need you), yet the militias, pictured in the background of the poster, consist only of male soldiers, sternly marching into battle. In another image from 1936, the female body again becomes an even more blatant allegorical call for battle (fig. 8). In this poster for the party Esquerra Valenciana, soldiers are again sternly marching into battle, while in the background a naked woman, wearing the traditional Valencian hairstyle, waves the flag of the Valencian Left. Whereas the woman in Arteche’s poster still wears the mono azul, this second female figure plays a purely symbolic role. Of course, a limited number of posters portray women and men together in battle, usually, if not exclusively, designed for and by anarchist groups: figure 9, a poster from CNT-AIT-FAI (AIT stands for Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores), shows a man and a woman in the trenches of the revolution. What is striking about 30. Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 50, 51; Greene, “Testimonio visual: Iconografía femenina en los carteles de la guerra civil,” 123. 31. Greene, “Testimonio visual,” 124.

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 7. “The Militias Need You.” (Reprinted by permission of the Biblioteca del Pavelló de la República, Universitat de Barcelona)

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 8. “Brothers, to the Front.” (Reprinted by permission of the Biblioteca del Pavelló de la República, Universitat de Barcelona)

these two “Freedom Fighters” (Luchadores de la Libertad), as the title of the poster reads, is that unlike the other images, here the woman is carrying the weapon; she also looks strikingly similar to the above-mentioned soldaderas, as though the artist had used images from the Mexican Revolution as a model for his representation of women in war. Yet images such as Arteche’s undoubtedly explain the easy dismissal of milicianas as adventurers or even prostitutes. A brief comment from leftist activist Matilde de la Torre in 1937 illustrates this exact point. In a description of a group of female workers in a weapons and dynamite factory in Asturias, de la Torre contrasts the plight of these women, as well as the daily dangers they confront, with the “flashy milicianas who get their pictures in the paper.”32 Two points need to be considered here. First, milicianas who fought at the front were often discredited, perceived by their male counterparts, as well as by other women, as being more concerned with adventure or even fashion than with the war effort. Moreover, if we move to perceptions and representations of milicianas produced by the Nationalist sector, we see a rhetoric 32. Mangini, Memories of Resistance, 78.

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 9. “Onward Freedom Fighters.” The fearless woman in this image looks like a soldadera. (Reprinted by permission of the Biblioteca del Pavelló de la República, Universitat de Barcelona)

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(and in the postwar years a series of laws) that demonized not only milicianas but as a matter of fact all leftist politically active or “red” women. Briefly, in the rhetoric of Nationalist and later Francoist Spain, politically active women became the culprits of the disasters and the unrestrained violence of the civil war. The war supposedly erupted because these “red” women challenged their traditional roles within the patriarchal family structure. They become tiorras rojas and viragos (manly women), and finally, a few misled women, fruit of moral perversion, of psychological defeat, . . . went to the streets in order to disseminate doctrines that shattered the home, that destroyed the family and that took Spanish society down unfortunate paths where all monsters were loose. (unas cuantas desventuradas, fruto de la perversión moral, de extravío psicológico, . . . salieron a la calle para propagar doctrinas que disolvían el hogar, que deshacían la familia y que llevaban a la sociedad española a unos senderos desgraciados por los cuales andaban desatados todos los monstruos.)33

Thus, the contrast between the perception of the adventurous and even frivolous miliciana propagated among Republican sectors and the perception that all women at the front were prostitutes, an image that the Nationalist forces disseminated, seems to be a difference in degree and not in kind. Undoubtedly, this perception is linked to the cultural representation of the miliciana in war propaganda. Moreover, de la Torre’s comment suggests that the perception of the playful and adventurous miliciana informs the self-representations of women who participated in warfare. De la Torre, after all, implies that the milicianas are merely internalizing certain male perceptions; the mono azul becomes a fashion statement instead of a revolutionary’s attire. As a matter of fact, most Republican women who actively participated in the war, contrary to the stereotype the Nationalist forces disseminated, emphasized their chastity during the war years. Rosario Sánchez Mora, La Dinamitera, a young miliciana who lost her hand in a training exercise in the initial weeks of war, reacted in anger when in an interview she was asked to talk about her private life: Rosario became furious; she even threatened to expel [the interviewer] from her home. But her anger said much more than she intended, and showed how much the frequent allegation that all women at the front were prostitutes must 33. Eutimio Martín, “La mujer en la poesía de la Guerra Civil Española,” 20.

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have hurt her: “This is disgusting! At the front all of us were milicianos, people with leftist ideology and with incredible ideals for which we were ready to die. I was sixteen when I went to the front. I was a virgin when I arrived and a virgin when I left.” (Rosario monta en cólera hasta el punto de amenazar con echarla [la autora de la entrevista] de casa. Pero en su enojo dice mucho más de lo que en realidad quería decir y muestra cómo debió herirla la imputación frecuente de que las mujeres en el frente eran prostitutas: “¡Eso son cochinadas! En el frente éramos todos milicianos, gente con ideología de izquierdas y con unos ideales increíbles por los cuales estábamos dispuestos a morir. Tenía 16 años cuando fui al frente. Llegué virgen y virgen me volví de allí.”)34

Briefly, the traces of this cultural representation are a constitutive part of women’s memories of revolution and war in Spain. The milicianas are historical figures; they are the women who chose to fight at the front, challenging not only established gender roles but even those rules and roles of their own families. At the same time, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate the mythified, sometimes romanticized, and sometimes demonized image of the adventurous miliciana from historical realities and, last but not least, these women’s stories. Perhaps most puzzling is that the vast majority of women’s texts from the era do not reject, or even challenge, these symbols and icons. Rather, these types of representation become a constitutive part of the women’s texts, precisely because symbols and icons such as the soldadera of the Mexican Revolution or the miliciana of the Spanish Civil War are the surviving elements of, to use Nash’s phrase again, a “gendered cultural and symbolic imagery” of war and revolution. The fact that women, even veterans like Rosario Sánchez Mora and Tomasa García, a former soldadera whose testimony will be discussed in the third chapter, vindicate the figures of the miliciana and soldadera suggests that these are not merely internalized patriarchal myths, but that they instead belong to a discursive landscape, or, rather, discursive battlefields, in which the specific texts operate.35 The intricacies of these discursive battlefields are the subject of the next chapter. I will first analyze the relationships among gender, revolution, and representations and then explain the ways in which the discursive battlefields of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War came into being. 34. Strobl, Partisanas, 74. 35. I derive the term discursive landscape from Daniel James, “Poetry, Factory Labour, and Female Sexuality in Peronist Argentina,” 141–42.

2 Discursive Battlefields

Revolution, Gender, and Representation Recent approaches to women’s participation in revolutions and wars suggest that women will frame their actions and experiences in terms of emancipation and that postrevolutionary legislation as well as official rhetoric carry out the domestication of fearless women.1 Most theorists agree that a revolutionary struggle provides women with responsibilities, possibilities, and access to the public realm, yet many of these new responsibilities and possibilities disappear once the revolution is institutionalized. Referring to the iconographic symbolic role of women, Sian Reynolds mentions the figure of Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria. She argues that during revolutions, women sometimes “appear to weigh their full weight as human beings, in a way that they do not under ‘normal’ political circumstances,” but emphasizes that “women often appear to weigh more than their full weight in revolutionary circumstances.” Along similar lines, Mary Anne Tétrault considers women’s participation in revolutions and their respective outcomes always in relationship to a particular family structure. The author explains that although revolutions contain liberating potential for women, the fact that revolutions tend to result in stronger state institutions usually limits or even erases the newly gained liberties and possibilities. Along similar lines, Cynthia Enloe associates a postwar “return to normality” with an emphasis on the family and public order. “The family, so many revolutionary state leaders argue, must be reconfirmed and made to serve as the cornerstone of public order in the post-war era.”2 1. Even though the literature on the intersections of gender, revolution, and war is quite extensive, I am considering three key texts: Sian Reynolds, Women, State, and Revolution: Essays on Power and Gender in Europe since 1789; Mary Ann Tétrault, Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World; and Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? 2. Reynolds, Women, State, and Revolution, xv; Tétrault, Women and Revolution, 19; Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? 161.

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Even though the theoretical groundwork that these thinkers accomplished in their works in many ways made this book possible, it is still necessary to take their positions one step further. An analysis of women’s writing on revolutionary women will reveal that such dichotomies as revolution and postrevolution as well as emancipation and domestication are not as clear-cut as they might appear. Rather, this analysis of literary productions and popular expressions of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War reveals an ongoing conflict between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication. This conflict appears in both canonical, mainstream cultural production as well as alternative forms of cultural production, that is to say, those texts that have not been considered part of the respective canons in Spain and Mexico, oftentimes authored by women and that today can be found only with great difficulty. It is in texts that belong to the second category, however, where the conflict appears much more visibly and with greater controversy. Although the corpus this book is mostly concerned with is women’s writing, these texts need to be seen and understood in the context of literature and cultural production fostered by elite and popular sectors during both conflicts. The analysis that follows provides a map of these texts and at the same time develops a critical approach to literary texts as well as other forms of cultural production that emerge from revolutionary struggles. An analysis of what Mary Nash calls the “gendered cultural and symbolic imagery” that permeates the literature and the cultural production of the Spanish Civil War will reveal a similar pattern. In order to avoid taking literature and cultural production in Spain and Mexico out of context by producing long lists of differences and similarities that could never be exhaustive, this section focuses on a major paradigm shift that lies underneath a revolution. Analyzing this paradigm shift will shed light on the ways in which discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication appear in the literary and cultural production of revolutions. The paradigm shift refers to the ways in which the roles of artists, writers, and intellectuals adjust during revolutionary struggles. Concurrent with the changes that take place at a political level during revolutions, artists, intellectuals, and writers redefine their own roles during revolutions, forging what are often considered to be the “voices” of the revolution. Yet these voices that attempt to speak for “the people,” and to restore a national culture that is in essence “popular,” are not quite as revolutionary as one might think. This does not mean, either, that cultural production emerging during revolutions simply corrupts and silences all the emancipatory possibilities of popular movements. Thus, if we focus again on cultural production, the pertinent question here is

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whether representations of revolutionary women in the poems, novels, songs, murals, and posters of the Spanish and Mexican revolutions necessarily imply possibilities of emancipation, or at least new forms of political agency. Following Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, we can speak of revolution “only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of government, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the constitution of freedom.” In the same essay, Arendt also argues that modern revolutions are accompanied by the notion “that the course of history begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before is about to unfold,” and the plot of this story “unmistakably is the emergence of freedom.” The most important content of freedom is “participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm.”3 Considering Arendt’s definition, one can argue that revolutions are a response to a crisis in representation, and that the violent overthrow of a regime by the majority of the population is an attempt to solve this crisis in representation. Liberation from oppression, to use Arendt’s words, is then also linked to this path from invisibility toward political agency or, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, becoming part of the state.4 However, the fact that revolutionary men and women, peasants and soldaderas, appear in the mainstream cultural production of the Mexican Revolution and that milicianas repeatedly appear in the poems of the Romancero de la guerra civil or in the posters of the civil war certainly does not mean that the crisis in representation has been solved. Simultaneously, this same dramatic and massive presence of these subjects clearly shows that a radical paradigm shift has taken place as far as cultural production is concerned and that representation will never be the same in the aftermath of the revolution, be it successful, defeated, or co-opted. That is why the definition of revolution as a response to a radical crisis in representation needs to be examined more closely. There is slippage in this somewhat rough definition of revolution, a slippage that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also accuses Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze of ignoring in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as well as the chapter “History” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. The word representation, Spivak reminds us, needs to be understood at two different levels, namely, representation as vertreten, “speaking for,” 3. Arendt, On Revolution, 28, 21, 25. 4. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 52.

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and darstellen, “‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy.” Spivak continues: “These two senses of representation—within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other—are related but irreducibly discontinuous.”5 Arendt’s definition of revolution certainly alludes to representation only as vertreten, which is not the same as darstellen. Thus, solving a crisis in representation by providing access to the public domain might not quite imply a new plot in history altogether, even when a violent overthrow of a dominant system is followed by a new form of governance that promises to solve this crisis in representation. The actual multiple struggles that collided both in Mexico and in Spain also reveal that each revolution, which might initially have begun with at least the desire for a violent overthrow of the dominant system, quickly took on a life of its own. Although the more dominant discursive production (not only in the realm of culture) that emerged from both struggles often follows the pattern of the War Story, thereby clearly discerning between the old and the new, both struggles were, as I have argued, extremely complex and also took such different incarnations over the years. In the Mexican case, not only is it often difficult to follow who was fighting whom, but the fact that the revolution actually became an institution in the shape of the seventy-year-long PRI-led government also makes us question the very meaning of the words Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party). In the Spanish case, a social revolution was already in the making before the 1936 coup, which of course only exacerbated the earlier rebellious fervor. Yet this particular revolution did not exactly attempt to overthrow the government: the war was fought against the Nationalists, not against the leadership of the republic. Moreover, not all factions that fought for the republic shared the same objectives. This became particularly clear when after serious clashes between the anarchists and the Partido Obrero Unificado Marxista in 1937 the Communists became by far the strongest pole in the Republican government. At this point in the conflict, winning the war, not social revolution, became the official priority, yet this still does not mean that what large sectors understood to be a revolution had suddenly come to an end. Political theorists on revolution, from Hannah Arendt to Theda Skocpol, have shown that revolutions are always discontinuous and incomplete and that as a matter of fact the outcome of the revolution is often very different from 5. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 256, 257.

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the revolutionary process itself. Two important points need to be kept in mind, namely, that this book is more concerned with the process of the revolution than its causes or its outcomes and, second, that particularly in the discourse of the social sciences the kind of emancipation that is associated with revolutions is theorized as intervention in the public arena, this is to say, to be represented, to be vertreten. A successful revolution, alas, idealistic and utopian, then would be a linear path from invisibility to representation in the public arena, from subalternity toward dominance and even hegemony. I want to emphasize, however, that the process more than the causes or the outcomes of a revolution is the object of this analysis, since I am particularly interested in the moment when meanings shift and new roles and rules emerge due to the unsettling circumstances that a revolutionary struggle engenders. I therefore focus on discontinuities between vertreten and darstellen; a revolution certainly implies a radical paradigm shift in both senses of representation, yet the important point is that they do not necessarily overlap. Following Spivak, when considering the question of darstellen, the crisis in representation could be much more complicated than we think. Spivak encourages us to think about the differences between a proxy and a portrait in order to begin understanding the differences between vertreten and darstellen. For Spivak, the main problem is that the conflation of these two meanings of representation elides what she defines as “epistemic violence” in the context of colonial India: “an alien legal system masquerading as law as such, an alien ideology established as the only truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the ‘native’ as selfconsolidating other.”6 Clearly, transferring Spivak’s notion of epistemic violence to revolutionary Spain and Mexico in the early twentieth century is somewhat problematic. However, the chapters that follow will clarify why and how a different sort of epistemic violence silences women’s participation and struggles, homogenizing women’s experiences through acceptable and in many ways nonthreatening figures and conventions. For now, it is essential to bear in mind that conflating vertreten with darstellen, ignoring the problem of epistemic violence, runs the risk of safely assuming a continuity between emancipation of all disfranchised subjects in revolutions, assuming that the voice of revolution that the aforementioned artists, intellectuals, and writers aim to articulate manages to successfully represent those who participated in the struggles. In other words, I propose that imposing an all6. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 71; Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 205.

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encompassing narrative of revolution that speaks for the heterogeneous struggles of all its participants might very well be just as alienating as any given colonizing narrative. One might assume that such a narrative will appear more frequently in the mainstream and cultivated forms of cultural production, whereas in the alternative and often more popular forms of cultural production we find challenges to the dominant narrative. Even though generally speaking this seems to be the case, it is important to emphasize that alternative cultural production of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War will not reveal a pattern that is altogether different from dominant narratives. Moreover, it is in the alternative cultural production of revolutions where we find a constant negotiation between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication, and this negotiation itself, this struggle, is what ultimately gestures at the remainder, at the spectral presence of a female corporeality that haunts hegemonic narratives of revolution in Mexico and Spain. Most forms of cultural production from the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, despite their manifested intentions to illustrate “a new plot in history,” do not radically challenge existing relations of power and subordination. Certain slippage between such terms as culture and cultural production is difficult to avoid. Neither is it possible nor would it make much sense to dissociate one from the other. I am, however, concerned with particular discursive formations, and not with a series of habits, customs, and traditions that are particular to a specific group of individuals. Rather, it is in the interstices of these texts or cultural products that it is possible to recognize conflicts and challenges that reveal the crooked and meandering two-way street on which subaltern subjects have embarked. Briefly, this analysis of revolutionary cultural production exposes the discursive construction of an experience of revolution in the hegemonic narratives from the Mexican and the Spanish contexts in order ultimately to reveal the traces of subaltern and ghostly presences that this same construction has excluded. If, following Fredric Jameson, a text is “a symbolic move in an essentially polemic and strategic ideological confrontation between the classes,” then texts that emerge out of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War are neither isolated nor autonomous texts. For one thing, the illusion or appearance of isolation or autonomy which a printed text projects must now be systematically undermined. Indeed, since by

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The Haunting Pain of a Phantom Limb definition the cultural monuments and masterworks that have survived tend necessarily to perpetuate only a single voice in this class dialogue, the voice of a hegemonic class, they cannot be properly assigned their relational place in a dialogical system without the restoration or artificial reconstruction of the voice to which they were initially opposed, a voice for the most part stifled and reduced to silence, marginalized, its own utterances scattered to the winds, or reappropriated in their turn by the hegemonic culture.7

Jameson’s statement leads us to think that if we consider the mainstream cultural production of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the voice of a hegemonic group has been perpetuated. Yet part and parcel of this voice is also its other side, this is to say, those voices that did not survive and remain marginalized and silenced today. In what remains of this chapter, I will prove that restoring the “popular,” attempting to collect the voices, which remains an exclusionary practice, is deeply entrenched with a process of subalternization that accompanied cultural endeavors in Mexico and Spain. In order to understand the production of “popular culture” in relation to the revolutionary struggles in Mexico and Spain, it is necessary to review the implications that “the people” (el pueblo) or “the popular” (lo popular) had for artists, writers, and intellectuals in both contexts. For Ranajit Guha, as well as for Giorgi Dimitrov and John Beverley, the “category of the people is heterogeneous rather than unitary.” However, most artists, intellectuals, and writers in the 1930s in Mexico and Spain would hardly have agreed with this point of view. They conceived of the “Spanish people” or the “Mexican people” as a particular fixed and static identity: the people were the repository of an autonomous culture that could be identified, defined, articulated, restored, and represented from above. The fact that such a conception is usually carried out in gendered terms is hardly a surprise. The term not only refers to a positive identification but also operates within a gendered model of revolutionary politics. This identity needs to be differentiated from subalternity, as the term refers to the subjects that the category “the people” excludes or leaves behind, this is to say, the remainder of a model of revolutionary politics.8 7. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 85. 8. The reference is to Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory, 90. Here I am also drawing from the work of Beverley, Guha, and Spivak. Referring to the Indian case, Beverley cites Guha’s definition of the subaltern as “the demographic difference between the total Indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite.’” Beverley concludes: “As Spivak notes, Guha’s identification of the people as subaltern is the product of what is in effect a subtraction, rather than a positive identity that is internal the people-as-subaltern” (88).

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Bearing these definitions of “the people” and “the popular” in mind, “popular culture” becomes a hybrid genre that allows for the articulation of tensions and conflicts between those who define what popular culture is and the subjects who are being defined by this category. Spivak suggests giving up hope on Jameson’s project of reconstructing the initially counterhegemonic and instead proposes the possibility of “being haunted.” This means giving up hope that a coherent voice or narrative can be reconstructed: as mentioned earlier, a prosthesis substitutes the use of a lost limb but can hardly serve as a remedy for the haunting pain of a phantom limb, and investigating the “memory of pain,” as Manuel Rivas puts it, is ultimately at stake here. Thus, blindly believing that it is possible to articulate and represent women’s experiences in revolutions in a transparent language without questioning the structures that subalternized these experiences in the first place would merely reproduce given ideological systems. Instead, Spivak opts for a deconstructive analysis of a series of texts that then reveal the trace of—in this particular case—women who participated in revolutions and whose stories have not survived, a trace that comes into being when repetitive references to a haunting corporeality interrupt the dominant myths and narratives of revolution and war. To be haunted, like a soul that cannot leave a haunted house that imprisons it but at the same time is the very condition for its existence, means not to hope for a coherent narrative that articulates the voice of the other that did not survive, precisely because that other is a haunting specter. I therefore propose questioning how the specific canons in Mexico and Spain came into being, who was behind them, and what the actual process of exclusion tells us about the ways in which women’s participation has been assimilated into Mexican and Spanish literary history and official history.

The Cultural Production of the Mexican Revolution Any analysis of the cultural production of the Mexican Revolution implies understanding competing myths and narratives. Even though the official ideological position of the Mexican state has been to defend the view that the leading party, the PRI, succeeded in accomplishing the initial goals of the struggle of 1910, this same myth has been challenged, criticized, and disavowed from different political, historical, and cultural perspectives.9 9. For different interpretations of this myth from historians’ perspective, see Ilene V. O’Malley, The Myth of Revolution: Hero Cults and the Institutionalization of the Mexican State, 1920-1940; Mary Kay Vaughan, “Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution”; and the essays edited by Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico.

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In the particular context of literary studies, there is a certain consensus that novels already foresaw the demise of the myth of the Mexican Revolution as it was still taking place, this is to say, as early as 1915. This becomes even more contradictory if we consider that intellectuals and writers like Martín Luis Guzmán and Mauricio Magdaleno worked in the service of the Mexican postrevolutionary state or that writer Nellie Campobello held an important position in the Ministry of Public Education as the director and main choreographer of the National School of Dance. Even the so-called popular genres were usually not authored or created by the peasants and workers who carried out the bulk of the revolutionary struggle. The implication here is that the changing roles of artists, intellectuals, and writers, as Angel Rama argues, for the most part do not question the established power structures. Rama uses the Mexican model during the revolution in order to show the ways in which the “Lettered City” managed to sustain itself during the years of revolutionary upheaval in the early twentieth century. The point is that in the revolutionary aftermath, we encounter a very similar situation to what was prevalent during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship: a close and necessary relationship between intellectuals, or letrados, and the state.10 According to Rama, this model survived the revolution, radically challenging the idea that in the revolutionary aftermath Mexican artists, intellectuals, and writers were illustrating the new plot in history that the upheaval had initiated. Instead, the letrados remained at the service of the Mexican state, and even though the objects of representation in Mexican revolutionary culture radically changed during and after the revolution, an old plot appeared framed in an old book that merely fashioned a new cover. Describing the cultural production of the Mexican Revolution is a thorny and complicated endeavor. This is due to the fact that the emergence of what is commonly known as Mexican revolutionary culture occurred during a relatively long (roughly, the referred time frame expands from 1910 to 1945), controversy-ridden period of political instability. Moreover, this period does not correspond with the more violent phase of the revolution but refers to the years when Álvaro Obregón and later Plutarco Elías Calles were institutionalizing the revolution. 10. In The Lettered City, Rama conceives the “Ciudad Letrada” in order to describe the ways in which power and knowledge structures remained confined to particular topographic and intellectual circles. In a revision of Latin American intellectual history from colonial times to the present, Rama shows the deep structural ties between the letrados and the state, ties that were already forged in the colonial era and, as the case of Mexico in particular reveals, in many ways were perpetuated in the twentieth century.

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The different articulations of this myth have more to do with the ways in which writers and artists conceived of their own roles in the present and future of their nation than with the itinerary of the (gendered) subaltern. This also becomes clear in Jean Franco’s groundbreaking study Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. Franco uses the expression “bleak wind” in order to define the nationalist ideology that at the end of the nineteenth century, instead of providing or even enabling emancipatory possibilities for emerging women writers, hindered women’s participation in the imagining of the new nation in the making. Consistently barred from participation in the periodical press, women writers were for the most part excluded from the nation-building process in the nineteenth century. This situation hardly changed in the early years of revolutionary cultural production in Mexico, when a renewed nationalist fervor strongly marked all artistic and cultural endeavors. As Franco points out, even though women’s lives changed dramatically during the revolutionary years, and even though female figures and icons are numerous in the cultural production of the Mexican Revolution, women were for the most part not the authors of these different cultural objects: “Yet the Revolution with its promise of social transformation encouraged a Messianic spirit that transformed mere human beings into supermen and constituted a discourse that associated virility with social transformation in ways that marginalized women at the very moment they were supposedly liberated.” Franco moves one step further, as she analyzes the work of two renowned women, Frida Kahlo and Antonieta Rivas Mercado. She suggests that “both came up against the fact that there could be no liberation within the symbolic order in which women always represented a fictional Other.”11 This marginalization of women again suggests that the cultural production of the revolution, rather than being the book with a new plot in history, turned out to be not much more than an old plot in a new book. Even though female figures are quite numerous in the cultural production of the Mexican Revolution, representations have very little to do with women’s actual experiences and negotiations and much more to do with altogether different 11. Franco, Plotting Women, 102, 105. The author explains that education and the press were the primary tools that enabled men (she refers concretely to Benito Juárez and Ignacio Altamirano) and at the same time excluded women from joining the intellectual elite. “But it was in literary circles that the blueprints for national literature were developed. . . . Even though some women participated in the circles and were respected as poets, these were predominantly male institutions, and the tone of the lectures was highflown and patriotic” (93).

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projects that the authors of these different cultural objects have initiated. In other words, it is a matter not just of analyzing the historical, cultural, and political moment when the different texts that form the corpus of Mexican revolutionary literature and culture come into being but also of understanding the ways in which these texts were interpreted and, of course, canonized. This selective process that ensures the survival of certain texts and the disappearance of others is what ultimately allows us to understand the ways in which women’s presence and participation in the struggle have been unevenly written in and out of the canon. With the exception of writer and dancer Nellie Campobello, patron of the arts Antonieta Rivas Mercado, artist Frida Kahlo, and photographer and political activist Tina Modotti, only very few women stand behind different aspects of the revolutionary cultural production in Mexico. Moreover, most of the narratives that inform the different cultural texts belong to an old plot in which women’s transgression of traditional roles was unthinkable. Women’s writing was acceptable only when it merely centered on the private, domestic sphere, separate from the public arena where the process of imagining the nation was taking place. “It was not only a question of whether women had access to literary life,” explains Franco. “Rather, the problem was the separation of the public from the private sphere and the incorporation of national literature into the former, leaving women primarily with a duty to the hearth and to the expression of private feelings.”12 Tracing the itineraries of gendered subjects does not just imply highlighting women’s stories that sound radically new and different. Rather, it becomes a matter of reading the challenges and tensions that emerge when such stories enter into conflict with the old framework in which they are still being told. This implies, as the chapter on Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho will show, a radical challenge to such binaries as public and private, masculine and feminine. Identifying this trace, the haunting pain of the phantom limb, implies seizing those moments when old plots frame women with new roles in traditional narratives. This can be seen in those texts that either reflect a triumphant revolution or protest the abuses of the sectors that corrupted the ideals of the revolution. As the critique of the work of Josephina Niggli and Nellie Campobello should clarify, it is not just a matter of liberation within a symbolic order. Not only were female authors excluded from the canon of revolutionary literature and culture, but their work was also traditionally considered not in terms of combat and vi12. Ibid., 94.

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olence but exclusively in a domesticated and domesticating framework. The next section, centered on the cultural production of the Spanish revolution and civil war, will show that even when the circumstances are as different as they were in Spain, women’s writing faced very similar obstacles.

Revolutionary Politics and Cultural Production in Spain In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, cultural production was for the most part carried out by artistic and literary elites who aimed to synthesize autochthonous traditions with models of revolutionary art and literature often influenced by Marxism. Meanwhile, revolution and war in Spain initially signified a radical challenge not only of the meaning, role, and content of cultural production but also to the question of who had the right and even the responsibility to narrate, to sing, and to draw the conflict in Spain. If literary and cultural production in Mexico was intimately allied with the Mexican postrevolutionary state, during the Spanish Civil War at least two antagonistic models professed similar intimate relationships with literary and cultural production. At first glance, the differences between cultural production from the different sides that fought in Spain appear to be radical. On the Republican side, we find posters depicting young men and women calling out to fight fascism at the front or the rear guard; poems exalting the heroism of the people of Madrid during the three-yearlong siege; newspapers and wartime press reflecting the large spectrum of leftist ideologies, dedicated not only to informing or entertaining the soldiers but also to serving as an educational forum; improvised schools at the front; novels and short stories that proclaim a call for revolution; and itinerant theater written and performed for soldiers at the front and workers in the rear guard. The most famous artists, intellectuals, and writers, ranging from the murdered poet Federico García Lorca to artist Pablo Picasso, all supported the Spanish republic. On the Nationalist side, on the other hand, cultural production was concerned with the representation of Catholic ideals, of a splendorous, imperial past always dating back to the Catholic kings, and, of course, of military hierarchy, glory, order, and discipline. As different as these two “conceptual models of reality that used culture as a legitimizing weapon” appear to be, certain aspects that characterize cultural production from the Republican side overlap with others that would undoubtedly belong to the Nationalist paradigm. Both sides appropriate the notion of the popular, as representations stemming from both sides claim the right to represent

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what the truly popular figures and sentiments in Spain are. Moreover, the imagery that appears in war posters overlaps, as Jo Labanyi explains, in an almost uncanny fashion.13 Writers and artists from both sides tended to articulate the fight in Manichaean terms, as a struggle of good versus evil, reflecting the traditional structure of the “War Story.” This is particularly prevalent, as we shall see, in regards to representation of women in poetry. In spite of these common characteristics, there are still crucial ideological differences between these two sectors that need to be taken into consideration. Whereas most Republicans adhered to the belief that education of the masses was the solution for backwardness, ignorance, and economic inequality and that “culture” was the indispensable tool that would make this education possible, most Nationalists considered “culture” to be an exclusive institution. Only a chosen, cultivated few could become the artists and authors of great works of art or literature. Educating the masses in order to fight underdevelopment, ignorance, oppression, and misery was certainly not on the agenda of Nationalist and later Francoist Spain. Labanyi explains that at the other end of the political spectrum, the more progressive sectors of the government during the Second Republic promoted the use of culture as “an educational tool,” which certainly contributed to the fact that most intellectuals, writers, and artists in Spain were loyal to the legitimate government.14 Yet this is not the only reason members of the Spanish intelligentsia— strongly influenced by the Russian Revolution and the changes that struggle would imply for the role of intellectuals, writers, and artists in the future of a nation—supported the republic. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, for many intellectuals and writers, the time had come to break down boundaries between their own oftentimes exclusive, privileged, and distant worlds and the world where “the people” resided. For these 13. Alicia Alted, “The Republican and Nationalist Wartime Cultural Apparatus,” 152. In “Propaganda Art: Culture by the People or for the People?” Labanyi explains the ways in which such overlaps occur: “Communist posters used constructivist designs to celebrate an image of man as a machine, depicted in non-individualized serial form, that sometimes coincided with the mechanized conception of the male body found in German and Italian fascist art; photomontage was also used, though in a fairly rudimentary way. Anarchist posters tended to be formally conservative, retaining an emphasis on the individualized human figure and using conventions of realism or melodrama. In particular, Anarchist posters celebrated the peasant rather than the industrial proletariat, in an idealization of rural life bordering on sentimental nostalgia and overlapping awkwardly with the Nationalist stress on organic community (though what the Nationalists meant by this was a return to hierarchy rather than collectivization)” (163). 14. Labanyi, “Propaganda Art,” 161.

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different authors, the era of the bourgeois work of art, created individually and in solitude, had come to an end. Art, in the broad sense of the term, was to be produced collectively, useful, and, more than anything, at the service of the people. Consequently, artists, intellectuals, and writers supporting the republic— oftentimes, like María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti, card-carrying members of a leftist political party—attempted to represent and to produce for the disfranchised masses that were now going to be the protagonists of history and of their own destiny. Yet different cultural endeavors were usually still carried out by and in the terms of the intelligentsia or the artistic and lettered elites. Cultural production still lay in the hands not of those who spontaneously became writers and poets or anonymous artists, but rather of those who already belonged to the intelligentsia before the war and for whom the outbreak of war would serve as a means to diffuse the conflict between, to use José Monleón’s terms, “the conciliation and unification of the aesthetic and the political compromise.”15 It is certainly the case that in most instances, representations stemming from the Left are radically different from those from the Right. Moreover, Republican women were often encouraged to write, to publish, and to participate in different cultural and artistic endeavors, a phenomenon that was not taking place behind the Nationalist lines. Nevertheless, the fact that the republic was more sympathetic to women’s issues still does not mean that art and writing produced by Republicans are framed solely in terms of emancipation, whereas discourses of domestication appear only in the cultural production from the Nationalists. As I mentioned in an earlier section, identifying the possibility of women’s emancipation among the rhetoric of the Nationalists, and particularly the women’s section of the Falange, the Sección Femenina, is a difficult task and would require a slightly different corpus, even though it would certainly be possible to discuss the cultural production of conservative and fascist women from a perspective similar to the one used here. As in the Mexican case, the Republican model of revolutionary politics was based on a particular static notion of “pueblo” that defined particular and often narrow paradigms for disfranchised groups, among them working-class women. A gender-based analysis will reveal that underlying structures of power and subordination remained throughout the Second Republic and the civil war.16 Compared to the Mexican case, where the presence of women writers was scarce, Spanish 15. Monleón, “El Mono Azul”: Teatro de urgencia y romancero de la guerra civil, 46. 16. Labanyi emphasizes that even though “Republican propaganda art was a genuine attempt to harness artistic production to a popular tradition,” the values of these traditions, particularly with regard to gender, were not always progressive (“Propaganda Art,” 166).

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women had a much more visible and frequent participation in the fostering of Spanish revolutionary literature and culture. María Teresa León, in addition to being a fiction writer and collaborating with the journal El Mono Azul, directed the theater group Guerrillas del Teatro; Rosa Chacel directed the publication Hora de España; and the contributions of poets and writers like Carmen Conde, Mercè Rodoreda, María Zambrano, as well as Lucía Sánchez Saornil have become crucial texts of twentieth-century Spanish literature. An overview of Spanish Civil War poetry published in the Romancero del Ejército Popular (Poetry of the Popular Army) shows that anonymous women also wrote poems and participated in other cultural endeavors during the Spanish Civil War. Whether we are talking about culture for or culture by the people, it is certain that women played a crucial role in defining the literary and cultural production during the conflict and the previous years. Yet the victory of the Nationalists, and the dismal consequences that this victory implied for many politically and intellectually active women, certainly contributed to the fact that women’s writing from the early twentieth century and, in particular, women’s writing from the war years have been marginalized, until very recently, from the canon. This includes prominent women writers such as Carmen de Burgos who in the earlier part of the twentieth century authored mainly short novels that, at times radically, questioned issues of gender and sexuality in her writing as well as Rosa Chacel and María Zambrano who may be the most famous women writers from this era, whose work, and the kind of attention it received in the remaining years of the twentieth century, always needs to be considered in relation to the radical interruption of revolution, war, and exile. In the 1920s, socialist Margarita Nelken and anarchist Federica Montseny wrote a number of short novels, yet the political roles that these two women played usually overshadowed their literary activity. Like Lucía Sánchez Saornil and María Teresa León, whose writing will be addressed in Chapters 4 and 6, respectively, Nelken’s and Montseny’s political activism and literary endeavors are usually considered to be mutually exclusive matters, subordinating their literary texts to particular ideological constraints. Although I do not include analysis of Nelken’s and Montseny’s writing, the comments on Sánchez Saornil’s poetry and León’s fiction purport to show instead that their texts move far beyond a transparent representation of an ideological standpoint.17 17. For an interesting collection of women’s novels from the early twentieth century, see Ángela Ena Bordona’s anthology Novelas breves de escritoras españolas, 1900-1936. Roberta Johnson’s book

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Yet, returning to Labanyi’s comment, it is also true that in the romances (poems), in the posters, and in the literature that came into being during these years, women are for the most part portrayed in a more traditional light, reflecting a patriarchal discourse in which female revolutionaries, in spite of fighting on all fronts of the war, appear represented through traditional feminine images that connote innocence, purity, and sometimes fertility, thereby perpetuating traditional gender roles. Thus, women’s writing will not represent a radical alternative to these traditional images but will instead engage in a critical negotiation with dominant motives. As the next two sections aim to show, the same phenomenon takes place in popular texts, such as corridos and romances, as well as in narrative fiction.

Resistance and Accommodation The Mexican postrevolutionary government sponsored artistic and cultural endeavors that aimed to foster a revolutionary and nationalist culture that represented and articulated a Mexican essence (lo mexicano) and played a preponderant role in the education of the Mexican people. The Spanish republic and the government during the war professed similar cultural politics: those artists and intellectuals who chose to participate actively in the cause were to create a culture for the people that would serve as an educational tool. The main differences between the texts that the intellectual and artistic elites produced for and sometimes with “the people” and those produced “by the people” do not rely on a potentially more authentic or accurate representation of the revolutionary struggle. Rather, accessing the more popular texts is a difficult and sometimes impossible endeavor. Many of them were spontaneous creations: poems perhaps hastily written down on a flyer or read aloud during political demonstrations and countless corridos, spontaneously composed to accompany a particular event. Many of these texts never found their way to the appropriate archives or anthologies that would allow them to be edited, diffused, and canonized. Studying more popular production implies serious archival work and investigation in oral history.18 As with the subaltern who ceases to be subaltern, Gender and Nation in the Spanish Modernist Novel shows the crucial ways in which the shifting meanings of gender influenced the most important writers in the early twentieth century. 18. Such an analysis would require closely reviewing the Archivo de la Palabra in Mexico, considering works like Thomas Frazier’s Blood of Spain, as well as conducting a series of personal interviews and researching personal archives for letters, photographs, and other documents.

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once she can speak in such a way that her voice is heard, those texts that have been anthologized or edited usually have come in contact with more cultivated forms of cultural production. If these texts are the “utterances scattered to the wind” that Jameson refers to, even those projects that attempt to reconstruct popular cultural production have already established a dialogue with the more hegemonic or dominant forms of cultural production. The two main popular textual bodies I will discuss here, for reasons described below, are the corridos of the Mexican Revolution and the romances from the Spanish Civil War. The romance is a popular Spanish tradition stemming from the Middle Ages and was originally meant to be recited or sung in public. Romances have a simple verse and are designed to be easily memorized.19 It is within these two genres that certain discursive conventions used to describe female figures first come across, conventions that will appear again in women’s representations of fearless women. Both the corrido and the romance precede the respective struggles in Mexico and Spain; as a matter of fact, some corrido scholars have argued that this particular body of texts actually originated in the medieval romance from Spain.20 Although some critics consider the corrido to be a literary genre, comparing it to the Spanish medieval ballad, for others the corrido should be understood as a strictly popular manifestation, or even an oral history, of the Mexican Revolution.

Corridos Corridos did not originate with the Mexican Revolution, but it is during the revolutionary years that they became an extremely popular and important representation of historical events as well as of revolutionary heroes and sometimes heroines. In order to question representations of women in the corridos, it is not just a matter of discussing the actual content of different corridos. Instead, I am interested in studying the ways in which the corridos were collected and anthologized, thereby becoming part of a written and oftentimes canonical history of the Mexican Revolution. As with the romances of the Spanish Civil War, it is important to distinguish the texts themselves from the process that makes only a small group survive and some even canonical. Moreover, today we have access 19. Monleón, “El Mono Azul,” 101. 20. For more information on the origin of the corridos and the debates that were sparked by this matter, refer to Vicente T. Mendoza, Romance Español y el corrido mexicano: Estudio comparativo; and Armando de María y Campos, La Revolución Mexicana a través de los corridos populares.

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only to the corridos that were collected, usually under the auspices of important Mexican institutions, such as the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Históricas de la Revolución (National Institute of Historical Research of the Revolution). The problem with these collections, explains Nestor García Canclini, is that they are often just that, collections that might bear witness to a particular aspect of Mexican popular culture or folklore but do not take into consideration the complex processes that take place when some of these texts find their way into collections or anthologies, while others eventually disappear.21 One of the consequences of this selective process is that women’s presence in corridos is usually taken for granted as representing mystified and romanticized Adelitas, epitomizing and at the same time eliding women’s diverse and heterogeneous participation in the revolution. In a comprehensive study of gender and corridos, María Herrera-Sobek argues that the portrayal of women, and thereby of female archetypes, is influenced by the portrayals of women in the Spanish medieval epics and romances from which these songs ultimately derive. She divides these “archetypes” into five different groups: the “Good Mother, the Terrible Mother, the Mother Goddess, the Love Archetype, and the Soldier Archetype.” Herrera-Sobek again divides this last archetype into three different manifestations: the historical representation, the romantic representation, and the mythical representation. Even though she never states this clearly, it appears that a certain time line also informs the different representations. As a matter of fact, the corridos that bear witness to the historical presence of women on the battlefields of the Mexican Revolution are few. Although a number of corridos corroborate women’s participation in the revolution, the names of these revolutionary women are rarely mentioned. Often they are just labeled mujeres (women) or soldaderas, other times as Juanas or galletas (women; literally, cookies). One of the few women who do appear in the corridos is Petra Herrera, a brave and fierce woman who is said to have led men and women into the battle of Torreón.22 Herrera-Sobek lists three corridos that describe the heroic deeds of Herrera herself. Anonymous soldaderas appear in a few more corridos, yet their actual action on the battlefield is barely mentioned. A possible exception here is the mention 21. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, 151. 22. Salas briefly narrates the story of this soldadera in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military. Herrera joined the revolution as a soldadera, yet she quickly took matters into her own hands and formed an exclusively female brigade. However, very little is known about Herrera or the fighting men and woman she led into battle (48).

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of Zapata’s wife in “Corrido de la muerte de Emiliano Zapata” (Corrido of Emiliano Zapata’s Death) as she warns Zapata of his imminent assassination. Women’s involvement in smuggling and, certainly, women’s roles as victims are also mentioned, yet neither their actions nor their agency is sung in most corridos. In the corridos that did survive, women’s roles as soldiers are barely mentioned; Herrera-Sobek suggests that this “Soldier-archetype” mainly represents the “embryonic stage” of women in corridos.23 She further argues that a domestication process concerning women in corridos has taken place, and the word process should be emphasized. Whereas the earlier “historical” corridos represent women in a more realistic manner, the later ones, including such corridos as “La Adelita,” are a reaction to the scarce yet nevertheless threatening presence of women in unconventional roles. In the most famous corridos, “La Adelita” and “La Valentina,” the women tend to stay away from any soldierly, military, or violent activities. These two corridos are crucial for our understanding of the discursive convention that would frame the representations of revolutionary women in Mexico, not only because the corridos are so famous but also because the content of these corridos has changed over time. Herrera-Sobek refers to two versions of “La Adelita.” In the earlier version she merely is a love object, but the second corrido talks more about Adelita as a soldier, although she is a romanticized woman warrior of mythic proportions.24 From these romanticized soldaderas, women in corridos evolve once more into mythified, archetypal characters, where “the ballad no longer bases its narrative on the actual verifiable events but on the deification and glorification of the soldadera as legend, as human being larger than life.”25 Gustavo Casasola asserts in the Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana (Graphic History of the Mexican Revolution) that no poet has sung the plight of the soldaderas in a dignified manner. Ironically, the mythified soldaderas that appear in the corridos are one of the most important symbols of the revolution. Yet these larger-than-life women, these symbols of the revolution, as the analysis of Josephina Niggli’s play in the third chapter will show, bear no relationship to the heterogeneous experiences of the soldaderas and of other women on the battlefields. Nevertheless, these myths and images constitute the very few available images of women who participated in the Mexican Revolution. 23. Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido, 104. 24. Herrera-Sobek explains: “The corrido adheres to medieval love lyric conventions: a lovelorn supplicant entreating his lady to love him and be faithful while he marches to the distant battlefields” (ibid., 105). 25. Ibid., 9.

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Romanceros In his comprehensive study Poesía de la Guerra Civil Española (Poetry of the Spanish Civil War), Serge Salaün emphasizes the importance of wartime publications, or hojas volanderas, such as El Mono Azul, since they were an outlet for the distribution of cultivated as well as popular poetry. Although El Mono Azul is certainly the most famous of these publications, it was definitely not the only or the only important publication of the era that attempted to gear the work of established artists, intellectuals, and writers toward a popular audience and at the same time to open new venues of artistic and literary expression for lower-class and less educated individuals. Poetry moved to the streets (and to the battlefields) particularly in the early years of the war: poems appeared on mural posters, they were disseminated and recited at political meetings and at the front, they were transmitted on the radio, and soldiers and workers were encouraged to write them. Poems became, at least in the eyes of the intellectuals, another weapon in the struggle against the fascist menace. Even though they were published and recorded in a variety of forms, and represented the variety of ideological affiliations of the republic’s supporters, the publication El Mono Azul became the most prominent collection and representation of civil war poetry. Initiated in August 1936 by José Bergamín, María Teresa León, Rafael Alberti, and other members of the Alliance of Anti-fascist Intellectuals, El Mono Azul was meant to be “a pamphlet that aims to bring to and from the front the clear and lively meaning of our antifascist struggle” (una hoja volandera que quiere llevar a los frentes y traer de ellos el sentido claro, vivaz y fuerte de nuestra lucha antifascista). Even though Rafael Alberti himself called for popular participation, requesting that milicianos and milicianas submit their own poems for publication, most of the romances published in El Mono Azul were signed by famous poets. The very first issue of the publication included five romances and the following call: “The Literature Section of Alliance inaugurates with this issue the Romancero of the civil war. All antifascist poets of Spain, both anonymous and well-known, are asked to immediately send their work” (La Sección de Literatura de la Alianza inaugura en este número el Romancero de la Guerra Civil. Se pide a todos los poetas antifascistas de España, anónimos y conocidos, que nos envíen inmediatamente su colaboración).26 The traditional form of the romance was particularly appropriate for a cultural endeavor that aimed to unite intellectuals and poets with anonymous milicianos and milicianas—many of whom were often barely learning to write—in a common cause. 26. Monleón, “El Mono Azul,” 9, 117.

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The contents of traditional ballads were usually of epic proportions, and could therefore be easily applied to the current situation of war and revolution, in dire need of heroes, heroines, and martyrs who would raise popular support for the Republican cause and elicit sympathy in the international arena. More than any other form of cultural production, with the possible exception of theater, the romance and the different romanceros constituted the desired fusion of the literary and the popular. Nevertheless, the term romancero is not restricted to a collection of romances; rather, it is a more all-encompassing term that includes collections of poems written during the war, for the Republican cause. In contrast to the Mexican corridos that for the most part were an anonymous genre, the fact that almost all romances carried the signature of their author permits us to make some observations about female authors of romances. As the analysis in Chapter 3 will show, women were authors and protagonists of the Republican poetry of the Spanish Civil War, yet their work appears in only very few anthologies, among them Ramos Gascón’s Romancero del Ejército Popular. Moreover, more educated and established writers like Rosa Chacel and Carmen Conde frequently contributed to different wartime publications, such as Hora de España and Mujeres Libres. Also, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, one of the founding members of Mujeres Libres, deserves particular attention since she was the author of a series of poems and edited the Romancero de Mujeres Libres, published in 1937 in Barcelona. Thus, even though most current studies of wartime literature and poetry suggest a different idea, women did play an important role in the creation and diffusion of poems, as well as other forms of cultural production during the Spanish Civil War. Female figures appear in both Nationalist and Republican poetry. At first glance, we could suspect that poetry from the Nationalist side only domesticates women, whereas representations of women in Republican poetry come across through discourses of emancipation. Yet it is important to read beyond these dichotomies, particularly since female figures more often than not appear framed by discourses of domestication in Republican poetry. This does not mean that male and female poets actively attempted to domesticate women and silence their accomplishments but that like the corrido, these romances correspond to a traditional form that might not have room for new changes and challenges. In other words, new ideas and concepts come across in old schemas and forms, often, as Labanyi comments, depending upon the restrictions that oral delivery imposed.27 Thus, in order to consider rep27. Labanyi, “Propaganda Art,” 165.

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resentations of and from women in poetry and popular poetry, the actual constraints that the forms of these poems impose are a crucial issue. In spite of certain generic differences, a similar process takes place in narrative fiction. Writing a novel implies much less immediacy than a poem or a corrido, and the time that elapses between the actual historical event and the moment when a writer publishes certainly provides the possibility of a reflection that might move beyond the (gendered) conventions that in many ways mark the corridos and the romances. One could conclude that representations of revolutionary women will almost by definition be more complex in novels than in corridos or romances. However, another factor to be considered here is that, as historical evidence reveals, postrevolutionary and postwar legislation and rhetoric tend to confine women either literally or symbolically to a domestic space. This and the fact that women tend to write more about the home front than the battlefields often make critics of the novel conclude that women writers represent a more passive perspective on revolutions and wars. The problem here, as the next section will reveal, is that such an interpretation elides women’s agency as participants in a revolution at the home front, on the streets, as well as on the literal and discursive battlefields of revolutions. The actual problem is not that in most novels women are confined to the home front or the rear guard, but the fact that women’s actions in the rear guard are often not discussed in terms of political agency and, more important, with little or no analysis of the continuities and discontinuities among gender, violence, and agency.

The Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War in Narrative Fiction In the previous sections, I have argued that popular genres should not be understood as autonomous repositories, untouched by more elite or privileged sectors of Mexican and Spanish society. Rather, these are sites where conflicts and antagonisms between those writing and those written about become visible. Similarly, the literary production of these conflicts necessarily engages with the popular, as these texts attempt not only to represent the changes in society but also to work in accordance with a model of revolutionary politics. Recognizing these models is, however, quite difficult in most novels and short stories, as these usually are less immediate texts that are written over a longer time frame. Also, as opposed to corridos or even romances, writing and publishing novels and short stories are options that more popular sectors of Mexican and Spanish society often

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did not have. In spite of certain attempts aimed at fostering the production of narrative fiction among popular sectors, these texts are usually not considered literary texts by most critics. Moreover, many of these texts did not survive the revolutionary, postrevolutionary, war, and postwar turmoil in Spain and Mexico. All this does not mean that narrative fiction is more detached from political events than other forms of literary and cultural production. Not only are nations narrated, but revolutions and wars also tend to function as the epicenter of new conceptions (and therefore new narrations) of nations. The implication here is not that twentieth-century literary histories in Mexico and Spain mainly consist of narrations of both struggles, but that the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War radically unsettled and eventually redefined the ways in which novels were written, published, and critiqued. Critics often classify the novels of the Mexican Revolution as well as the novels of the Spanish Civil War as being either “first wave” or “second wave.” Gareth Thomas explains that the texts that form the first-wave civil war novel have for the most part now been lost, precisely because its authors were not famous, nor did they continue writing after the war.28 Following Thomas, these novels fail aesthetically, and he links this failure to the fact that they were written not only when a revolution but also when a war was taking place. The origin of the first-wave novels, texts mainly written for propaganda purposes, lies in the novela popular (popular novel). Thomas argues that these novels avoid aesthetic or intellectual endeavors of any sort. Moreover, and in spite of the fact that the so-called first-wave novels “constitute an extremely interesting collection, despite their poor literary quality,” first-wave novels are noteworthy only because of “the injection of a powerful propagandistic message into a tradition of popular story-telling which had hitherto been apolitical.”29 The problem with Thomas’s argument is that his notion of “literary quality” consists of a more or less sophisticated narrative technique, as well as the capacity to make literary references. Naturally, most of the writers of these first-wave novels did not care much for such references, precisely because liter28. Some of the examples of first-wave novels that Thomas cites are: Jorge Claramunt, El teniente Arizcun (1937); Concha Espina, Retaguardia (1937), Luna roja (1938), and Princesas del martirio (1940); Rafael García Serrano, La fiel infantería (1943); Ricardo León, Cristo en los infiernos (1941); Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, Camisa azul (1939); Tomás Borrás y Bermejo, Checas de Marid (1938); and Agustín de Foxá, Madrid, de Corte a checa (1938). For a complete list, see Thomas, The Novel of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1975), 250-54. 29. Ibid., 59. Concretely, Thomas refers to such collections as La Novela Corta (1916–1925) and La Novela de Hoy (1922–1932) that bear resemblance to the nineteenth-century folletín (serial) that was published up to the 1920s in Spain (34).

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ary or intellectual histories were not exactly the backgrounds they were writing from. Thomas fails to see that even though these novels might lack certain aesthetic or intellectual virtues, these are still texts where meanings are negotiated and where differentiating subjectivities, marginalized before the revolution or war, now have the chance to be articulated. Even though Thomas never uses the actual term second-wave novel, it is safe to assume that in the case of the Spanish Civil War, these would be the novels produced in the aftermath of the war and, in the case of Republican novelists, more often than not, in exile. In the case of the novel of the Mexican Revolution, John Rutherford adopts Thomas’s categories, defining the first-wave novels of the Mexican Revolution as “an immediate, ephemeral response to a crisis, and their impact, if they have any, is soon forgotten.”30 This first wave is then followed by a postwar period of escapist fiction, and only about ten years after the end of the hostilities it is time for the second-wave novels, usually written by more established authors, to emerge. Rutherford suggests that most of the war novels that do survive as great works of literature belong to the second wave. If we turn this discussion to the question of gender, one might initially think that discourses of emancipation are more prevalent in the so-called first-wave novels, whereas it is the role of the second-wave novel to domesticate revolutionary women whose lives radically changed for the duration of the revolutionary struggle. My contention is that this idea is not so evident and that the conflicts between these two discourses are prevalent in novels written both during and after the revolution. Particularly, women’s works are often considered to move beyond ideological or political struggles. Critics tend to ascribe certain moments—a young boy losing four fingers on one hand after mistaking explosives for toys, a young girl covered in ashes, killed by a bomb that was not meant for her—to humanist and even universal denunciations of war. The fact that such events bear witness to 30. Rutherford, “The Novel of the Mexican Revolution,” 216. Rutherford describes the need to divide the novels, assuming an almost organic division between high and low art yet never defining such terms as works of art, banality, or literary style; he emphasizes the propagandistic role of these novels in order to differentiate them from works of art. The “inexpert authors,” Rutherford claims, “lacking literary culture, remain close to the traditions of the popular novel, and their works reflect its artlessness in, for example, ponderous melodrama, moral Manichaeism, clumsy authorial intervention to deliver simplistic messages, heavy-handed manipulation of plot, crude characterization, forced and inappropriate inclusion of sentimental love intrigues, and language which fluctuates between banality and laboured attempts to reproduce what such novelists regard as elevated literary style” (216).

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the brutality, even senselessness, of war is beyond a doubt. Yet moments like these, stemming from Campobello’s My Mother’s Hands and León’s “Una estrella roja” (A Red Star), respectively, are much more than just that, as these texts speak to a spectral corporeality, a violence deemed trivial in or even absent from mainstream (and often heroic) narratives of revolution and war. To move back to the question of gender and genre, it is important to point out here that testimonial texts, biographies, autobiographies, and oral histories are often considered to be the only texts that offer counternarratives to the silencing of revolutionary women in more canonical forms of literature. Yet my analysis of Nellie Campobello’s and María Teresa León’s work shows that this is not the case. Women’s narrations of war and revolution are not going to be radically different from those that appear in the more dominant texts. Nevertheless, the negotiation with dominant themes that takes place in most women’s novels and short stories is what allows us to trace the itineraries of gendered subjects and thereby reveal the spectral corporeality that haunts dominant narratives of revolution and war. The problem with a great part of the literary criticism on novels of revolution and war in Spain and Mexico is that it takes the binaries that inform the “War Story” for granted, thereby eliding women’s political agency. I therefore propose a theoretical approach to these novels and short stories that questions the War Story and understands the different texts not as solutions, but rather as embodiments of the conflicts from which they emerge. In other words, I am interested not only in the (gender-related) conflicts that appear in the novels and short stories themselves but also in seeing these texts as conflictive objects. The fact that only a very small number of the canonized novels of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War were written by women, and that an even smaller number deal specifically with women’s participation on the battlefields, makes most critics simply conclude that women do not write about war. The consensus is that women’s more passive (and sometimes pacifist) positions as witnesses and victims of war make most female authors write texts that essentially condemn war, violence, and even political propaganda. These novels should not be confused with memoirs and biographies of women from the era, since in most of these we find a very clear change in political and sometimes even feminist consciousness. With very few exceptions, and unlike the corridos and romances that I discussed in the previous section, novels for the most part do not appear during revolutions or wars, but are published in their respective aftermaths. This does not mean, however, that novels written in the aftermath of both revolutions in

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Mexico and Spain are any less political than poems or other texts that convey the urgency of the revolutionary struggle. Rather, novels might be more concerned with the ways in which women’s participation in revolutions is assimilated into the postrevolutionary order, in the case of a “successful” institutionalized revolution in Mexico or, in the case of Spain, where the Nationalist victory implied severe setbacks for women.31 When discussing the novel of the Spanish Civil War, as well as the novel of the Mexican Revolution, one of the first points that needs to be questioned is what the canonization of a series of texts in such a genre implies. Second, it is important to question what lies underneath the formation of the corpus—which, of course, is the body haunted by the pain of a phantom limb—of the novels of the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War. The crucial point is that representations of fearless women in narrative fiction never reflect a one-sided either domesticating or emancipating mechanism. Instead, they represent a point of fissure in the texts that allows us to question the ways in which authors, as well as society at large in Mexico and in Spain, cope with women’s massive penetration of the public arena and appropriation of traditionally masculine endeavors such as writing. Jorge Fornet argues that in the Mexican case, women’s writing on the revolution faced yet another obstacle in the 1920s and ‘30s in Mexico, namely, the “crisis of the virility” of Mexican literature. Fortunately, the question of whether Mexican literature was virile enough (or even virile at all) was answered by at least one novel that appeared to satisfy the necessary prerequisites for a national virile literature: Mariano Azuela’s Underdogs.32 Becoming a non plus ultra of virility does not seem to be too complicated a task for this novel of the Mexican Revolution, since written culture was an almost exclusively male domain in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico. Moreover, those few women who did dare to write in these years tended to stay away from the battlefields of the revolution, with the exception, of course, of Nellie Campobello, who witnessed the events of the revolution in the North of Mexico from her own backyard, so to speak. Yet with this tiny exception—after all, Campobello’s work was not really considered a novel, but rather a collection of intimate anecdotes and childhood memories—no other texts from the era appear to challenge the robustness of the novel of the Mexican Revolution. Ironically, 31. See Janet Pérez, “A manera de introducción: La guerra, la literatura, la mujer y la crítica.” 32. Fornet, Reescrituras de la memoria: Novela femenina y revolución en México, 4.

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and this is Fornet’s main argument, women’s writing about the revolution occupies a much more radical position than what their male counterparts produced. He avers that the authors of the novel of the Mexican Revolution were very critical of the present regime, and women’s marginal positions in a patriarchal society make female authors produce even more radical texts. Fornet is certain, however, that this oppositional discourse that comes across in women’s writing could never be what he calls an absolute originality, as such originality does not exist.33 Women’s narrative fiction of the Mexican Revolution is not going to constitute a radical alternative to the canonized genre of the novel of the Mexican Revolution. However, the dialogue that women writers established with dominant themes and motives that appear in the novela de la Revolución Mexicana allows us to contextualize the formation of this particular genre in a particular selective process in which, to use Jameson’s words, the surviving texts “tend to perpetuate a hegemonic voice,” while other utterances, the voices these are opposed to, are “scattered to the wind.”34 Unlike the novel of the Mexican Revolution, a category that most critics agree is officially inaugurated with Azuela’s non plus ultra of virility, the Spanish Civil War novel does not have such a clear starting point. Even though the civil war broke out in 1936, politicized narrative fiction aimed at a popular audience preceded the war by more than two decades. Most critics of the novels of the Spanish Civil War take the “War Story” for granted, thereby silencing women’s participation in revolution and combat. Both María-Lourdes Möller Soller and Janet Pérez, for example, assume women simply did not write about the front, because women usually were not physically at the front.35 In a footnote, Möller Soller explains that there were no writers among the milicianas, which explains why there are no firsthand accounts from women at the front. Furthermore, in the Mexican case, none of the soldaderas was a writer, either; at least no soldadera has—to my knowledge—published a memoir or a novel. The only way to know about these women is either through mediated testimonials or through the texts of others that bore witness to the women’s presence on the battlefields. 33. Ibid., 4, 7. Fornet explains that feminine discourse “does not attempt to break away from the corpus to which it belongs, but instead establishes a dialogue from its own perspective” (7). 34. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 85. 35. Möller Soller and Pérez put forth this argument in, respectively, “El impacto de la guerra civil en la vida y obra de tres novelistas catalanas: Aurora Betrana, Teresa Pámies y Mercè Rodoreda,” 36; and “A Manera de introducción,” 8.

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Pérez chooses to divide the corpus between novels that describe the war from the point of view of the combatants and those that describe the war from the point of view of the noncombatants. This classification, however, already is part and parcel of the War Story. Pérez’s argument without a doubt goes hand in hand with one of the most discussed points in the criticism of fictional narrative of the Spanish Civil War, namely, that all the authors of these novels were more or less protagonists or eyewitnesses, in either childhood, adolescence, or their adult years. However, according to Gareth Thomas, these accounts are “far from being historical” in the conventional sense of the term.36 The fact that these writers did witness one or another aspect of the war results in more subjective interpretations of history that, according to Thomas, provide a better, or at least a more complicated, interpretation of history than what some historical texts purport. Reflecting Fornet’s argument on women writing about the Mexican Revolution, Pérez argues that women writers also make better witnesses and therefore better analysts of the Spanish revolution and civil war, since there is nothing glorious about the war seen from what she calls a “purely feminine perspective.” Moreover, Pérez contends in a different essay, “even those few [women writers] who may be classed as ideologues usually concentrate upon social and familial concerns.”37 This perspective consequently makes women’s writing of revolution and war— even though women do not tend to write all that much about combat—less political or even less ideological. It is my goal to show that the division between a male perspective and a female perspective is just as artificial as the division between first- and second-wave novels. The fact that women might be more removed from the battlefields than their male counterparts—which ceased to be an option during the siege of Madrid or the bombing of Guernica—and that women tend to write more about hunger, feeding their starving children, and protecting themselves and their families from bombs, soldiers, and other threats of war does not create a privileged position that endows women writers with a vision free of ideological and political constraints. Instead, their writings reflect certain issues that often are absent in more canonical or dominant narratives of revolution and war, a selection that clearly underscores the public-private, domestic-political, and feminine-masculine dichotomies that revolutions and wars undo the moment the first shot is fired, the first bomb is dropped. 36. Thomas, Novel of the Spanish Civil War, 5. 37. Pérez, “A manera de introducción,” 11; Pérez, “Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers,” 172.

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Pérez argues that many women were afraid to write about an experience “they had not lived.”38 The problem here is not only Pérez’s somewhat narrow definition of experience, which does not take the discursive construction of experience that Joan Scott puts forth in her essay, but also that Pérez does not consider such experiences as carrying bombs underneath one’s dress or images as the aforementioned young girl covered in ashes (both instances are references to León’s “Red Star”) to be experiences of war. Another issue that Pérez does not consider is, of course, the writing of women on the Nationalist side. As I have already argued, analyzing that corpus does require a slightly different method of analysis, yet it may be worthwhile to briefly refer to the woman who was possibly the most prominent Nationalist writer, Concha Espina. Thomas lists at least three of Espina’s novels under his “first-wave” novels, implying that hers are texts that reflect the polarities of the war in a transparent and Manichaean manner. Espina and other writers such as Carmen de Icaza or Mercedes Formica undoubtedly supported the Nationalist cause and later the Francoist regime, yet this does not mean that the discursive construction of gender in their texts should necessarily be taken for granted. Michael Ugarte argues that in spite of Espina’s rhetoric, her staunch defense of Catholicism and Spanish nationalism, her so-called first-wave novel Retaguardia (Rear Guard [1937]) and the collection of short stories Luna roja (Red Moon [1938]) are by no means devoid of the tensions and negotiations that unsettle the strict gendered divisions on which fascism grounds itself.39 Although Thomas mainly focuses his analysis on the literary quality of these texts, a close look at the tensions and slippages that mark the discursive construction of gender on both the Republican and the Nationalist sides certainly reveals the negotiation between emancipation and domestication that informs these early texts.40 Needless to say, even though the Mexican Revolution was not marked by the same ideological polarities that explain the struggle in Spain, the analysis of narrative fiction in both cases should reveal that a novel should not have to take place on the front lines in order to critically and politically engage 38. Pérez, “A manera de introducción,” 8. 39. Referring to Retaguardia and Luna roja, Ugarte argues that although these narratives “are clear in their political content, they do not preclude the persistence of the former feminist Concha Espina, a Concha Espina who seemed to write and live with the tension between equality and difference as elaborated in her creation of Aurora de España” (“The Fascist Narrative of Concha Espina,” 103). Aurora de España is the main character in Espina’s 1929 novel La virgen prudente. 40. Labanyi carries out the task of looking at both political sides in her already mentioned article “Resemanticizing Feminine Surrender.”

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with the struggle itself. Yet as long as women’s writing is excluded as a construction of a particular experience of war that comes across in hegemonic narratives, women’s negotiations with the dominant discourse will remain concealed. The problem is that such binaries inform the structure of the War Story, perpetuating established gender roles and eliding the challenges, negotiations, and conflicts that come across in these texts. The preceding cross section of literary and cultural production in revolutionary Mexico and Spain is hardly exhaustive, yet I hope it is sufficient to reveal the ways in which the roles of artists, intellectuals, and writers changed during the years of struggle, in accordance with a specific model of revolutionary politics. Even though literature, art, as well as other forms of cultural production had new protagonists and were often even geared at different audiences, existing relations of power, knowledge, and authority for the most part remained unchallenged. Yet in spite of these continuities, particularly as far as gender is concerned, different cultural texts emerging from the era still are sites of change and contestation, as it is in these texts where we can trace the ways in which women’s participation in both revolutions is assimilated into history and even memory. Moreover, the review and analysis of these discursive battlefields should clarify the historical and cultural moments when the texts discussed in the four chapters that follow emerged and how they did so. It is in these texts that the aforementioned tensions and conflicts allow for alternative and open-ended narratives that ultimately make it possible to think of new frameworks to understand women’s struggles and women’s writing from and about revolutions.

Pa r t I I

Death Stories

3 A d e l i t a’s D e a t h

¿Dónde estás, Adelita? “Where are you, Adelita? Where are you guerrillera?” ask the first verses of a popular protest song from the 1980s. Adelita, the love interest and idealized female companion of the Mexican revolutionary soldier, has become a guerrilla fighter and a new symbol for women’s participation in different struggles in Nicaragua or El Salvador. The transfer of this heroic figure to other struggles is no coincidence, not only because “La Adelita” was apparently the favorite camp song in the 1930s of Nicaraguan revolutionary leader César Augusto Sandino but also because today Adelita has become a slippery signifier, a palimpsestic figuration within hegemonic as well as counterhegemonic forms of revolutionary writing.1 She is omnipresent in dominant and resistant myths and narratives that have moved far beyond the Mexican border. Adelita has become a metonymy for women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution as well as the symbol of an idealized femininity and even of women’s struggles today. She oscillates between women’s empowerment and women’s oppression, between political agency and subalternity. The varied incarnations of Adelita as symbol, myth, and icon speak to the different meanings that have been attached to this figure. Alicia Arrizón presents a positive and politically empowering perspective on Adelita, the same perspective that also comes across in Arrizón’s reading of Josephina Niggli’s Soldadera, even though Arrizón avers that Adelita was not always such a privileged figure.2 Most historiographies of the Mexican Revolution, particularly those center1. Salas provides this anecdote in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 94. The song is “Dónde estás, Adelita,” Lucha Villa con el mariachi Vargas, Musart Records, Ed-1783. 2. Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage, 70.

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ing on women’s histories, often introduce their explorations by questioning what lies beneath Adelita’s ubiquitous presence in Mexican popular culture, revealing that this is often the first step most inquiries into women’s histories during the Mexican Revolution have to take. In In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution, Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer briefly refer to the women’s presence on the battlefield, describing them as an anonymous mass of soldaderas who did, however, experience a revolution of their own as far as sexual and social customs were concerned. This liberation of customs would later be represented in literary and cinematographic archetypes such as “the new outspoken Adelita, promiscuous and tomboyish, sexually active, free to the point of abandon, garrulous to the point of impudence.”3 For the authors there is no conflict between the emancipating possibilities of the revolution and the representation of these same possibilities in an archetypal figure that in corridos, literary texts, and movies might be “free to the point of abandon” at a romantic and erotic but not a political level. Even though certain sources claim that Adelita was a historical figure, she is most well known through the corrido of the same name. A particular version of that corrido frames the figure of Adelita as an accepted and acceptable representation of all soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. She is the woman whose name the valiant soldier cannot and does not want to forget. Even though the corrido “La Adelita” appeared on the scene in the early years of the revolution, it is difficult to establish when the figure Adelita became the archetypal soldadera. A crucial moment was, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, in 1925, when policy makers for Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón had decided to ban soldaderas from the Mexican army. Excluding women from the battlefields implied that their undeniable presence would be narrated as romanticized tales, as can be seen particularly in the movies from the golden era of Mexican cinema, where, as Elizabeth Salas explains, a strong female figure is usually domesticated at the end. Bearing in mind the chaos, even the newfound freedom that characterized the earlier years of war and revolution, one could argue that earlier corridos offered more emancipatory representations of soldaderas, whereas chroniclers and bards of the neotraditional postrevolutionary regime—which attempted to rid itself of the stigma that soldaderas’ presence entailed for the Mexican army—would accept only more conventional representations of women. According to María Herrera-Sobek, turning them into love objects was a strat3. Aguilar Camín and Meyer, In the Shadow, 51.

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egy that allowed soldaderas’ often unsettling presence to be comfortably assimilated into Mexican history.4 Yet further investigation of the origins of “La Adelita” reveals the inherent ambiguity and the multiple meanings that accompanied both figure and corrido from the very beginning.5 If it were possible today to gather the life stories of the various women who in different moments were revealed to be the “real” Adelitas who inspired the song, a rich and complex picture of women’s participation in the revolution, in which discourses of emancipation and domestication constantly oscillate, would emerge. Yet myths, oftentimes intricately related to the patriarchal discourses of Mexican nationalism, have already taken the place of such a possibility. In the most popular version of the corrido, Adelita is a domesticated soldadera: she is lively yet docile, faithful and respectable but unaffected by the daily violence of the revolution. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Herrera-Sobek explains that the corrido echoes the conventions of medieval love lyrics. This aspect of the corrido is particularly visible in its final stanzas. Here, the soldier leaving for battle takes with him an image of Adelita. He will carry her image on his chest, as though it were a shield that could protect him from the enemy’s bullets. I bid farewell to my beloved Adela From you a token I wish to take, Your picture I carry in my heart As a shield that’ll bring me victory. (Ya me despido de mi querida Adela de ti un recuerdo quisiera llevar,

4. Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 82. As Herrera-Sobek points out, “Two alternatives were presented to the balladeer aside from completely ignoring women’s involvement in the conflict: to neutralize the woman by making her a love object and thus presenting her in a less threatening manner or to transform the soldadera into a mythic figure” (Mexican Corrido, 104). 5. According to María y Campos’s comprehensive study La Revolución Mexicana a través de los corridos populares, “La Adelita” clearly speaks to and for all soldaderas of all factions of the revolution, challenging other popular versions that claim that the song was written for a real-life Adelita (41). In the introduction to Las Soldaderas, Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska contests María y Campos’s point, giving more importance to popular beliefs than to alleged historical facts. She explains that there was a real-life Adelita who finally received a pension in 1963 (23). The coexistence of different origins implies that establishing once and for all the identity of a real Adelita is neither possible nor necessary, as such an empirical search must rely on archives and collections that, as I argue in Chapter 2, will always represent only a highly ideological selection of texts.

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Even though, strictly speaking, Adelita’s image is on the battlefields, she is still not associated with the violence, the possibilities, or the emancipatory potential of the revolution. She becomes a symbol of triumph, larger than life, revealing an all-too-common trait of female figures in revolutionary struggles, namely, that “their symbolic and iconographic presence in the imagery and images of revolutions suggest a transcendental and inspirational presence.” Yet the corrido also exists in multiple forms. In another very popular version, Adelita does perform soldierly activities, challenging the more passive Adelita of the first corrido. In this later version, Adelita is a young woman who valiantly followed madly in love with the sergeant. Popular among the troops was Adelita, the woman the sergeant adored, because she was not only valiant, but beautiful so that even the colonel respected her. (una moza que valiente los seguía locamente enamorada de un sargento. Popular entre la tropa era Adelita, la mujer que el sargento idolatraba, porque además de valiente, era bonita Y hasta el mismo coronel la respetaba.)7

The chorus of the corrido, however, remains the same. Adelita is still the woman the soldier cannot and does not want to forget. What differentiates this Adelita from the former version is that here she is elevated to a woman warrior. Even though in this version Adelita is definitely present on the battlefields of the revolution, she remains, as Herrera-Sobek suggests, “an example of the idealized, beautiful and valiant soldadera type in its romanticized manifestation.”8 This Adelita a quien quiero y no puedo olvidar (that I love and cannot forget) would rapidly travel to other genres, becoming an accepted and acceptable metonymy for all soldaderas, who often became known as “Adelitas.” 6. Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido, 105. 7. Reynolds, Women, State, and Revolution, xv; Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido, 107. 8. Herrera-Sobek, Mexican Corrido, 108.

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Evidence for the pervasive presence of this myth, and the way it has become deeply embedded in any form of remembrance of the revolution, can also be found in the few available histories of female veterans. One of the very few testimonies of a woman who actually identifies herself as a soldadera is Tomasa García’s. Her abbreviated life story, an interview-turned-narrative, appeared in the magazine Fem in 1979. In this narrative, journalist Marta Romo uses García’s life story in order to explore soldaderas’ histories beyond the acceptable and accepted, often domesticating, myth. However, the answers that García provided to Romo’s inquiries suggest that her own story cannot be told without reference to such mythical figures as Adelita. Yet Adelita’s presence does not merely falsify García’s memories, as these references still reveal strong interferences of the acceptable icons, myths, and stereotypes that come across in the dominant discourse of the Mexican Revolution. The issue at stake here is not whether the veteran soldadera is telling the truth; instead, the elements she uses (needs) in order to articulate her past are what make these memories so interesting. García recalls: They all called us “Adelitas” because we were revolutionaries, we were part of the battalion, but the real Adelita was from Ciudad Juárez. The real Adelita, she used to say: “Órale, let’s all go for it, and whoever is afraid should stay at home and cook beans! And shots and shots and whoever did not obey, she would kill them herself! She was very brave. (A todas nos decían “Adelitas” porque éramos revolucionarias, éramos de tropa, pero la mera Adelita era de Ciudad Juárez. La mera Adelita esa decía—¡Órale, todos a entrar y el que tenga miedo que se quede a cocer los frijoles! Y balazos y balazos y el que no obedecía, ¡lo mataba ella misma! Era muy valiente.)9

García not only remembered the real Adelita, but as a matter of fact she recalled character traits from all the female protagonists of corridos: the valiant Juana Gallo, a soldadera who “would really go for it in combat, against bands of five or six” (le entraba bonito a combatir en combate y en contra de gavillas de cinco o seis), or the coquettish Marieta who “was good at driving the entire battalion crazy. Always so in love!” (servía para traer a toda la tropa de cabeza. ¡Muy enamorada!). By referring to these different figures, García reiterated the exact stereotypes and myths as they appear in the corridos.10 9. Romo, “¿Y las soldaderas? Tomasa García toma la palabra,” 13. 10. Ibid. According to Herrera-Sobek, the figure of Juana Gallo represents the soldier archetype in many corridos (Mexican Corrido, 110). Julia Tuñón Pablos explains in Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled that Marieta was the coquettish soldadera whose constant flirtation got her in trouble (90).

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Adelita has also appeared in movies, pulp novels, comics, calendar covers, theater, and dance, to mention only a few of her incarnations. Photography of the Mexican Revolution has also produced one of the most acceptable and popular Adelitas, an image that today can still be bought as a postcard in any kiosk in Mexico. A short history of this same image quickly reveals the mythification process that turned Adelita into such an acceptable figure. John Mraz explains that contrary to popular belief, many of the images that belong to the Casasola Archive represent not the revolutionary insurgents, but rather the counterrevolutionary troops of General Victoriano Huerta. Among the many images that show the soldiers’ and sometimes soldaderas’ departure in crammed militarized trains, we find an image of a woman looking out from the train. The popular “Adelita” with her frightened look, as though it were either foreshadowing or reflecting the violence that this fearless woman has encountered or would encounter on the battlefields, is, however, a cropped version of the complete image (figure 1 shows the complete picture), as the negative of the original is broken. Mraz tells us that in the Graphic History of the Mexican Revolution, a caption underneath the cropped picture reads: “Adelita, soldadera.” Agustín Victor Casasola was to have taken the picture in 1910. Mraz explains that even though it is impossible to know when the picture was actually taken, chances are that 1910 was a highly unlikely date. The battalions did not move much across the Mexican geography in the first year of the struggle. It is much more probable that the picture was taken in 1913 and that the woman was either traveling with or bidding farewell to the federal soldiers. Mraz suggests that both women, the fearful (or fearless?) Adelita and the woman standing next to her, might have been prostitutes: soldaderas usually traveled on top of the train, while apparently one of the train wagons was usually reserved for prostitutes.11 Even though Mraz’s mutually exclusive classification of soldaderas and prostitutes is problematic, his comments certainly reveal that Adelita is an overwritten figuration. Finally, his comments imply that the popularity of the song probably explains why this particular fearless woman became known as Adelita. As a matter of fact, the myth of Adelita remained ubiquitous in Mexico even in the latter part of the twentieth century. Elena Poniatowska’s oral history of the massacre that took place in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, Massacre in Mexico, includes the testimony of Eduardo Valle Espinosa, who describes the female nursing students as Adelitas: “The girl comrades from the School of Nursing were 11. Mraz, “Archivo Casasola,” 213.

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real heroines during the attack on the Santo Tomás campus. They did the whole Adelita bit spontaneously, straight from the heart. They willingly risked their lives to care for our wounded, help get them off the campus, and attend to their every need.”12 Adelita’s presence on the battlefield is undeniable, but in 1914 and also in 1968 Adelita remained a myth of idealized femininity. She is certainly brave, yet it is her task to take care of the injured; violence, blood, or death does not affect her heart of gold. Adelita is there to ensure that the fight will go on. Moreover, Adelita has in many ways become a name that epitomizes the history of the soldaderas: they all become Adelitas, erasing individual experiences not only for historians, poets, and novelists who would write the history and the novels of the Mexican Revolution but also for the women who participated in the revolutions as soldaderas and for those who would write about them. An article in the Mexican daily Reforma from 2000 still used the term Adelitas to define women in politics. In the article “De Adelitas a funcionarias: La evolución de las revolucionarias” (From Adelitas to Bureaucrats: The Evolution of the Revolutionaries), Yascara López claims that “the Adelitas have not died, they have just changed their image. They no longer carry the gun, the children, the food, now they lead zapatista movements and are the leaders of cultural scientific groups in the country.”13 Adelita has also moved across the Mexican border, as she appears widely in the writing of Chicanas, displaying strategies of resistance and accommodation from within the Chicano movement. Adelita embodies different political meanings on both sides of the Rio Grande, and her border crossing reveals that nationalist contingencies hardly suffice to explain her presence in Mexico and in the United States.14 Chicana writers and activists also use the imagery of the soldaderas to distinguish a particular Mexican and Chicana feminism from EuroAmerican culture. Even though one could speak of strategic essentialism in this particular context, the crucial issue is that soldaderas and Adelitas are not always an “oppressive myth,” as Carlos Monsiváis would have it. Although Monsiváis argues that the soldaderas represent the “irruption of peasant women into history,” he also contrasts their various tasks (“they take part in guerrilla action, map the country 12. Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, 90. 13. López, “De Adelitas a funcionarias.” 14. Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 102.

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in reconnaissance activities, ride and bear arms”) with the ways in which the soldaderas have been assimilated into official history. “Revolutionary women are mythified and the myth, stipulating the usual characteristics and conditions, confirms and guarantees slavery, bitterly transforming natural virtues into a dead weight for their descendants. Couldn’t women of the Revolution have produced a lighter inheritance? In the event, they were forced to pass on to their descendants a fatal load of abnegation, silent suffering, stoicism and stubborn veneration for their men.”15 Even though Monsiváis’s use of “natural virtues” can be questioned here, his analysis of the soldaderas’ simultaneous absence and presence in Mexico and in the United States certainly suggests that accepting Adelita, and what she stands for, as an emancipatory or even feminist icon is always a thorny gesture. Both Salas and Arrizón list and briefly describe further appearances and cameos of this figure in literature, art, and popular culture.16 Unable to do justice to the inherent complexity that Adelita necessarily conveys every time she appears on the scene, what remains of this chapter focuses on two texts that narrate two radically different death stories of Adelita: Baltasar Dromundo’s narrative Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” (1936) and the already mentioned play Soldadera, by Josephina Niggli. Whereas Dromundo’s text represents an attempt to fix a domesticated version of this figure in collective memory, Niggli’s play stages Adelita’s heroic suicide as a possible act of counterwriting.

She Was a Dorado! Even though Dromundo titles his book Francisco Villa y la “Adelita,” the woman’s story is little more than an anecdote that serves to provide a (fictionalized) origin to the corrido, and ultimately contributes to a veritable hero cult of the always controversial and enigmatic Francisco Villa.17 What follows is a brief analysis of the different domesticating strategies that come across in Dromundo’s book. My analysis of Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” is conscious of the fact that the 15. Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards, 6. 16. These include the song “Las Adelitas” (1960) by Bonifacio Collazo, the repertoire “Las Adelitas” from the Ballet Folklórico de México, the film La Adelita (1973), Ana Montes’s one-act play Adelita (1976), Charles Dickinson’s play La Adelita (1937), and Angel Martín’s calendars. 17. According to Arrizón, “The central event in Dromundo’s narrative—in which Villa imposes his power and strength on Adelita—is easily interconnected with the larger narrative of machismo and sexism in which the male protagonist imposes his power and maleness on a female” (Latina Performance, 51).

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survival of popular heroes and heroines—like Adelita—more often than not depends on the ways in which these figures penetrate dominant historiographic and literary discourse. To use Eric Hobsbawm’s language, Dromundo, the clerk, chronicler, and poet of the northern state of Durango, created a narrative that stands at the interaction of folklore, myth, fiction, and history.18 The short book was published in 1936 and dedicated to the new state governor. Adelita’s story, as it appears in this particular text, has very little to do with women’s experiences in the Mexican Revolution. Instead, the author mixes folklore, myth, and history in order to create a narrative that comfortably fits into the dominant ideology of the Mexican state and at the same time elides the multiple narratives and possibilities that the oral tradition of the corrido entailed. Dromundo’s text includes a transcript of the aforementioned first and most famous version of “La Adelita,” the romantic love story in which women are always removed from the violence of the battlefields. Yet in Dromundo’s narrative, Adelita changes from being a soldier’s beloved to an idealized Amazon of mythic proportions, only to be domesticated at the end of the text. Her heroic death not only restores her honor but also underscores Francisco Villa’s strict yet fair sense of justice. In the text, Adelita is not only a brave young woman from Durango but also a convincing and enraged speaker, who is at the same time a captive of her own uncontrollable passions. She is not the selfless, even passive, soldadera known from chronicles and corridos. Instead, she is a temptress who seems to ignore the dramatic consequences of her frivolous actions. In an enraged speech, a coquettish yet self-assured Adelita encourages Pancho Villa to become the next president of the nation. Throughout the speech, Adelita cannot keep herself from flirting with the general known as “el Centauro del Norte.” “The girl’s allure could be sensed. It was clear that she was interested in the general” (Se notaba el “flirt” de la muchacha. Era indudable que se interesaba por el General).19 Villa is unable to resist the young temptress: he embraces and kisses her in a melodramatic moment. 18. In Bandits, Hobsbawm addresses the ways in which life stories of subaltern subjects do not enter historical discourses: “The sad truth is probably that the heroes of remote times survive because they are not only the heroes of the peasants. The great emperors had their clerks, chroniclers and poets, they left huge monuments of stone, they represent not the inhabitants of some lost corner of the highlands (which happens to be like so many other lost corners), but states, empires, entire peoples” (111). 19. Dromundo, Francisco Villa y la “Adelita,” 34. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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Events take an unfortunate turn when Portillo, Adelita’s jealous boyfriend, bursts out of his hiding place, from which he had been observing the entire scene. Portillo wants to avenge his blemished honor, but unable to confront his superior, he shoots himself instead. When Pancho Villa finds out that Portillo was Adelita’s beau, he blames her for what happened and orders her to leave his army. Adelita obeys, yet she joins another troop and later on returns to Villa’s army, the División del Norte, disguised as a “Dorado,” the elite corps of the División, taking the place of the young soldier for whose death she was blamed. After the battle of Celaya, the first major defeat of the Villistas, Adelita’s lifeless body is among the many deceased. Only in death is her true identity once again revealed. Moved, Villa finally declares, “She was a Dorado” (Era un dorado, 40), thereby restoring Adelita’s honor, as he orders her body to be buried next to Portillo’s. As in Niggli’s play, a woman’s dead body remains at the end, yet the immediate burial—the disappearance of Adelita’s body and the earlier erasure of her sexual identity—precludes the possibility of an act of counterwriting. Adelita’s death comfortably restores dominant myths of the Mexican Revolution. At first glance, Dromundo might be presenting a much more emancipated Adelita than the one that comes across in the corridos. After all, she chooses to participate in combat and dies cross-dressed as a male soldier. Yet Adelita’s heroic actions dramatically contrast with the corrido, which, according to the text, tells the story of “that girl who once was Portillo’s bride” (aquella muchacha Adelita que fue novia de Portillo). Here, the woman’s cross-dressing as well as her participation in combat are completely absent. She is merely the woman who patiently awaits her lover’s return. The corrido ends with the following verses: So please stay, dear Adelita, I’m going to war to fight I have not lost hope Of embracing you once again. (Conque quédate, Adelita querida, ya me voy a la guerra a pelear la esperanza no llevo perdida de volverte otra vez a abrazar.) (40)

Again one has to ask, ¿Dónde estás, Adelita? Whereas the corrido has become a song of inspiration for the other revolutionaries, Dromundo’s character van-

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ishes from the scene to appear completely transformed into an asexual warrior, albeit for the duration of a battle that will end in defeat and the woman’s death. This excessively smooth transition from the teasing soldadera to the selfless soldier erases and silences the complexities and challenges implied by women’s actual presence on the battlefields of the revolution. For a brief interval, for the duration of a few battles, Adelita has become a soldier, and just a soldier. And this new Amazon even “seemed to have suppressed the sexual factor, to instead become useful as a human being in the military lines of Arrieta from Canelas, born leader of the revolution in Durango” (parecía haber supeditado el factor sexual a su función de utilidad social como ser humano en las filas militares de Arrieta el de Canelas, jefe nato de la revolución en Durango, 42). There are no conflicts between the flirtatious and beautiful Adelita and the selfless Amazon who is willing to sacrifice her last drop of blood for a revolution that would only perpetuate the rules and structures that turned her into the scapegoat of Portillo’s death. Dromundo’s Adelita glides seamlessly from one extreme to the other, embodying what Miriam Cooke calls “mythic war time roles,” and thereby domesticating everything Adelita represents.20 Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” clearly shows the ways in which Adelita’s transformations ultimately respond to these mythic roles, as Dromundo’s text does not allow for any gender ambiguity: Adelita is either the domesticated lover who in this particular case even stands in the way of battle, as she is blamed for Portillo’s death, or the emancipated soldier who has given up completely on her sexual identity in order to become a useful warrior. In the beginning of the narrative, Adelita is merely a self-assured and beautiful woman, even though the text already foreshadows her imminent betrayal. As she prepares for her speech, she consciously wants to please Villa, not only with her words. And making a delicious and coquettish gesture, she drew a smile as she looked at her aunt again calling out: “Aunt, look at me. Do you think the General might think that this famous Adelita from Durango might be ugly?” And the girl looked beautiful. (Y haciendo un delicioso mohín de picardía, dibujó una sonrisa mientras volvía a mirar a su tía, y exclamaba: 20. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 15.

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The fact that Villa’s men sing the corrido “La cautela” (The Caution) right before Villa kisses Adelita only confirms that Adelita—and to an extent women— cannot be trusted and mean only trouble in revolutionary settings. The last verse of the ballad sounds again, after Villa has found out that Portillo killed himself for Adelita’s sake: . . . it was not true what she promised me, everything was false, she paid me with false currency. . . ( . . . no fue verdad lo que ella me prometió, todo fue una falsedad, falsa moneda me pagó...) (37)

Adelita rapidly moves from being beautiful and desirable, to parasitic, untrustworthy, and unrespectable,21 to becoming a woman warrior; Dromundo’s text never gestures at the contradictions that aim between them. She quickly becomes a mere obstacle, as her reckless and flirtatious behavior is blamed for Portillo’s death. Once Francisco Villa finds out the true identity of the slain Dorado, he orders her to be buried next to Portillo, thereby performing a symbolic marriage that restores Adelita’s honor as well as her gender. Only in death is Adelita the “Dorado” (note that Villa says “Dorado,” not “Dorada,” erasing the gendered ambivalence of the Amazon) allowed to become a woman again, when she no longer is a soldier. Her body is quickly buried and her potentially counterhegemonic story assimilated and thereby silenced in revolutionary writing. A brief review of Pancho Villa’s biography as well as studies of women’s participation and soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution makes Dromundo’s narra21. Cynthia Enloe explains in Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives that such qualities are often associated with representations of camp followers in military history (37).

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tive and its melodramatic conclusion quite unlikely.22 Nevertheless, in Francisco Villa y la “Adelita,” Dromundo intends not to write exactly a historical text, but rather to fix the memory of a particular myth in the collective imagery in the state of Durango, turning folklore into accepted, even state-sanctioned, history. In his own introduction, Dromundo explains that his text is the result of his research on the origins of the corrido in northern Mexico. Rather than reflecting what may have been a historically accurate narrative, he is more concerned with reflecting the folkloric tradition.23 Dromundo establishes a sharp distinction between historical accuracy and oral tradition in the North of Mexico and automatically endows the latter with an essential truth. He gives much more importance to what he understands to be the particular version of Adelita’s story, whose popularity endows orality with a certain authority, yet he also erases this authority with the same sweep, as his written version has now fixed and framed this tradition in a particular patriarchal narrative. The comments on Niggli’s play Soldadera that follow will further reveal why Dromundo’s text is so problematic, since the play stages Adelita’s heroic death as a possible attempt to refute narratives such as Francisco Villa y la “Adelita.” At first glance, the fact that in Soldadera Adelita as well as other soldaderas are literally speaking on stage might make us suspect that the play can be easily dismissed as another attempt to speak for the subaltern, thereby burying the soldaderas in even deeper silence. The section that follows aims to show that death stories are never just so straightforward.

Adelita’s Radical Act of Counterwriting The term fearless women always implies two contradictory meanings that oscillate between accommodation and resistance. The outcome of Josephina Niggli’s play Soldadera reflects this ambiguity: does Niggli’s Adelita, to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms, render her body graphematic, becoming a figure “who intended to be retrieved, who wrote with her body,” and who attempted to “speak” across death,” or does her death mainly confirm the dominant narrative of the Mexican Revolution?24 The genealogy of Adelita in the first section of this chapter, part and parcel 22. See Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 227; and Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, 46. 23. See Dromundo, Francisco Villa y la “Adelita,” 7. 24. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 24.

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of any attempt to answer this question, clearly reveals that Adelita is an overwritten and palimpsestic figure. The same genealogy also highlights the limits and failures of any effort to “locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within politics of resistance.”25 Yet this does not mean that such an analysis will necessarily be unfruitful. Rather, an awareness of such limits and failures precisely allows us to understand and deconstruct the very discursive structures out of which these figures like Adelita emerge. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of the suttee, the self-immolation of widows in India, in her 1986 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as well as in her more recent return to the questions she addressed in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason illuminates the complexities of Adelita’s heroic death. The historical, cultural, and political inscription of the woman’s free choice to die lies at the core of her discussion. Spivak considers widows’ self-immolation in India to be a “manipulation of subject formation.” Although in the Brahmanic discourse of widow sacrifice the suttee is represented as the woman’s free choice, in the colonial discourse the moment in which the widow who is about to immolate herself on the funeral pyre decides not to do so after all is considered to be an act of free choice. Yet the woman’s actual agency disappears in the gap between “patriarchal subject-formation and imperialist object-construction,” between patriarchal traditions and imperial discourse. In her words, “The British ignore the space of the Sati as an ideological battle-ground and construct the woman as object of slaughter, the saving of which marks the moment when not only a civil but a good society is born out of domestic chaos.”26 What appears to be the widow’s choice, or maybe even her own means to construct a counternarrative, is caught between the patriarchal tradition—here the suttee, the “good wife,” can freely choose to die on her husband’s funeral pyre— and imperial discourse, where she becomes the victim of a ruthless world that needs the guidance and protection of the colonial metropolis, in other words, the white man’s burden. Thus, if the widow who immolates herself on her husband’s funeral pyre is caught between patriarchy and imperial discourse, it is im25. Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever,” 26. The authors read Spivak’s essay together with Derrida’s Archive Fever and use his notion of “archival violence” in order to highlight the complexities of the woman’s death on the funeral pyre. The main issue here again is that woman’s agency is precluded not only by imperialism but also within ancient Hindu law. The woman’s agency therefore disappears from the archive, but her disappearance should not prevent the (postcolonial) critic from investigating the traces of her disappearance. 26. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 234, 235.

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perative to question where we can talk about agency and free will when discussing figures of women participating in revolutions. None of the critiques of the novel of the Mexican Revolution will bother mentioning Josephina Niggli’s play. After all, why should they? Neither is Soldadera a novel nor is her play written in Spanish or even for a Mexican audience. A Mexican expatriate, Niggli was born in Monterrey in 1910 and sent to San Antonio at a young age, escaping the revolution in the North of Mexico. Already in the United States, her father financed the publication of her first book in 1931, the collection of poetry Mexican Silhouettes; she also published poems and short stories in Mexican Life and Ladies’ Home Journal. She received her bachelor degree in 1931 and in 1935 joined the Carolina Playmakers, a graduate program at the University of North Carolina. In the 1940s, Niggli returned to Mexico and worked as a stage manager for playwright Rodolfo Usigli.27 Furthermore, theater is certainly not at the center of attention of postrevolutionary literary and cultural production in Mexico. The most important cultural expressions and movements emerging from the revolution were the muralist movement, the novel of the Mexican Revolution, and cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. According to Carlos Monsiváis, while the muralist movement was offering what he calls a “a programmatic optimism,” novels provided a fundamentally opposite message, as they reveal also, “programmatically, their arduous pessimism.”28 Even though a closer study of both novels and murals might significantly alter this dichotomy, compared to murals and the novel theater plays only a marginal and minor position. Yet this does not mean that there was no room for theater in postrevolutionary Mexico. Rather, theater might even offer a fundamentally different perspective that may have the potential to move beyond the dichotomized representations that mark the muralist movement as well as the novel of the Mexican Revolution. Until the outbreak of the revolution, theater was considered to be a pastime of the Porfirian upper classes. Yet after 1910, the so-called teatro frívolo (frivolous theater) or género chico (literally, a minor genre) offered popular classes new possibilities for resistance that moved beyond the all-encompassing macronarratives that come across either in murals, novels, or the mass-culture phenomenon of cinema. Monsiváis argues that the theater of the género chico provides two simultaneous spectacles: the stage becomes a sort of tabula rasa for new social 27. For more information on Niggli and her work, refer to Arrizón, Latina Performance, 45. 28. Monsiváis, “Notas sobre la cultura mexicana en el siglo XX,” 1445.

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commentary and the birthplace of new popular stock characters. The particular dynamics of the género chico crucially differentiate theater from other forms of cultural production: here, the often “popular” audience has the chance to talk back to what is presented on stage.29 However, even though the transforming possibilities that Monsiváis associates with theater—and not with art, the novel, or even cinema—should not be taken lightly, Niggli’s work remains removed from the “center stage” in Mexico at the time. Even though Niggli wrote Soldadera in 1936—roughly the same time frame when many of the texts considered to be part of the novel of the Mexican Revolution appeared—her work was geared toward a very different audience. Soldadera was performed for the first time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1936. As a student of Frederick Koch, who was also the editor of her plays, Niggli’s main concern was to translate and import Mexican folklore for a U.S. audience.30 One could easily fall into the trap of merely dismissing Niggli’s work as an excessively didactic, exotic, or even simplistic representation of particular social, political, and gender struggles from which she was removed at an early age. Chances are that Niggli herself did not intend to do much more than to construct such a re-presentation on stage in Chapel Hill. Yet certain elements of the play—the references to violence, to writing and illiteracy, and finally to heroic death—allow for a much more provocative reading of the play. These are also the elements that are absent in Baltasar Dromundo’s narration of Adelita’s heroic death. Whereas in the latter a symbolic marriage after death exonerates Adelita from her transgressions, Niggli’s play ends with a eulogy to a dead body, probably torn to pieces by an explosion. It is an open-ended text, which in an explosion throws not only thunder and bones but also unanswered questions into the air.

Soldadera Niggli’s play takes place at a soldiers’ camp in the year 1914 in the Sierra Madre in the state of Coahuila, Mexico. Seven women, members of a revolutionary battalion, are guarding storage of ammunition at a soldiers’ camp on a mountain path. Two of the women, Cricket and Concha, the leader, have cap29. Ibid., 1536. 30. In Latina Performance, Arrizón argues: “Niggli’s construction of Mexican American identity is intertwined with the folkorization of culture” (62). According to Arrizón’s study of Niggli’s work, the Mexican American playwright took part in the “intellectual search for community that characterized the emerging upper and middle classes” (43).

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tured a federal prisoner, the Rich One. In addition to signaling to approaching federal troops with the help of a mirror that Cricket procured for him, the prisoner also attempts to seduce young and innocent Adelita. At the end of the play, the federal soldiers are so close to the camp that the only way to save the other women as well as the ammunition is to throw a bomb down the mountain and into the valley. Whoever throws the bomb will also die in the endeavor. Concha originally intends for Cricket to throw the bomb, as punishment for her greed and betrayal. Yet as the women are fighting, Adelita grabs the bomb and throws it down the mountain path. Adelita dies, with the sun shining on her face. The women are safe now, yet it remains ambiguous whether Adelita’s heroic sacrifice merely confirms the dominant narrative of the Mexican Revolution, as it would in Dromundo’s narrative, or her death becomes an act of counterwriting. The play reveals that this ambiguous negotiation between a dominant narrative and a radical counternarrative is the only way to perform the stories and histories of the soldaderas without turning them into another symbol that bears no relationship to their lives and experiences. In the explosion, the symbol clashes with what it conceals. Niggli herself defined “true” soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution as fearless women in María Teresa León’s sense. They were “women for whom there was no blazing patriotic fire.” They were “broken shells whose only desire was revenge for all they had suffered during those horror-ridden years before 1910. For them there was no beautiful past, no glorious future. Their only consolation was to weep over the graves of their dead. Unfortunately there are no graves for dead dreams.”31 Needless to say, Niggli’s play must negotiate with the already established myths and stereotypes, since they, in many ways, are the only sources from which she can draw information. Yet the young, illiterate, and to an extent innocent Adelita is also using her body to articulate a counternarrative. Unable to use the written word in order to tell her story, Adelita’s body, as it is reduced to thunder and bones in the explosion, becomes Adelita’s text. Whereas Dromundo’s Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” reinscribes these stereotypes with what Miriam Cooke calls “mythic war time roles,” Soldadera contests such roles because Niggli situates her characters in a crucial moment of violence and struggle. In most canonical representations, the soldaderas are but a background to the revolution, and the revolution is but a background in the lives of the soldaderas, but the women’s experiences in Niggli’s play intersect with the battles, the violence, and 31. Usigli, “Playmaker of Mexico,” x.

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the disillusion of the revolution. Instead of wanting to save lives, some of the soldaderas seem to disregard life. Further, they do not shy away from the use of violence and even killing with their own hands. The play begins as the federal prisoner tries to escape and María shoots him, wounding, but not killing, the man. Tomasa, an old soldadera, comments: “‘If we’d killed him when Concha first brought him in we could have slept for another hour this morning.’”32 Not only is it the prisoner’s life that is worth less than a good hour of sleep, but the lives of the soldaderas themselves—with the possible exception of the leader Concha and Adelita—are also just slightly more valuable at best, as the following exchange shows: THE BLOND ONE. (As she lights the cigarette, she asks curiously but without much concern.) “I wonder if he did kill The Old One?” MARÍA. (Shrugs.) “What is the difference? All she did was grumble anyway. If Hilario didn’t have such a kind heart he’d have gotten rid of her long ago.” (9)

Yet the disregard for life and death, together with the violence that permeates the words of the soldaderas, does not mean that Niggli’s characters are essentially evil or bloodthirsty femmes fatales, as representations of women who participate in revolutions and wars often suggest. Instead, the soldaderas in Niggli’s play, following Rosi Braidotti’s thoughts on nomadic violence, “inhabit the man-made world as a prolonged, painful form of self-estrangement and are capable of outbursts of great violence as a consequence.”33 Cricket, the promiscuous soldadera, probably drawn from the corrido “La Cucaracha,” dreams of and reminisces about moments of violence and murder. While cucaracha literally means cockroach and not cricket, the female character that appears in the corrido of the same name bears certain resemblances to Niggli’s character. Just like Cricket, La Cucaracha is constantly in trouble, yet her problems have little to do with the emancipating possibilities of the revolution.34 32. Niggli, Soldadera, 9. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text. 33. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminism, 28. The “Flintenweib,” the castrating rifle woman Klaus Theweleit describes in Male Fantasies, also comes to mind. Theweleit associates images and descriptions of women bearing arms with “an image of terrifying sexual potency. It is a phallic, not a vaginal potency that is fantasized and feared” (73). Interestingly enough, the few gunslinging soldaderas that appear in the literature of the Mexican Revolution, among them Mariano Azuela’s La Pintada in The Underdogs (1915) and Angustias Farrera in Francisco Rojas González’s Negra Angustias (1945), are quickly punished or domesticated or both before their castrating rampage can do too much damage. 34. Innumerable different versions of “La Cucaracha” were sung in Mexico as early as the nineteenth century, during the French intervention. Similar to “La Adelita,” “La Cucaracha” was pop-

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In an early moment of the play, Niggli’s Cricket is still dreaming, but in her sleep she says: “‘Kiss me again, you brown-eyed devil, or I’ll break my knife off in your stomach’ ” (7). It goes without saying that her threat to kill this browneyed devil mirrors sexual threats to women. However, Cricket’s promiscuity, as well as her predisposition to use her knife, does not come out of nowhere. In a later scene, she reveals that she was raped at only fourteen, yet still managed to kill one of her attackers: “ ‘The only thing that ever happened to me was when the Rich Ones carried me off on my fourteenth saint’s day. They brought me back quick enough, so I can tell you.’ (She sighs.) ‘One of them used soap that smells like violets. Every time I smell a violet now I can remember the feel of my knife going into his stomach. Oh, well, the poor sinner’s getting more rest than I am—be damned to him!’” (26). With the exception of Adelita, all the women have experienced the violence of the revolution: Tomasa and the Old One lost their sons. The Old One’s son was crucified, whereas Tomasa’s son was chased to death by starving dogs. THE OLD ONE. (As if she were seeing enacted in front of her this story out of the past. The spell of common suffering has bound the women’s attention to her.) “When I had reached the place, they had crucified him—put nails through his hands and fastened him against a door. He was looking up at heaven—. I closed his eyes, and then his head dropped down as though he were hunting for my breast. Like a little baby he was...” TOMASA. (Laughs grimly.) “They were good to my son. They gave him ten paces ahead of a starved pack of dogs. When I found him there was nothing left but bones. The little Rich squirts told me to make soup out of them.” (15)

Revenge seems to be behind the women’s dreams. Torturing the federal prisoner to death becomes the sole outlet for them to act in the violent world they inhabit. This becomes clear in Tomasa’s next statement: “ ‘I want to think of him’ (referring to her son) ‘all the time, and every moment I think of him, I want to have a Rich One between my hands’ ” (10). Having a Rich One in her hands is no easy task for Tomasa. Not only do the women inhabit a violent world, but to make matters more complicated, as soldaderas they are condemned always to be at the receiving end of violence as well. It is their task, after all, to guard the

ular among most revolutionary troops; there were federal, villista, carrancista, and zapatista versions of the corrido. What they have in common, however, is that just like Cricket in Soldadera, La Cucaracha leads a life of debauchery and vice and is always running out of either marijuana or money.

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ammunition and the prisoner, who appears to be the first and possibly only potential victim of the women’s desire for retribution. As the Old One, María, and Cricket comment, Hilario does not allow the women to fight, to participate in battle. Instead, it is their job to “mold his bullets for him,” “guard his ammunition for him,” and “keep a prisoner for him” (12, 13). Thus, when the time comes to discuss the way in which the prisoner is to be executed, a bullet in his head, a quick death, is just not an option. “ ‘It’s Tomasa and the Old One,’” explains Concha herself to the prisoner. “‘They’ve suffered a lot from your kind, and Hilario never would let them play with any of his prisoners, so they’ve been looking forward to you’” (32). Tomasa, the Blond One, and the Old One also suggest different means of executing the prisoner: crucifying him, just like the son of the Old One; having him lay spread-eagled over a cactus plant, so that the sharp point will grow right through his heart; or, as Tomasa suggests, spreading honey on his body, so that ants will devour him. “‘A little honey on the eyelids and under his armpits and these little babies will soon make pretty holes in him. They’re nice large red ants.’ (As THE RICH ONE, a little sick, shuts his eyes and turns his face away from her.) ‘Look at him, shaking already. He’ll be screaming by tomorrow morning, like my son when the dogs were after him, bless his sweet soul in heaven’” (39). Yet Soldadera is much more than the staging of an eye-for-an-eye revenge. Instead, Niggli’s play suggests that death, torture, and violence were part of the soldaderas’ daily struggles, and this is precisely what is absent in the mythified Adelitas, as they appear in corridos and in Dromundo’s and García’s narratives. This is also what Niggli’s Adelita has not yet experienced but that Adelita’s encounter with the Rich One will radically change. Even though the Adelita introduced in the initial moments of Soldadera is neither promiscuous nor adventurous, she is still the Adelita with the heart of gold. Niggli describes her as “the poetry of the Revolution, and the beauty, and she who has seen almost nothing of death finds life very gay” (6). Adelita is horrified when she listens to the other soldaderas discuss what might be the best way of executing the prisoner. “‘I say you are animals, all of you—worse than animals. All you can think of are terrible things—things you shouldn’t think about—devil’s things.’” Adelita still idealizes the revolution and her role in it. She appears to be the Adelita of the corrido who has come to life. “‘You are making something ugly and horrible out of the Revolution. And it isn’t ugly—it’s beautiful!’” (41). Adelita’s innocence and her faith in a beautiful revolution are also what make her such easy prey for the Rich One. He makes her believe that she indeed is the

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Adelita of the corrido, the poetry of a revolution whose words only he knows, words that are unfamiliar and unintelligible to Adelita. He is the one who will have the right and the skills to write down the history of the revolution, while only Adelita’s death will allow her to enter the back door of a marginalized history of the same revolution. Whereas the prisoner has access to the written word, and thus to what one day will be found in history books, novels, and archives, all Adelita has is her own broken and at the same time politically inscribed body. Thunder and bones. The Rich One even manages to convince Adelita that since he can read and write, since he can identify and articulate the symbols of the revolution, he himself is a part of it, no matter what his origins are. Adelita at least seems to think so, as she tells Concha: “‘The man is different. He believes in the Revolution. Why, he even knows the words of the ADELITA’” (22). Adelita mistakes knowing the words of the ballad that bears her name for fighting the same cause she does, as though the Rich One’s capacity to read should endow him with the magic words that redeem him. And magic is precisely the word Concha uses when Adelita tells her that the prisoner has taught her to write her name. Adelita says proudly: “‘I can [write] now. See, I can write my name.’ (She writes it in the air as she pronounces the syllables, A-de-li-ta! As she crosses the ‘t’ and dots the ‘i’ she laughs up at CONCHA.)” (21). Concha then replies, with mock surprise, “‘Who taught you such magic?’” (21). Concha knows that there is clearly nothing magical to being able to spell the name Adelita or knowing by heart the words to the corrido. There is no hidden meaning; as a matter of fact, the meaning is quite explicit: the Rich One can shift positions—in Adelita’s eyes he can become someone who believes in the revolution, in her cause. Yet Adelita is unable to move beyond the symbolism that has inscribed her. Indeed, this particular scene foreshadows her death: Adelita is already writing with her body, in this case, her bare fingers, in the air. She will never learn to write with a pen and paper, only with her own body, and it remains an open question whether this particular kind of “writing” or “rendering the body graphematic” actually challenges the lies of the Rich One. This becomes clear in Adelita’s conversation with Concha, when she reveals the ways in which the prisoner has been attempting to seduce her: CONCHA.

(Suspiciously.) “What else has he told you?” “Oh, he uses a lot of words. I don’t know what they mean, but they sound so beautiful. He said I made him think of red wine in an amber glass. What is amber?”

ADELITA.

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Death Stories CONCHA. “I don’t know.” (Narrows her eyes.) “So he talks about you a lot, does

he?” ADELITA.

“Ay, yes. He says that when all the soldiers sing the verses of my name, they think of me.” (She laughs.) “But that is foolish. I don’t know all the soldiers.” CONCHA. “He seems to be a very clever young man. I think I had better have a little talk with this Rich One.” (22)

Adelita’s life has nothing to do with red wine in amber glasses or other beautiful lies. Instead, hers is full of violence and death to such an extent that an hour of sleep appears to be worth more than life itself. The symbol Adelita and the character Adelita clash in Josephina Niggli’s play. On the one hand, she is a symbol, as the prisoner himself tells her when he claims that all the soldiers sing the corrido “La Adelita.” On the other hand, she is also a young, poor woman who will never have the chance to tell her own story. She is the woman who removes herself from the battlefield so that the revolution can go on, sacrificing her own life for the sake of revolution and disappearing behind a symbol of idealized Mexican femininity that has been lurking in the shadows all along. In this sense, the character Adelita echoes another literary soldadera, young Camila in Mariano Azuela’s book The Underdogs. Similar to Camila, Adelita is also young and innocent. Moreover, the inherent goodness of both soldaderas contrasts with the greed, frivolity, and bitterness of their counterparts, La Pintada in The Underdogs and Cricket in Soldadera. Also, both women are deceived by educated, selfish, and ultimately evil men: Luis Cervantes seduces and betrays Camila in Azuela’s novel, and the Rich One betrays Adelita in Niggli’s play. In both cases, the men’s education, their fine manners, and particularly their access to the magic of the written word are what make them so attractive in the young soldaderas’ eyes and hearts. Finally, in both texts the corrido “La Adelita” plays a crucial role, as it becomes an anthem that transports the reality of revolution, violence, and war into romantic dreams for Camila and Adelita. In The Underdogs, Camila asks Cervantes to sing the corrido, so she can remember the words and think of him, as though she wanted to become the abnegated and selfless lady who awaits the safe return of her beloved soldier. “‘Hey, curro, . . . I wanted to tell you something . . . Listen, curro; I want you to teach me ‘La Adelita’ . . . so I can . . . I bet you don’t know why? . . . Well, so I can sing it lots of times, lots, when you aren’t here anymore, . . . when you’re so far, far away . . . that you don’t remember me anymore.’”35 35. Azuela, The Underdogs, 30.

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It is here also, where these striking similarities end, since the promiscuous and untrustworthy La Pintada murders innocent and self-sacrificing Camila. Niggli’s Adelita takes her fate into her own hands, as though it were a pen to write her ghostly story. In the crucial moment of the play, when the federal soldiers are about to invade the camp, Adelita takes the bomb, throwing herself against the enemies and down the mountain path. She calls out: “‘This is the Revolution! The sun will shine in my face!’” Her last words are “‘Long live the Revolution’” (45). Earlier in the play, as the other women were discussing different ways to torture and kill the prisoner, Adelita protested: “‘What do you know about the Revolution? It’s beautiful, it’s glorious, it’s heroic. It’s giving all you’ve got to freedom. It’s dying with the sun in your face, not being eaten to death by little red ants in a bottle. If this is your Revolution, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it’” (42). Adelita herself says so: for her, the revolution means dying with the sun shining on her face. Adelita is a symbol, yet the play in itself does not seem to allow for such a one-dimensional character. Concha is well aware that Adelita has died for a beautiful lie and says bitterly: “‘Aren’t you glad? Aren’t you happy? Hilario can fight now for the Revolution’” (45). Then she forces the other women to sing the corrido “La Adelita.” First the women sing: “‘If Adelita should go with another / If Adelita should leave me all alone.’” Yet the last verses are not those one might expect: “‘I would follow in a boat made of thunder / I would follow in a train made of bone’” (46). The thunder of the explosion and the bones of all the dead bodies are all that is left of Adelita, mere fragments of a story that she never had the chance to tell. And this is also the exact point that is missing, I would argue, in Alicia Arrizón’s analysis of the play. She is mainly interested in Niggli’s “bi-sensibility that transformed two separate cultures into a new synthesis” and suggests that what lies beneath the complexities of the characters in Soldadera is this sensibility as well as her feminist consciousness.36 Consequently, according to Arrizón, Niggli idealizes Adelita, turning her again into a courageous and strong symbol. Arrizón also understands Adelita’s suicide at the end of the play in these terms. “This event represents Niggli’s idealization of Adelita’s character, the dramatist’s sense of poetic justice makes Adelita the symbol of the revolutionary cause. Beyond Niggli’s romantic metaphors, however, lies her rich ideological and feminist consciousness.”37 Yet the character’s sacrifice 36. Arrizón, Latina Performance, 59. 37. Ibid., 59.

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speaks to much more than a sense of poetic justice. Rather, it represents a moment when three crucial issues intersect: writing and illiteracy, the soldaderas’ exposure to the violence as well as the emancipatory possibilities of the revolution, and finally the multiple meanings involved in the heroine’s death. Arrizón mentions that the play closes with a final performance of the corrido “La Adelita,” yet her comments ignore the references to violence, destruction, and fragmentation that are inherent in this particular version of the corrido: the explosion that suggests that any attempt to reconstruct the stories and histories that the mythical Adelita conceals will result only in silences, fragmented narratives, thunder, and bones. Like the voices in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Adelita’s voice is a voice of death. She is constructing a counternarrative with her own body, since she does not have access to the written word. Still, can Adelita be heard? As already anticipated, this reading is indebted to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s description of the suicide of a young woman from Calcutta that appears in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as well as in the chapter “History” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. A closer analysis of the death of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri will further illustrate this point. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak ends with a reference to Bhaduri’s death, a matter she takes up again in the chapter of her later book. Even though the circumstances of Bhaduri’s death might allow us to read it as a subalternist rewriting of the suttee, Spivak contends that this particular reading cannot rid itself of, and as a matter of fact emerges out of, hegemonic patriarchal notions in certain Hindu traditions. Even when suicide seems to be the sole form of a subalternist writing, Bhaduri’s death is still part and parcel of a dominant narrative. “The subaltern female cannot be heard or read.”38 Bhaduri hung herself in Calcutta in 1926. The subversive potential of her suicide resides in the fact that she waited for her menstruation, so that the cause of her death would not be understood as an illicit pregnancy. Bhaduri had been involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence and had been entrusted with a political assassination that she did not feel able to confront. She decided to kill herself, taking with her this political secret. Her suicide and her waiting for the onset of menstruation might suggest that she is rewriting the suttee, displacing “the interdict against a menstruating widow’s right to immolate herself; the unclean widow must wait, publicly, until the cleansing bath of the fourth day, when she is no longer menstruating, in order to claim her dubious privilege.”39 38. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 104. 39. Ibid.

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Bhaduri’s blood, her impure corporeality, prevents her from being a suttee, a good wife. However, this attempt to articulate a counternarrative with an already inscribed trope (menstrual blood) fails. Spivak argues that Bhaduri’s suicide is not a radical, subaltern rewriting of the suttee. Rather, the woman’s suicide still emerges from a particular patriarchal tradition that the independence movement does not challenge but instead perpetuates. Moreover, the fact that even younger female generations of Bhaduri’s family do not deem her to be worthy of remembrance is what made Spivak suggest at first that even though the subaltern’s use of her own body might articulate a counternarrative, this narrative might not be heard. Voluntary death seems to be the only way of entering a particular narrative, be it Indian independence or the Mexican Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. Yet a voluntary or even voluntary and heroic death challenges only the political imagery that inscribed a female revolutionary’s dead body up to a certain point: it is very easy to read this death exclusively within the dominant frame that leaves no room for the woman’s free choice or agency. This is where women’s writing comes in, since women’s writing opens the exact possibility to see these deaths not only as a reiteration of dominant narratives but also as possible forms of counterwriting. The gendered subaltern subject emerges from this clash or crash, like the Phoenix emerging from its own ashes, only to disappear again in the thunder and bones of the explosion. One certainly has to consider here that we are talking about different contexts. Whereas Spivak refers to moments in the history of colonial India, Soldadera is a fictitious play of the Mexican Revolution, written in the United States. However, even though the actual play is fictional, the myth of Adelita lies at the crossroads of history and fiction. As mentioned earlier, Niggli’s use of the name Adelita is no accident. The soldaderas become the “Adelitas”; the histories and voices of an extremely heterogeneous group of women who played a preponderant role in the revolution are reduced from stories about war, revolution, and survival to love stories. In calling her character Adelita, Niggli is engaging with the ways in which women’s participation has been epitomized in one particular figure that has taken the place of women’s stories and histories about revolution and war. Niggli’s use of the name Adelita makes Soldadera historical. Still, the fact that the boundaries between fiction and history may be challenged does not mean that Bhaduri’s death and Adelita’s death are merely two sides of the same coin. In the Indian case, the woman’s agency is trapped in the interstices between patriarchy and imperial discourse; both the patriarchal traditions and the metropolis are defining what is certainly not a free choice. At the same time, and especially considering

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Bhaduri’s suicide, it is important to bear in mind that we are not just talking about two hermetic and monolithic discourses that clash in the colonial encounter, but rather about patriarchal traditions, imperial discourse, the writing of history, and nationalism that come together like the sticky threads of a spider’s web that have entrapped Bhaduri’s dead body. In the case of the Mexican Revolution and Niggli’s text, Adelita’s free choice to die vanishes between patriarchal traditions and a narrative of the revolution, in which women are present but where the emancipating possibilities of the revolution are always effaced. Adelita’s death is at the same time resistance and accommodation to the dominant narratives of the Mexican Revolution. And this is the precise question the play addresses. Both Bhaduri and Adelita die so that secrets can be kept, so that a struggle that would quickly forget women’s participation and women’s deaths in combat can go on. Further, it is impossible to retrieve Adelita’s act as an exercise of her free will or agency. As a matter of fact, her death is part and parcel of the “oppressive myth” that haunts the memory of the soldaderas. The point is that the play does not resolve the ambiguity between an act of counterwriting and a heroic sacrifice that is part of the dominant narrative of the Mexican Revolution. And this is precisely all it can do with the thunder and the bones that are left at the end of the play. Like Adelita’s broken body, the play also leaves a lingering question: can death be an act of counterwriting? This aporetic moment at the center of a text written by a woman and about revolutionary women is not exclusive to women’s participation and representation in the Mexican Revolution, but as a matter of fact marks a general pattern that is part of the discursive construction of women’s representation in revolutionary struggles. The examination of female images in popular poetry and the transmutations of them in the death story of the “Trece Rosas” aims to prove exactly this point.

14 T h e “ Tr e c e R o s a s ” a n d Other Death Stories

Popular Heroines On the night of August 5, 1939, a group of women, incarcerated at the Ventas Prison in Madrid, became the “Trece Rosas.” Their story appears over and over again in poems that pay homage to the young women’s deaths, in women’s memory texts from postwar Spain, as well as two recent novels, Dulce Chacón’s Sleeping Voice and Jesús Ferrero’s Trece Rosas. In the most comprehensive article written on this death story, Jacobo García Blanco-Cicerón explains that on August 5, only eleven women were executed, but that imprisoned members of the socialist and communist opposition named them “Trece Rosas” when two other women were executed shortly afterward. According to García Blanco-Cicerón, not all of them were minors: Carmen was twenty-four years old, Blanquita twenty-nine, and Pilar was between thirty and thirty-two.1 Although marginal in dominant historiographies of the Spanish Civil War, the story of the Trece Rosas appears, albeit with slight differences, in a number of memoirs and oral histories of leftist women who were either imprisoned or exiled in the immediate aftermath of the war. Moreover, the execution of the minors, the choice of the name, and the poems written on their deaths represent a crucial moment in which literary conventions and oral traditions intersect, creating a narrative that oscillates between resistance and accommodation to dominant myths and narratives. Identifying this exact process is the first goal of this chapter; reading the conflicts among acceptable icons, images, and tropes and 1. Chacón’s and Ferrero’s novels will be discussed in Chapter 7. See García Blanco-Cicerón, “Asesinato legal (5 de agosto de 1939): Las ‘Trece Rosas.’”

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the traces of the itineraries of gendered subjects that remain in this “death story” of the Spanish Civil War is its second goal. In order to accomplish such a task, this chapter traces the representation of rojas (revolutionary women of the Republican Left) and milicianas in different texts and genres, focusing mainly on poetry, memoirs, and oral histories. The death stories of Lina Odena, a Communist activist and miliciana who took her own life after being stranded in enemy territory, and Encarnación Jiménez, a laundress who was executed after having washed clothes belonging to Republican milicianos, are part and parcel of a system of representation that, on the one hand, allows for the construction of popular heroines who died for the Spanish republic but, on the other hand, reinforces traditional gender roles and rules, thereby erasing women’s active participation in combat and even in politics. Moreover, the death story of the Trece Rosas emerges from the same discursive battlefields that already permeated the constructions of these earlier narratives of women’s heroic deaths. It goes without saying that one of the consequences of the defeat of the Spanish republic in the civil war was the complete criminalization and even demonization of all the men and women who fought for the vanquished side. Thus, in the years that followed the war, the heroines of the republic never became national symbols of idealized femininity, as did the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution. This does not mean, however, that during the relatively short time period when rojas or milicianas were considered heroines that they were more complex or “real” figures than the mythical soldaderas, accurately reflecting women’s struggles. Mary Nash explains that an analysis of these figures is indispensable in order to understand the ways in which gender roles operate and how these later become part and parcel of an accepted, if not official, history.2 Lina Odena’s activism in the Communist Party alone would never have made her a subject of the romances that were published in El Mono Azul, as only her death allowed her presence in that corpus. Encarnación Jiménez’s name is known only because she was executed in the early months of the war and quickly became a subject of several poems in the Romancero. It is in this interstitial space, between history and literature, where the back door to history and to remem2. In the essay “Un/Contested Identities: Motherhood, Sex Reform, and the Modernization of Gender Identity in Early-Twentieth-Century Spain,” Nash argues: “Gender identities are, to a large extent, consolidated and disseminated through images of women. These models of femininity become decisive manifestations of informal social control and help channel women into historically constructed gendered relationships” (26).

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brance swings open for a brief instance, only long enough to recognize the clash between the role that a heroic death forces these women to play and the stories that their execution erases from history and memory. Lina Odena and Encarnación Jiménez were not the only heroines that appeared in the popular poetry of the civil war. Yet out of reasons that will soon become obvious, I choose to focus on these two figures. Of course, this does not mean that the (death) stories surrounding other popular heroines are any less complex. The already mentioned Rosario Sánchez Mora was a young miliciana who, like the Trece Rosas, belonged to the JSU and later decided to join the front. After losing her right hand in a military exercise, she met poet Miguel Hernández, who wrote a poem titled “Rosario, Dinamitera.” The images in this particular poem are strikingly similar to those that appear in the poems written on the occasion of the deaths of the Trece Rosas. Aida Lafuente was a young Communist activist, shot by the repressive forces of the government, during the miners’ uprising in Asturias in 1934. Even though her death preceded the war, she usually appears grouped together with the other heroines of the Republican Left. Moreover, even though all these figures became heroines of the republic, the circumstances of their deaths (or their wounding) are often hardly comparable: whereas Lina Odena took her own life, Encarnación Jiménez was executed, Rosario Sánchez Mora lost a limb in a training exercise, and Aida Lafuente died in combat. What remains comparable, however, is the discursive construction of these popular heroines in civil war poetry; the images, metaphors, and tropes used in the poems written to honor these women’s sacrifice—as the well as the sacrifice of the Trece Rosas— are strikingly similar, as they all emerge from what Daniel James has called the same “discursive landscape.”3 The fact that a suicide, an execution, an injury, and a death in combat are therefore made analogous is, without a doubt, problematic. Once again, women’s heterogeneous experiences in the civil war and the years of revolutionary struggle that preceded the conflict are reduced to recurrent images and symbols that ultimately stand for something else. The cultural representation of the milicianas again proves exactly this point. As explained in Part I, officially milicianas were present at the front in only the first seven months of combat, yet this was certainly enough time to turn milicianas into either positive or negative myths. In other words, nothing could be further from the truth than claiming that representations from the republic are articulated exclusively as discourses of emancipation, while only the representations 3. James, “Poetry, Labour, and Sexuality,” 141–42.

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from the Nationalists carried out the domestication of revolutionary women. Although the official rhetoric of the Francoist regime, established after the Nationalist victory in 1939, certainly continued diffusing domesticating and also demonizing stereotypes about rojas and milicianas, such images originated in the discursive battlefields of the civil war. Yet it is in the cultural production of the Republican Left—mainly wartime posters and popular poetry—that the conflict between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication becomes prevalent. In the three years that the war lasted, we can observe a process similar to the one outlined in the previous section: women’s experiences in revolution and war, this is to say, the daily violence and the emancipatory possibilities that participation in the struggle implied, are concealed by symbols and figures that within the paradigms of Republican cultural production are perfectly acceptable. Different instances of women’s writing—in particular, the writing on the Trece Rosas—show the ways in which this process has taken place, revealing that the only possibility of articulating is by means of already available metaphors, symbols, and tropes. The complexities and challenges that women’s presence on the battlefields entailed do not appear, with very few exceptions, in posters or poetry.4 Nevertheless, the figures and images that come across in these different genres become part of the discursive battlefields from which an image like the Trece Rosas originates. Such discursive battlefields consist of poems, letters, and a few other texts that narrate women’s heroic deaths during the war, as well as a series of discursive conventions that marked the development of Republican wartime cultural production. A soldier’s heroic death in battle, a classic paradigm in wartime poetry, is a recurrent theme in the romances of the civil war, yet once these martyrs are female, this same theme is derailed. A hero’s death is not such; instead, it represents a path toward immortality, and the soldier’s death becomes an excuse for a reflection on the war itself. Alun Kenwood explains that on occasions, regeneration, closely associated with nature (one could even say a female, fertile nature), becomes a crucial motif in elegiac poems.5 4. It is important to differentiate the milicianas that appear in these posters from the female figures that appear in poetry. In “Testimonio visual,” Greene emphasizes that even though the heroism of certain milicianas was fairly attractive subject matter for a series of poets in the first months of war, most representations of women in poetry are more akin to a second wave of wartime posters, which portray women in one of two ways: they either perform traditionally supportive roles or become the most explicit victims of the evil menaces of fascism (129). 5. Kenwood asserts in “Art, Propaganda, Commitment: Hispanic Literature and the War”: “Writers expressed a belief in the regeneration of the death through the recurrent process of na-

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This motif becomes particularly prevalent in the poems on the Trece Rosas. Even though there are a number of recurrent themes in all of Spanish Civil War poetry, and maybe even in all of war poetry itself, the obsessive repetition of three feminized metaphors—flowers, stars, and, of course, roses—in those few poems that describe the deaths (and injuries) of women is remarkable. Flowers, stars, and roses serve to bridge the gap between the masculine discourse that informed the aforementioned motifs and the uncommon situation of a woman’s life and death in war. In contrast with the peasant who is bonded to the earth, women who died heroic deaths become maternal soil, the fertile source of new life, again reflecting more traditional gender roles. It might therefore not be far-fetched to say that the women who witnessed the deaths of the Trece Rosas gather the images and metaphors from such poems as those written to commemorate the deaths of Encarnación Jiménez and Lina Odena.

Lina Odena’s Death Story Lina Odena was a young Catalonian activist in the Communist Party. Of working-class background, she was a seamstress who had her first encounter with the Communist Party in 1931. She quickly became a militant, working for women and youth. In 1932, Odena traveled to the Soviet Union to further her political formation. She had been a leader of the JSU and the secretary-general of the National Committee of Antifascist Women. Upon her return from Moscow, Odena’s political commitment increased. She became a renowned speaker and activist, devoted to the Communist Party of Catalonia. The outbreak of the war finds Lina Odena in Almería, where she was attending a congress on the unification of Socialist and Communist youth (the JSU, the group to which the “Trece Rosas” also belonged). In spite of the military superiority of the National forces that had taken Granada, Sevilla, and Córdoba, the struggle was not over, and Lina Odena remained in Andalusia. She became the representative of the local Committee of the Communist Party and remained in the South the last two months of her life, with only two brief escapes to Madrid and her native Barcelona. On September 13, 1936, Odena met her death while she was traveling along the different front lines. It is unclear what her exact mission was; she did travel with credentials from the newspaper Mundo Obrero (Worker’s World), even though she was not a war correspondent. Chances are ture. Man and land were one since the peasant was bonded to the earth he had tilled all his life” (The Spanish Civil War: A Cultural and Historical Reader, 35).

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that traveling undercover as a journalist made it easier for her to contact the different, often very divided, militias. Some sources speculate that Odena was trying to organize an attack on the Nationalist lines, yet the known facts regarding her untimely death are few. Apparently, her driver took a wrong turn, crossing the lines that divided Republican from Nationalist territory. Finding herself at the mercy of her enemies once the car was stopped at a roadblock, Lina Odena shot herself. Her burial was at the cemetery of Granada on September 14, 1936, yet what remains of this death story are myths and legends that quickly turned the young miliciana into a popular heroine.6 Even though a number of political writings from the era pay homage to Lina Odena’s life as an activist, only her death allowed the miliciana to become part of the Romancero. The poems dedicated to her memory transformed Lina Odena’s enigmatic death into a heroic, albeit gendered, act. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know whether the young militia woman actually did fire her last bullets when she encountered the Nationalists, yet most poems represent her as a heroine who died fighting in action. Moreover, her death is represented in classical heroic fashion: Lina Odena might be dead, yet all poems promise that she will live on in the struggle against the enemy. Yet in all poems, the authors adapt traditional masculine heroic patterns and articulate Odena’s death in traditional feminized metaphors, tropes, and images. An analysis of the references to rape in the poems written on the death of Lina Odena shows that even though she might die like a male hero, the fact that she tries to protect herself from sexual predators renders her death feminine. Briefly, the constant menace of rape turns her heroic demise into a symbolic return to the private and domestic domain. She dies to guard her honor as a woman, revealing that her presence on the battlefield was always already questionable and eccentric. In “A Lina Odena, muerta entre Guadix y Granada” (To Lina Odena, Dead between Guadix and Granada), a poem that José Pla y Bertrán published in El Mono Azul in 1936, Odena’s death is a path toward immortalized memory. Yet she also becomes a “fresh rose” (fresca rosa) or a “flower of a moistened stem” (flor de humecido talle), feminized images that undoubtedly allude to Odena’s youth and innocence, which coexist alongside her courage and heroism, as the last two verses of the poem indicate: “Nobody will be able to forget you: / From 6. Antonio Gascón and Manuel Moreno, eds., Lina Odena: Una mujer, 30, 31. The poems on Odena are cited from this book, and subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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Guadix to Granada, you broke your green stem!” (nadie ya podrá olvidarte: / Desde Guadix a Granada, quebraste tu verde talle, 56). Odena cannot and will not be forgotten, yet it is only death that allows her to be remembered. The same motif appears in Lorenzo Varela’s romance, where Lina Odena also becomes a protector of brides and mothers. You fell, Lina Odena, but not your liberties. From Málaga to Granada, land, wheat and olive fields, and the brides and the mothers no longer fear the criminals. (Tú caíste, Lina Odena, pero no tus libertades. Que de Málaga a Granada, tierra, trigos y olivares, y las novias y las madres no temen ya a criminales.) (58)

Odena’s death is also often related to one of Dolores Ibárruri’s most famous statements, “It is better to be the widows of heroes than the wives of cowards.”7 José Pla y Bertrán’s version of Odena’s death echoes La Pasionaria’s words, as the miliciana exclaims in the poem: “Alive you will not capture me, because I am a brave maiden / I’d rather die with honor than live like a coward!” (Viva no podréis cogerme, que soy moza de coraje / ¡Prefiero morir con honra, antes que vivir cobarde! 56). We find a similar reference in Eugenio Sastre’s “Romance a Lina Odena” (Ballad for Lina Odena), where the young woman also is a courageous woman who knows how to die with honor before living like a coward. (una mujer de coraje que supo morir de honra antes que vivir cobarde.) (60) 7. Paul Preston, ¡Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War, 293.

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The striking difference between La Pasionaria’s famous statement and these verses is that here the woman is not choosing between a courageous or cowardly husband; Odena is choosing between life and death. Yet despite Odena’s undeniable heroic status, the different poems of the Romancero still present her death in a gendered fashion. This becomes clear upon a closer exploration of the reasons that the different poems state to explain Odena’s suicide. In most poems, the authors suggest that Lina Odena shot herself to prevent being raped. Here, the menace of rape is an overwritten and codified act: these poems, instead of exploring the very real possibility of rape during wartime, use rape as a trope to explain an act as uncommon and unexpected as a woman’s suicide on the battlefield. Yet there is something more to it: in the poems, Lina Odena’s death is not only a gendered but also a racialized act. There is no historical proof that North African members of the Moorish troops that supported the Francoists were threatening Lina Odena’s life. Yet in most poems the presence of sexually threatening and demonized North African soldiers explains Odena’s choice to die.8 Poems written to commemorate the death of Lina Odena are certainly not the only civil war poems imbued with a racist fear of the Moorish invaders, yet the fact that here a racial stereotype is part and parcel of a domesticating discourse that conditions and even excludes Lina Odena from the battlefields is certainly remarkable. Both gender and racial stereotypes disavow the potential transgressions that the miliciana’s presence might have implied on the battlefields of the civil war: Lina Odena uses her last bullet to take her own life before the bloodthirsty North African soldiers rape her. In the already mentioned poem by Pla y Bertrán, twenty blood-starved soldiers besiege the young miliciana: Twenty Moors chase her armed with twenty knives. They carry the plague in the blood. (Veinte moros la persiguen armados de veinte alfanjes. Llevan la peste en la sangre.) (56) 8. In her article “De la inmigración marroquí a la invasión mora: Discursos pasados y presentes del (des)encuentro entre España y Marruecos,” Daniela Flesler explains that the presence of Moroccan soldiers in the Nationalist army was often interpreted to be “a new Arab invasion of Spain, caused by Franco’s treason of his land” (79).

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The situation is very similar in Alcazar Fernández’s “Romance a Lina Odena”: Do not move further, comrade! Do not move further, miliciana! The Moor is waiting for you starved for white flesh; even the beasts long to bite scented roses. (¡No avances más, compañera! ¡No avances más, miliciana! que el moro te está acechando hambriento de carne blanca; que hasta las bestias desean morder rosas perfumadas.) (60)

Finally, in Eugenio Sastre’s romance, Lina Odena kills herself before the “savages” can soil her honor: She killed herself not allowing the savages, to soil her honor in life, and stab her body. (Ella misma se mató no consintió que salvajes, mancharan su honor en vida, y su cuerpo apuñalasen.) (60)

Rape certainly was a serious threat for Lina Odena, and the comments on her death aim to highlight the very complexity that rape entails during times of revolution and war. Sexual violence was and is hardly uncommon in warfare, and following Susan Brownmiller, the threat of rape, “by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,” is “the quintessential act by which a male demonstrates to a female she is conquered—vanquished—by his superior strength and power.”9 The poems written about Lina Odena’s death reveal, however, the limits of Brownmiller’s argument. To go back to the image that inaugurates this book, one 9. Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, 5, 44.

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could assume that Lina Odena’s sole means to kill her fear is to kill herself. Yet the simultaneous act of killing this fear and killing herself also erases Lina Odena’s participation in combat. A woman’s death can be explained only once this constant fear Brownmiller talks about is alluded to. In Brownmiller’s study, as well as numerous others, the problem is that fear (of rape) is all encompassing, precluding the possibility of alternative narratives.10 Moreover, the racist representations of the North African soldiers that appear in these poems should not be taken lightly. Their presence performs two simultaneous tasks. First, the woman’s sexuality and vulnerability explain her choice to die in such a way that established gender (and race) roles remain unquestioned. It seems as though a woman cannot die in classic heroic fashion after all. This would prove Nancy Hartsock’s point, namely, that the hero’s fame and glory can be achieved only through a demonstration of masculine virtue.11 Second, outsiders punish the miliciana for her transgression, relieving the Spanish men from carrying out such an unfortunate endeavor. Vicente Aranda’s film Libertarias (1996) reiterates exactly the same pattern. At the end of the film, a group of milicianas is ordered to leave the front and take jobs as laundresses instead. The women refuse and remain at the front. Yet shortly afterward, a troop of Moroccan soldiers attack, rape, and brutally kill most of the milicianas. A Spanish general restores order to the violent scene, as he orders the African men to stop their raping and killing rampage.12 Even though most of the poems emphasize Odena’s integrity, courage, and innocence (this is also what such images as “fresca rosa” entail), the presence of the 10. In Maneuvers, Enloe explains that rapes are an “indistinguishable part of a poisonous wartime stew called ‘lootpillageandrape’” (109). Brownmiller’s analysis concurs with Enloe, yet she also grounds her argument in what she calls “the very maleness of the military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men in arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—[which] confirms for men what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the center ring” (Against Our Will, 25). 11. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power, 187. 12. In “Notes toward a Feminist Peace Politics,” Sara Ruddick avers that such constructions are part and parcel of a militarized masculinity: “Typically, masculinities are also divided between the enemy and ‘our troops.’ ‘We’ are just warrior-protectors. By contrast, a particularly malignant form of swaggering masculinity—a criminalized, sexualized aggression—is attributed to the enemy. When enemy males are racialized as predators from whom innocent countries of women-andchildren need protections, they become killable killers ready to be burned and buried in their trenches” (112). Within this militarized masculinity, women’s only possible role is to be a passive victim.

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menace of sexual violence in the poems can hardly be ignored. Odena has an additional burden to bear, her female, rapable body and, with that, the possibility of soiled honor. Here, sexual difference is clearly written into the battlefields. Consequently, even when women enter into the Romancero as heroines, they do so in a gendered manner, as images and symbols that reveal more about the ways in which these women’s presence on the battlefields is assimilated into dominant narrative than about women’s actual experiences in revolution and war. In this light, how heroic is Lina Odena’s death in these poems? On the one hand, she is outdoing even La Pasionaria herself by not being the hero’s widow: Odena herself is the heroine of her own story. Yet the sexual threat effaces her heroism: in her final moment, the miliciana does not die for a collective struggle; instead, her sexually violable body leaves her no other option than ending her life instead of continuing to fight for that same struggle. Thus, the woman’s heroic death restores gender roles, instead of obliterating them. The news of Lina Odena’s death was not only diffused in Republican publications: in a journalistic text written by Julio Belza, a member of the Falange who claims to have witnessed her death, Odena’s apparent suicide acquires a radically different meaning. Belza’s article appeared in the journal Historia y Vida (History and Life) in 1974. In sharp contrast to the Republican poems, Belza’s narrative renders Odena’s death senseless. He denies that the enemy ever threatened her. This possibility is quite unlikely if we consider that around the same time Encarnación Jiménez received the death penalty for washing the stained clothes of milicianos. Belza describes Lina Odena’s encounter with the Nationalist soldiers at the roadblock in the following terms: She was a woman, and that proper feeling of a gentleman, that respect man has for the female, that natural, invincible, Celtic-Iberian sexual attraction made them briefly forget the enemy, the miliciana, the one who was carrying a gun in her belt, to pay attention to the driver who was now the center of attention. They began searching him. The woman, a little behind the group, took advantage of this lapse and half-hidden behind the car she was able to take out her pistol, lean it on her temple and shoot. When they got to her, she was already dead. (Era una mujer y ese sentimiento hidalgo, ese respeto del hombre hacia la fémina, esa atracción del sexo, invencible, natural, celtibérica, les hizo olvidarse momentáneamente de la enemiga, de la miliciana, de que llevaba un pistolón al cinto, para dedicar su atención al conductor que además había quedado en un primer plano. Comenzaron a cachearlo. La mujer, un poco detrás del grupo aprovechó aquel descuido de sus aprehensores y medio oculta tras el coche

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Belza goes on to explain that Lina Odena was a journalist and that she had also been guilty of murdering a priest a few weeks earlier. The main goal of Belza’s narrative is to undo the heroine status of Lina Odena. In Belza’s words, she not only killed “with that inconceivable indifference that cinematographic fiction uses to represent street gang members in Chicago” (con esa inconcebible indiferencia con que la ficción cinematográfica nos presenta a los pandilleros de Chicago), but her death also becomes an act of cowardice instead of a heroic deed.14 Belza’s testimony should not be taken for granted, either. His language, as well as his claims that Odena was never threatened and that her suicide was a vulgar evasion, needs to be severely questioned. Undoubtedly, Lina Odena did have strong reasons to fear torture, rape, and even death had she remained a prisoner of the Nationalists. Lina Odena might be a popular heroine, yet her death story appears articulated in traditional tropes, metaphors, and images that reveal that her “free choice” to die emerged out of patriarchal structures and traditions. The comments on this “free choice” to die consciously refer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s death discussed in the previous chapter. Contrary to Bhaduri’s case, Odena’s suicide appears not as a conscious attempt to use her body in order to write a narrative that would challenge the gendered inscriptions of her death. However, similar to the Indian woman, Odena could not free herself from the gendered meanings that the authors of the different romances dedicated to her memory would bestow upon her death. Yet as problematic as these different poems and romances might be, they still represent the few available images (un)fit to describe women’s experiences and challenges on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War. The sections that follow will reveal the ways in which different women pieced together narratives of resistance using those fragmented and contradictory elements that come across in romances and poems like the ones just discussed. First, however, it is necessary to discuss another heroine’s death story.

Encarnación Jiménez’s Death Story In 1937, the Nationalist forces that at that point had seized power in southern Spain arrested Encarnación Jiménez. She received the death penalty and was 13. Belza quoted in Gascón and Moreno, Lina Odena: Una mujer, 52. 14. Ibid.

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executed shortly afterward. Her crime had been washing the bloodstained clothes of milicianos. Both Nationalists and Republicans gave the laundress a role to play: For the Nationalists that executed her, she was just another culprit, guilty of revolutionary insurgence. For the Republicans, and in particular for Republican poets, she became an immediate heroine and symbol, the innocent victim of ruthless, fascist violence. The fact that she was merely washing milicianos’ clothes, this is to say, the fact that unlike the milicianas Encarnación Jiménez never transgressed traditional gender roles, certainly emphasizes her innocence and at the same time the Nationalists’ cruelty. Located not too far from the battlefront (where women were not), but still on the home front, it was her task to make the violence, even the pain of war, disappear. Following Elaine Scarry, the main purpose and outcome of war are to injure bodies, but this self-evident fact often disappears from view, either by omission or by redescription. Thus, through these poems Encarnación Jiménez becomes an instrument of the “disowning of injuring” in war.15 In the poems dedicated to her memory, the bloodstains on the soldiers’ clothes clash with the laundress’s immaculately white skin. The woman’s blood, however, is never mentioned. Thus, the injuries, and with them the corporeality, of the subject who performs “the disowning of injuring” disappear in the woman’s death story. The most widely anthologized poem written on the occasion of Encarnación Jiménez’s death is a romance by Félix Paredes that appeared in the Romancero general de la Guerra Civil Española in 1937. Here, the tragic death of an innocent woman is used in order to emphasize the duplicity and mercilessness of the Nationalists. First and foremost, Jiménez is a victim. The romance contains numerous biblical references, yet the implication here is not only to condemn the Nationalists who commit acts of murder and violence in the name of religion. Such references also imply that Jiménez was performing traditionally female domestic chores. Paredes’s poem mainly aims to pass judgment on the state-sanctioned violence of the Nationalist crusade, and he does so by underscoring Jiménez’s innocence and her status as a lowly victim without the slightest political agency. Furthermore, the images and tropes in the poem certainly imply that the laundress was merely adhering to traditional gender roles. Paredes’s description of the laundress’s clean and white arms emphasizes her femininity, her innocence, and, last but not least, the division between the public and the domestic domain. In the poem, the laundress’s arms become 15. Scarry, Body in Pain, 64, 65–68.

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Not altogether differently from La Pasionaria, who became the symbolic mother of the Republican Left, Encarnación Jiménez became a maternal figure. Her act, her duty of literally washing away the blood that stained the men’s clothes, speaks for itself, as it reifies her and traps her within a role that is exclusively domestic, reflecting traditional gender discourse on domesticity, which, following Nash, “implied that domestic responsibilities were women’s exclusive duty. In this way, the cultural identity of women was not formulated through paid work but through the assumption of service inherent to the figure of a wife and a mother.” Even the battlefields of revolution and war do not seem to alter the persistent beliefs in these inherent qualities, which is clearly what comes across in this kind of cultural representation. Analyzing these poems, to move one step further, certainly shows that such beliefs are not challenged, but rather reinforced, in Republican wartime poetry. Even though Paredes criticizes “those who interpret the Christ” (los que interpretan al Cristo), the religious framing of this poem is quite clear. Encarnación is the suffering virginal mother who sacrifices everything for her “invincible boys” (invencibles chicos). Here, Paredes reflects a trait that is also common in war posters: the presence of religious symbols in a revolutionary context.17 In Paredes’s poem a female figure enters historical and literary memory, yet she does so by reflecting traditional gender roles and accentuating women’s traditional roles of passive victims in war. Between being a member of a conspiracy (the Nationalists’ version) and a voiceless maternal figure, Encarnación Jiménez’s life story disappears. The woman’s story cannot be retrieved, precisely because there is no story at all. Only her death, her lowly status as a victim of state-sanctioned violence, is worthy of remembrance. 16. Paredes quoted in César de Vicente Hernando, Poesía de la Guerra Civil Española, 1936–1939, 204–5. 17. Nash, “Un/Contested Identities,” 28; de Vicente Hernando, Poesía de la Guerra Civil, 204. Greene explains in “Testimonio visual” that this imagery is recurrent in certain posters from the Spanish Civil War, particularly those picturing nurses (128).

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Similar to Paredes’s poem, Rufino Sánchez’s romance, published in the journal Avanzando in 1937, also turns Encarnación Jiménez into a symbolic victim. Again, Jiménez becomes a symbol of purity and innocence that clashes with the brutality of her antagonists. She is represented through the use of traditional romantic and gendered metaphors and images, which also provide a sharp contrast to the demonized enemies. Moreover, her hands become roses that filled with perfume the bloody clothes of the fallen heroes. (rosas que llenaron de perfume las ensangrentadas ropas de los héroes caídos.)

As in the earlier poem, Jiménez is elevated to the status of universal mother or bride who moves beyond the ideological struggles fought out in the war, for she does not understand the ideological implications of the conflict. You, Encarnación, ignored it... You did not understand such a thing! Of course! A wounded man is a man you thought, tenderly. (Tú, Encarnación, lo ignorabas... ¡No comprendías tal cosa! ¡Claro! Un herido es un hombre pensabas tú cariñosa.)18

In the poem, Jiménez’s act is framed solely in terms of charity; she becomes the last remnant of goodness in the face of evil. The laundress is a symbol and victim of the Nationalists’ malice, which sharply contrasts with her inherent kindness. She has no political agency, as she does not understand the struggle that inscribes her death as a political act. Encarnación Jiménez is a silent victim, the subaltern subject on whose dead body the War Story is written. Encarnación Jiménez’s death story is so crucial because she is one of the few 18. Sánchez quoted in Antonio Ramos Gascón, El Romancero del Ejército Popular, 86–87.

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women that appear mentioned in the Romancero and because libertarian poet Lucía Sánchez Saornil wrote a poem about her. It is also important to point out here that Sánchez Saornil is one of the founding members of the anarchist group Mujeres Libres and that her work as a poet is absent from most discussions of wartime poetry. In contrast with the poets mentioned earlier, Sánchez Saornil consciously attempts to turn this “death story” into a “life story.” Bearing in mind my definition of the term death story, turning a death story into a life story necessarily implies speaking for the subaltern. However, even though Sánchez Saornil might reify the laundress’s story, turning her into yet another symbol, the poem still allows us to pose questions similar to those addressed in the discussion of Josephina Niggli’s play. The title of Sánchez Saornil’s romance speaks for itself, “Romance de la vida, pasión y muerte de la lavandera de Guadalmedina” (Ballad of the Life, Passion and Death of the Laundress from Guadalmedina).19 The references to Christian sacrifice that appear in the title are undermined by the story Sánchez Saornil is about to tell. In Rufino Sánchez’s romance, the land is personified, feeling the pain of Sánchez’s untimely death, which is, of course, a very common trope in the poetry of the Spanish Civil War: traditionally speaking, the hero’s death enables this identification with the land. Sánchez Saornil, however, identifies the river with Jiménez’s life: literally and figuratively speaking, the river is a reflection of the laundress’s hardship-filled life and her untimely death. Sánchez Saornil’s descriptions of the waters of the Guadalmedina do not reiterate the compassionate and domesticated vision of nature we have seen in other poems. Rather, the river itself is the scenario of the woman’s toiling or, more concretely, of the exploitation of women like Encarnación Jiménez. Farewell, hard shores that watched me, a slave my knee stooped on the earth, my back a worn-out arch, throwing into the current with inherited ignorance . . . ! (¡Adiós duras orillas que me miraron esclava la rodilla hincada en tierra, 19. The poem was first published in Mujeres Libres in 1937 and is reproduced in Mujeres Libres: Luchadoras libertarias. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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arco agobiado la espalda, arrojar la corriente con ignorancia heredada . . . !) (169)

The laundress’s ignorance is not the same inherent innocence and benevolence to which the other poets referred. In Sánchez Saornil’s poem, Jiménez’s lack of education becomes a political issue. She was never exposed to the opportunities that the kind of political emancipation and autonomy that Sánchez Saornil and Mujeres Libres defended would have provided her.20 Thus, the execution does not become a radical interruption of an otherwise innocent life, but instead is part and parcel of a woman’s destiny of exploitation that could have been avoided. Lucía Sánchez Saornil’s ballad shows that women’s subjugation (especially for the rural poor) did not magically disappear once the war broke out in Spain. Encarnación Jiménez might now be washing the clothes of milicianos instead of her former masters’ clothes—hardly a revolutionary change for the laundress. I exchanged the “masters’” clothes, fine and clear linens for milicianos’ clothes, dark and bloody. (Cambié ropas de “señores,” batistas finas y claras por ropas de miliciano, obscuras y ensangrentadas.) (170)

Maybe more than most of the other poems of the Spanish Civil War, Lucía Sánchez Saornil’s work is a call for revolution, suggesting that, unlike what Janet Pérez argues, all women’s poetry does not remain in the realm of the antiheroic.21 20. For more information on Mujeres Libres and the group’s politics, as well as Sánchez Saornil, see Martha Ackelsberg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women; and Nash, Defying Male Civilization. 21. In two essays, “Behind the Lines: The Spanish Civil War and Women Writers” and “Voces poéticas femeninas de la Guerra Civil Española,” Pérez argues that the work of women writers, be it narrative or poetry, tends to focus almost exclusively on the “non-ideological” and domestic aspects of the war. In the latter, she contends: “As though it had been agreed, the poets present the anti-heroic aspect: those who kill a child in the streets, or an old man in his chair, or the civil population in their homes are not brave” (276).

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Furthermore, a change, or a revolution unknown to Encarnación Jiménez, will eventually predetermine her destiny. Even though she claims that all she knew was that the milicianos whose clothes she washed “were flesh from my tormented flesh” (eran carne de mi carne atormentada), Encarnación Jiménez here is aware that hers is a politically inscribed death: “Damn my ignorance!” (¡Maldición de mi ignorancia! 170). Encarnación Jiménez is still a symbol, yet the fundamental difference in Sánchez Saornil’s work is that she does not represent the laundress as a merely innocent victim of fascism. Instead, she stands for oppressed and uneducated women whose lives and toils the promises of the Spanish republic never reached. Moreover, Sánchez Saornil’s romance implies that it is not just Encarnación Jiménez’s death that is politically inscribed. Rather, her whole life is now imbued with political and ideological meaning. Ultimately, the poem is a call for action, which by no means shies away from the use of violence. Poor of the world, come to her! Let the battle horn sound! Down with all codes, Let the flames run swiftly! ................ On your feet, poor of the world, Like a raging current! (Pobres del mundo, ¡acorredla! ¡Suene el clarín de batalla! ¡Abajo todos los códigos, corran veloces las llamas! ................ ¡En pie los pobres del mundo, en torrente desbordada!) (172)

Referring one last time to the river, now overflowing with the people’s rage, Sánchez Saornil uses Encarnación Jiménez’s death in order to protest women’s lack of education as well as a call for action. The point is not that women writers or poets like Lucía Sánchez Saornil are going to present radical counternarratives simply because they are women. Rather, in this particular poem the author engages with the moment when a heroic death allows the subaltern to enter literature, history, and memory. Encarnación Jiménez is a symbol, but as in the play

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discussed in the previous chapter, here the symbol clashes with what lies underneath—the subaltern, the hurting phantom limb. In the “Ballad of the Life, Passion and Death of the Laundress from Guadalmedina,” Sánchez Saornil claims that Encarnación Jiménez’s life and death are combat experiences. She is writing a war story that could radically challenge the dominant narratives (particularly as far as gender is concerned) that come across in the canonical Romancero general de la Guerra Civil Española. Yet the fact that even contemporary criticism of Spanish Civil War poetry chooses to ignore the work of poets like Sánchez Saornil contributes to the erasure of these alternative war stories. Needless to say, the preceding comments do not mean to imply that only female poets have the potential to radically rewrite the War Story or that heroism (and antiheroism) becomes a thorny issue exclusively in women’s poetry. Some of the issues that Sánchez Saornil raises also come across in César Vallejo’s España, aparta de mí este cáliz (Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me). In poem 3, Vallejo narrates the death story of Pedro Rojas, a railroad worker and political activist. Pedro Rojas may not have been as uneducated as Encarnación Jiménez: he knew how to write. Yet the worker’s written statements that Vallejo intersperses in the poem reveal two things: first, the spelling mistakes show that Pedro Rojas’s education certainly was limited, and second, acquiring these albeit limited skills is undoubtedly related to his involvement in the revolutionary struggle. Like Adelita, he also writes into the air, using his body: “He used to write on air with his thumb: ‘Long libe [sic] the compadres! Pedro Rojas!’” (Solía escribir con su dedo grande en el aire / “¡Viban las compañeros! Pedro Rojas!”). Even though Vallejo is a far more well-known writer than the ones earlier referred to, some of the already mentioned motifs appear again. Rojas is “husband and man, railroad worker and man, / father and more man. Pedro and his two deaths” (marido y hombre, ferroviario y hombre, / padre y más hombre. Pedro y sus dos muertes).22 Not unlike Lucía Sánchez Saornil, known as an anarchist activist and not as a poet, the well-known Peruvian poet also turns a death story into a life story. Pedro Rojas has a story only because he dies, yet in his poem Vallejo also puts forth that he was not just a martyr or a symbol of sacrifice. Death stories are by no means limited to female victims; neither are, of course, the often essentialist qualities such as “husband and man, railroad worker and man / father and more man” that heroes, heroines, and martyrs acquire in wartime poetry. Yet these very 22. I am quoting Alvaro Cardona-Hine’s translation of Vallejo’s poem (Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me, 22–23).

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brief comments on the death story of Pedro Rojas should confirm a fact that has often been taken for granted vis-à-vis the deaths of heroes in war but ignored when it comes to women’s sacrifice, namely, that multiple stories in which emancipation, agency, and violence collide lie beneath a heroic death. The subsequent section on the deaths of the Trece Rosas will further justify this fact.

The Deaths of the Trece Rosas At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the repression of the new dictatorial government represented a radical setback to women’s emancipation that had been possible in the previous years. Emulating the Nationalist discourse on gender, in the postwar era Francoist propaganda diffused the idea that politically active women were the ultimate culprits of the disasters of the civil war. In this climate of purging and political retribution, the fact that a group of thirteen (or eleven, the difference does not matter much) women were singled out and executed together is certainly no coincidence. The deaths of the minors took place only a few days after the assassination of Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Gabaldón and his daughter. Some sources suggest that the women were accused of participating in the murder of Gabaldón, even though they were already in prison when the assassination took place. The problem was not only that Gabaldón’s death needed a symbolic retribution. The minors were also targeted because of their youth, their gender, and their activism in the JSU.23 Other testimonies state that, together with other male members of the JSU, the women were accused of having participated in a conspiracy to end General Franco’s life on the day of the Victory Parade, May 18, 1939. Yet chances are that the women had been involved only in reestablishing contacts in order to regroup and reconstitute the JSU.24 Be that as it may, the deaths of the Trece Rosas were exemplary and politically inscribed executions. Militancy in a leftist party was an outright defiance of the gender roles and rules that the Francoist state had already established during the war and that relegated women to a controlled, domestic sphere. The executions of the Trece Rosas and the naming itself is therefore not an isolated incident, but a crucial moment in Spanish history where layers of mean23. See García Blanco-Cicerón, “Asesinato legal,” 12; José Manuel Sabín, Prisión y muerte en la España de la postguerra, 262; and Tomasa Cuevas, Prison of Women: Testimonies of War and Resistance in Spain, 1939–1975, 79. 24. Cuevas, Cárcel de mujeres, 19, 112.

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ing converge. As I mentioned in the beginning, the inconsistencies and ambiguities that surround the charges against the Trece Rosas suggest that their main crime had been their militancy in the JSU. Moreover, blaming the women for the death of an important member of the Civil Guard would kill two birds with one stone: the government sends out a strong message saying that it will not tolerate any kind of subversive, much less terrorist, activities, and the execution of young women is painlessly justified. Nevertheless, the Francoist writing of history that turns these women into scapegoats clashes with a resistance written in the few words that form the term Trece Rosas, the poems, and the oral testimonies. The earlier comments on wartime poetry reveal that when the name Trece Rosas was coined and when Rafaela González, Ángeles Ortega, and Flor Cernuda wrote their poems on the Trece Rosas, a number of tropes and images that described women’s heroism in the Spanish Civil War had already become part of the poetic language of the Republican Left. Naturally, it is impossible to prove that either González or Ortega knew of the poems about Lina Odena, Encarnación Jiménez, or other heroines of the republic. However, when the name, the poems, and the accounts of the last night of the Trece Rosas came into being, a particular mechanism took place. The authors of the name, poems, and testimonies drew from a number of preexisting images and tropes that came from a variety of sources, among them poetry, adjusting and shaping them to the particular situation of the deaths of the Trece Rosas. In other words, González, Ortega, and Cernuda dived into the discursive battlefields of the Republican Left. The obsessive repetition of the same metaphors, namely, flowers, stars, and particularly roses, suggests that the pool of images, tropes, and metaphors for politically active women during the revolution and war was fairly limited. Yet the gap was filled by using preexisting formulas for male heroic deeds and heroic deaths, as well as by supplementing them with more feminine images. It is in the use of these tropes, however, that we see their ambivalent function. Although the authors of the poems drew from a body of conventions, the name and the poem also function not only as a means of resistance against Francoism itself but also as a way to establish a counternarrative that bears witness to women’s violent deaths in the early years of the Francoist dictatorship. Rafaela González’s poem “Como mueren las estrellas” (How the Stars Die) was written shortly after the women’s deaths. The poem centers on two underlying motifs: an idealized nature and the possibility of regeneration. In González’s poem, thirteen roses “have been torn down from the eternal rose bush” (han tronchado del eterno rosal). The insistence on spring motifs implies regeneration and

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transcendence. The women might not have died in vain; they are now part of a history and a land that will not forget them. Furthermore, González insists on the innocence of the thirteen minors, using traditional symbols and images that accentuate their femininity: “thirteen stars” (trece estrellas), “thirteen virgins from the Temple of Freedom” (trece vestales del Templo de la Libertad), and, finally, “Virgins who in a white funeral procession, without letting out a scream / in death’s arms move toward eternity” (Vírgenes que en blanco cortejo, sin lanzar un grito / en brazos de la muerte van hacia el infinito).25 Religious symbols abound in González’s poems, and, similar to what occurs in other poems and wartime posters, these motifs suggest that the minors’ deaths were worthwhile sacrifices. It thereby attains meaning and coherence within the larger narrative of anti-Francoist resistance. Moreover, the term vírgenes undoubtedly emphasizes the purity and innocence of the thirteen minors. Unlike González, who wrote her poem in free verse, Ángeles Ortega used the much more traditional form of the sonnet, in her poem “A trece flores caídas” (To Thirteen Fallen Flowers). Ortega’s alliterative use of the number thirteen certainly implies the symbolic meaning associated with this particular number. As in the other poems, images of death, bitterness, and decay coexist with the hope for regeneration as well as a bond with nature. Also like the other poems, Ortega emphasizes the youth, innocence, and femininity of the minors: Thirteen flowers from thirteen lemon trees towards the valley where the wheat fields dry. Thirteen nymphs from thirteen springs who leave their song to the goldfinch. (Trece flores de trece limoneros hacia el valle que seca los trigales. Trece ninfas de trece manantiales que les ceden su canto a los jilgueros.)26

While the lemon trees of the first verse of this quartet might refer merely to the bitterness of the deaths of these thirteen minors, or might even suggest a certain geographical location, it is also possible that Ortega’s metaphor is a direct 25. González quoted in Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el Franquismo, 99. 26. Ortega quoted in Giuliana di Febo, Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España, 1936–1976, 98.

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reference to Federico García Lorca’s Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballad). This reference reinforces the motif of death and decay that is traced throughout the first quartet of the sonnet.27 The thirteen flowers of the first verse are bound to a valley where death awaits them. The dead minors are now voiceless: they are the thirteen nymphs, but these thirteen nymphs also give away their song to the goldfinch. It has become the task of others to tell the story, to ensure that the Trece Rosas will be remembered. The last verse brings to mind the fact that in spite of their brutal and untimely deaths, their memory will survive. The Trece Rosas have died for a cause, and someone will be there to tell their story. This becomes particularly visible in the fourth stanza of the poem: Thirteen stars that break the chains that stop them from reaching the heavens freeing themselves from shadowy sands. (Trece estrellas que rompen las cadenas que les impiden alcanzar el cielo y se desprenden de sombrías arena.)

Note that, as in the other commented poems, a star becomes a metaphor for the executed women. In this particular case, the star image suggests transcendence and regeneration: the memory of the Trece Rosas is to rise beyond the worldly shadows. The deaths of the thirteen minors are now filled with meaning. Yet at the end of the sonnet, Ortega exchanges the motifs of hope for transcendence and regeneration for those of death and hopelessness: the women become “Thirteen broken flowers on the ground” (Trece flores truncadas en el suelo).28 The last stanza then leads us back to the title of the poem, “To Thirteen Fallen Flowers,” suggesting the interplay of two very different yet related notions. On the one hand, the author hints at the ways in which Francoism cut their lives short. On the other hand, hope for regeneration and transcendence is also evident in the poem. 27. In “Ballad of the Black Sorrow,” for example, García Lorca asserts: “Soledad, how sad you are! / What pitiful grief! You weep drops of lemon, / long-stored, sour in the mouth” (Selected Poems, 85). In another poem, “The Arrest of Tony Camborio on the Road to Sevilla,” in which Antonio Torres Heredia is arrested by the Civil Guard and later brutally killed (García Lorca describes this in another poem), the lemon symbol serves as a premonition for the death of the gypsy: “Half way through the journey / he picked some round lemons, and threw them in the water / until it turned golden” (96). 28. Di Febo, Resistencia y movimiento, 98, 99.

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The tropes and images in Flor Cernuda’s poem “Fusilaron ‘Trece Rosas’ de la libertad” (They Executed the “Thirteen Roses” of Freedom) tend to accentuate the women’s innocence and purity. In the poem, the women become “thirteen white roses” (trece rosas blancas), “thirteen springs of fresh rain” (trece primaveras de lluvia fresca), “thirteen butterflies with wide wings” (trece mariposas de alas anchas), “thirteen streams of crystal water” (trece chorros de agua cristalina), as well as “thirteen red pansies” (trece pensamientos rojos), and finally, “thirteen shot hearts” (trece corazones balaceados). Even though “pensamientos rojos” could very well refer to pansies, the choice of the adjective rojos underscores the women’s membership in a leftist political party. Also, the “thirteen shot hearts” implies that the women have been brutally murdered, their lives interrupted, their innocence destroyed. Cernuda’s poem is also the only one that directly refers to the women’s executioners, who are sick and insatiable minds who will not ever be worth what they were in life. (mentes enfermizas y voraces que ¡nunca jamás! serían capaces de darles cancha en la vida.)

Different from Lina Odena’s death, the women’s execution is explained in much less visceral terms. It is not the result of a random bloodthirsty action; instead, it appears as a crucial component of an oppressive system in the making. This becomes particularly evident in the last verses of the poem. Here, the Trece Rosas fall, crying out “Freedom!!!” (¡¡¡Libertad!!!) and warning “Humanity” (a la Humanidad).29 The warning at the end not only suggests the threat of a dictatorial and brutal regime in Spain but as a matter of fact refers to the threat of fascism in Europe as a whole. Yet the fact that the name Trece Rosas, as well as the poems, refers to preexisting literary conventions that do not account for the complexity of women’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War does not imply that these texts should simply be dismissed as manifestations of the dominant myths and narratives that these women have internalized. In the realm of memoirs and oral histories, representations of the Trece Rosas tend to be less formulaic. The differences that ap29. Cernuda, “Fusilaron ‘Trece Rosas,’” 53.

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pear in the testimonies that narrate the last night of the Trece Rosas reveal that their deaths attain a particular narrative function in the different texts, suggesting that a death story might always refer to issues that move far beyond the victim’s life and the victim’s death.

The Last Night of the Trece Rosas In the testimonies that refer to the deaths of the thirteen minors, their execution attains mythic proportions. The goal of the analysis that follows, rather than questioning the accuracy of certain facts or the plausibility of certain events, is to reveal the different layers of meaning that are attached to this event. Republicans and Nationalists used myths in order to construct and legitimate their respective policies, to foster new and recycle old heroes, and ultimately to define clearly who their respective enemies were. In the particular case of the cultural representation of female figures, a series of recurrent myths certainly served to control, order, and restrict their agency and women’s behavior. As mentioned earlier, the meanings associated with rojas and milicianas shift rapidly. Whereas in the initial months of war, milicianas clad in the mono azul appeared in large numbers of wartime posters, the increasing militarization of the Republican army rapidly filled the same signifier with negative connotations. Images of milicianas were used in different contexts in order either to describe or to prescribe women’s behavior, revealing that the rapidly changing representations of women often did not reflect changes in the underlying patriarchal structures of the Republican Left in Spain. Yet this does not mean that the fact that the deaths of the Trece Rosas have in many ways become a myth within women’s resistance to Francoism merely reproduces the dominant ways in which myths were used in the Republican wartime cultural apparatus. Luisa Passerini elucidates that myths can also function as a form of resistance, or even codify resistance, against a dominant narrative. In her analysis of the interviews she carried out with terrorist women in Italy, Passerini talks about a “shared imaginary” that has allowed women to persist in their, at this point desperate, endeavors.30 The myth of the Trece Rosas, the story that is passed on collectively within the prison walls, fulfills a similar function. Here, the recurrent themes include: (1) a sacrifice for a worthy cause, (2) the motifs of regeneration and transcendence that correspond to a heroic death, (3) an emphasis on the innocence of 30. Passerini, “Mythbiography in Oral History,” 54.

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the executed minors, and (4) a radical condemnation of the brutality of the Francoist regime in the making via different instances of resistance. The last part of this section addresses testimonies that refer to the deaths of the Trece Rosas. Although some of the testimonies appear to reflect the rhetoric of the Communist Party, others bear no specific political affiliation. The differences between these testimonies, as well as the inherent ambiguity in the name and poems, situate the Trece Rosas in the gaps between the layers of the myths and narratives of the Right as well as the Left. It is in these gaps where the story of the Trece Rosas oscillates between resistance and accommodation to dominant myths, narratives, and images. The analysis will also prove that women’s use of certain myths that previously have implied accommodation to dominant narratives does not necessarily mean that these texts merely reflect internalized social control or even oppression. Undoubtedly, the different texts that mention the deaths of the Trece Rosas do not all belong to the same group of witnesses. Instead, this death story appears scattered in a series of biographies, oral histories, and memoirs. Yet in spite of its fragmented nature, this death story is still passed on collectively within the walls of Spanish prisons, allowing us to recognize the recurrent themes of a shared imagery. In the analysis of the different accounts of the last hours of the Trece Rosas, the emphasis is not on the actual sequence of events, but on the narrative function that this particular testimony has within the different texts where it appears. This does not mean that the different witnesses are merely fictionalizing the deaths of the thirteen minors: there is always historical and ideological meaning attached to the diverse ways in which the witnesses describe the deaths of the thirteen minors.31 In the subsequent contrast between the testimonies that narrate the deaths of the minors, it is by no means my intention to deem some wrong and classify others as correct. Rather, the differences between them show the diverse meanings that these heroic and exemplary deaths attained for other imprisoned women, for the Francoist resistance, and even for the Francoist state 31. In his seminal essay “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” historian Alessandro Portelli explains that the fact that events like the one here discussed are reproduced in sometimes very different narratives allows us “to recognize the interests of the tellers, and the dreams and desires beneath them” (The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, 20). Portelli concludes: “The discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the value of the oral sources as historical documents. It is not caused by faulty recollections (some of the motifs and symbols found in oral narratives were already present in embryo in coeval written sources), but actively and creatively generated by memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events and of history in general” (26).

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in the making. Ultimately, the women’s stories vanish underneath these different meanings. A number of testimonies echo ideological party lines, turning the women into heroines who certainly do not know fear, but are far from becoming the fearless women María Teresa León recognizes in the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. In testimonies like the ones that appear in Fernanda Romeu Alfaro’s El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el Franquismo (Broken Silence: Women against Francoism), the execution becomes an emblematic event in the history of women’s resistance to Francoism. At the same time, however, it is important to pay close attention to the different sources that the author cites. Romeu Alfaro summarizes the events in the following way: On August 5, 1939, thirteen adolescents, militants of the JSU, were executed next to the walls of the Cemetery of the East (Madrid). The people called them “the Trece Rosas.” Blanquita, the youngest one, had not turned sixteen. The Francoists had just taken Madrid when a coed youth group, who all belonged to the JSU, got organized and saved many anti-Francoists who were in danger. They were arrested, taken to a court marshal at the Salesas convent and condemned to death. (El 5 de agosto de 1939 fueron fusiladas junto a las tapias del Cementerio del Este [Madrid] trece adolescentes, militantes de las JSU, llamados por el pueblo “las Trece Rosas.” La más joven, Blanquita, no había cumplido 16 años. Apenas habían entrado en Madrid los franquistas, un grupo de jóvenes de ambos sexos, pertenecientes a las JSU, se organizaron por su cuenta y se dedicaron a poner a salvo a muchos antifranquistas que se encontraban en peligro. Fueron detenidos, se les llevó a un consejo de guerra a las Salesas, y allí les condenaron a muerte.)32

Romeu Alfaro cites the testimony of Antoñita García, who witnessed the last hours of the thirteen minors. Unlike other testimonies, here the young women are courageous, calm, and at peace with their fate. They spend their last hours giving away their personal belongings and writing letters. Clearly, the behavior of the thirteen minors is mature and exemplary. The minors that were part of my group were wonderfully brave. In the hours they were in the chapel they sang revolutionary songs and gave away personal items, wrote letters. Even though it may be arrogant to say this, I have a head of a black doll that one of them gave me, she carried it on her belt. 32. Romeu Alfaro, El silencio roto, 40. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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Death Stories (Las menores de mi expediente que fusilaron fueron maravillosamente valientes. Las horas que estuvieron en “capilla” cantaron canciones revolucionarias y repartieron cosas personales, escribieron cartas. Yo, aunque sea inmodestia decirlo, tengo una cabeza de una negrita que una de ellas me dio, que la llevaba en su cinturón.) (40)

Romeu Alfaro also includes a document titled “La lutte des femmes sous la terreur de Franco” (Women’s Struggle during Franco’s Terror). This document is part of a text published by the French Communist Party in 1947 and includes testimonies of women’s anti-Francoist resistance between 1939 and 1941. Here she finds the following testimony that, just as Antoñita García’s does, emphasizes the courage, if not heroism, of the young women. The young women, displaying an admirable serenity, distributed their clothes among the other imprisoned women and were brave enough to clean up and comb their hair, they put on their nicest clothes and waited with determination and cold blood to be taken to the chapel. They soothed the other women, who were crying, telling them they were happy to give their lives for a just cause. When the Falangist executioners came, the thirteen minors left shouting: “Long live the Republic.” (Las jóvenes, dando pruebas de una serenidad admirable, distribuyeron sus ropas entre las reclusas y tuvieron el valor de lavarse y peinarse, se pusieron sus más bonitos vestidos y esperaron con firmeza y sangre fría que vinieran a conducirlas a la capilla. Consolaron a las otras reclusas que lloraban asegurando que se sentían felices de dar su vida por una causa justa. Cuando los verdugos falangistas vinieron, las 13 jóvenes menores salieron gritando “Viva la República.”) (42)

The narrative here is coherent and heroic, and more than anything their sacrifice is made evident. Furthermore, the fact that one of the women’s last deeds is giving away their belongings suggests that their political consciousness did not decrease in the face of imminent death. Rather, their deaths are politically significant, and the proximity of their executions seems to have provided these thirteen minors with a lucid understanding of the meaning of their sacrifice. They were even strong enough to comfort the other imprisoned women. Their deaths were tragic but at the same time acts of heroism and political sacrifice that in the rhetoric of the Republican Left were reserved, with the possible exception of Lina Odena, for the male protagonists of the Spanish Civil War.

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The testimony that appears in Dolores Ibárruri’s memoirs clearly functions along similar lines, as La Pasionaria emphasizes the loyalty of the minors to the JSU, which depended directly on the leadership of the PCE. In her memoir, Dolores Ibárruri includes the letter of Agripina Moreno, who witnessed the execution of the thirteen minors. Moreno’s testimony suggests that the minors died not only in the name of the JSU but also in the name of La Pasionaria herself. Moreno describes how one of the women, Pilar Bueno, addressed her before her death: “Comrade Agripina, if you are lucky enough to save your life, take good care of yourself, so that you can fight for justice for us. We are innocent. And if some day you see Dolores, tell her we will die as her dignified disciples” (Camarada Agripina, si tienes la suerte de salvarte, cuídate y vive para que nos hagáis justicia. Somos inocentes. Y si algún día ves a nuestra Dolores, le dices que moriremos como dignas discípulas suyas). Then Moreno goes on: Carmen Barrero was telling me: “They are going to kill me with my brother. I feel sorry for my mother. We are innocent. They kill us because we are Communists.” Juanita Lafite, eighteen years old, the orphan daughter of a high ranking member of the military, asked us to let the Party and the JSU know that we would die with the red flag very high. A young girl, her last name was Conesa, cried out: “We will die like Communists, we will not allow them to blindfold us, our murderers will face us. We are innocent.” (Carmen Barrero me decía: “Me van a fusilar con mi hermano; lo siento por mi madre. Somos inocentes. Nos matan porque somos comunistas.” Juanita Lafite, de dieciocho años, huérfana de un militar de alta gradación, nos encargó [que] dijéramos al partido y a la JSU que moriríamos dejando bien alto la bandera roja. Una jovencita apellidada Conesa exclamaba: “Moriremos como comunistas, no permitiremos que nos venden los ojos, nos matarán de cara a nuestros asesinos. Somos inocentes.”)33

Moreno explains that one of the condemned women said: “Tell the party and the Youth to keep on fighting strongly together. And that they should not forget us” (Decid al partido y a la Juventud que sigan luchando fuertemente unidos. Y que no nos olviden). Moreno goes on to describe the Teresian nun, who, deeply affected after having witnessed the execution, explains to the other imprisoned women: “The girls refused to be blindfolded, they died with their uncovered faces, 33. Quoted in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Pasionaria y los siete enanitos, 186–87. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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looking at the executioners. Pilar Bueno, with her fist raised high, died shouting: ‘Long live the United Socialist Youth!’” (Las muchachas no se dejaron vendar los ojos, murieron a cara descubierta, mirando al pelotón. Pilar Bueno, con el puño en alto, murió gritando: “¡Viva la Juventud Socialista Unificada!” 187). In this letter, Moreno notes that an unnamed member of the Juventudes Libertarias (Libertarian Youth) had come up with the name Trece Rosas and had also written the first poem on the Trece Rosas. Ibárruri herself comments on Agripina Moreno’s letter: The “thirteen roses” were named Joaquina López, Virtudes González, Carmen Barrero, Dionisia Manzanares, Pilar Bueno, Julia Conesa, Blanquita, Victoria, Adela, Martina, Palmira, Anita, Anita López . . . Some last names are missing . . . Time, the years erase many things. But in the annals of our people’s struggle, the courage of the thirteen girls executed in the Ventas Prison will always shine. (Las “trece rosas” se llamaron Joaquina López, Virtudes González, Carmen Barrero, Dionisia Manzanares, Pilar Bueno, Julia Conesa, Blanquita, Victoria, Adela, Martina, Palmira, Anita, Anita López . . . Faltan algunos apellidos . . . El tiempo, los años borran muchas cosas. Pero en los anales de la lucha de nuestro pueblo siempre resplandecerá el valor de las trece muchachas fusiladas en la cárcel de Ventas.) (188)

A number of points need to be considered. Again, in this particular narrative the sacrifice in the name of the JSU and, by extension, the PCE and Ibárruri herself is worthwhile and heroic. Yet the fact that here Pilar Bueno wants Dolores Ibárruri to know that she and her comrades are dying as the dignified disciples of La Pasionaria suggests that she is gesturing at a lineage of politically active women within the PCE. Furthermore, the references are not to the republic, as in the other testimonies, but to the JSU and the PCE. Julia Conesa is to have said, “We will die like Communists.” At the moment of her death, Pilar Bueno does not say, “Long live the republic!” but rather, “Long live the Unified Socialist Youth!” Again, even though tragic, their deaths were a sacrifice for a worthwhile cause, and the thirteen minors knew that in their last hours. There is no suggestion that they feared death. They all seem to have been at peace with their fate as martyrs for the JSU and, by extension, the PCE and La Pasionaria herself. Yet even though the loyalty to the PCE and its “common language” permeates this particular testimony, Ibárruri marks the death of the Trece Rosas in her writing as a crucial moment in the history of the people’s struggle.

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It may be too easy now to suggest that such ideological constraints simply disappear once the testimonies write further way from political parties. What therefore needs to be addressed in the remaining testimonies are the ways in which they contradict the politically coherent representations from the previous ones. A fitting example would be María del Carmen Cuesta’s testimony, which appears in Tomasa Cuevas’s collection of testimonies, Prison of Women. Even though Cuesta also belonged to the JSU during and before the war, her testimony does not represent the Trece Rosas in the same heroic manner as some of the previous accounts do. Cuesta joined the JSU in 1934, where she befriended Virtudes González, who would later become one of the Trece Rosas. Cuesta was arrested shortly after the end of the war in 1939, when she was fifteen years old. On August 5, Cuesta’s friend Virtudes received the death penalty, together with the other women. Cuesta explains: That night, at what time I don’t know, with Victoria asleep beside me and Anita and Martina sleeping elsewhere, we were awakened with a blow to the shoulder. Victoria and I sat up like two automatons; in front of us were the director’s lieutenant, Carmen de Castro, María Teresa Igual, and some other officials. I don’t know who was outside the room, but Anita and Martina were already standing up and Victoria, with her curls falling over her forehead, clutched my neck, crying: “María, they’re going to kill me. María, they are going to kill me!” She clung to my neck so hard I couldn’t loosen her grip. At last Martina and Anita drew close and Martina said to me: “You’d better put your affairs in order soon because if you don’t, they’ll kill you just like us.” And Anita said: “Please, Victoria, be brave.” Then Victoria stopped crying, and I saw her go through the door, her head drooping. We were all speechless from shock. I don’t think we even cried. I don’t know whose idea it was to kneel down, but again, like robots, we all fell to our knees. We remained kneeling until we heard the sounds of a machine gun in the morning. Those sounds you could hear clearly, especially if there was a breeze coming from the East. Some nights we could count perfectly the shots of the coup de grâce. That night we kneeled until we had counted sixty-five of those shots. One-half hour later María Teresa Igual, a haughty, cold woman, came in to tell us of the valor and integrity with which our friends had met death. She told us that some of the girls had come to confession—I don’t know if that was true—and they had gone out singing JSU hymns and died shouting “vivas.” What’s more, she told us that the machine-gun fire hadn’t killed Anita López, the tallest of the girls. Anita was still alive when she fell. She had sat up and

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Death Stories asked, “Well, aren’t they going to kill me?” At that very moment the coup de grâce was administered. This same woman, María Teresa Igual, who was present at the executions and told us everything, also brought our companions’ personal belongings. To me they gave Virtudes’s dress and from Joaquinita López, a belt from Africa.34

Even though JSU hymns and the “vivas,” and even the belt from Africa, coincide with the other testimonies, Cuesta’s narrative allows a glimpse at the desperation and fear on the night of August 5. Instead of merely emphasizing the girls’ heroism, she also describes their fear and anxiety, as well as the brutality of the executioners, who at the same time can and cannot kill Anita López. The emphasis here is not on the heroic sacrifice, but on the brutal and untimely deaths of thirteen young women who found themselves trapped within the mechanism of the Francoist purging machine. Moreover, Cuesta’s testimony stresses the impotence of the other imprisoned women who witnessed the last night of the thirteen minors. First Victoria and María sit up like automatons, then “like robots” all the other women fall to their knees. Cuesta does not specify whether the women were actually praying or merely imitating a traditionally Christian gesture. Cuesta’s description of the last night of the Trece Rosas signals the limits and inconsistencies of the discourse of a heroic death, a death that is meaningful in the greater scheme of things. It is in the accounts of María del Carmen Cuesta, as well as the others that appear in texts like Prison of Women, that a very different, possibly subalternized, narrative of the Spanish Civil War takes shape.35 It is also a narrative that is passed among imprisoned women during those years—not only in the Ventas Prison in Madrid. This is what clearly comes across in Consuelo García’s biographical novel Las cárceles de Soledad Real (Soledad Real’s Prisons). Here, Soledad Real gives a secondhand account of the execution and admits that it has become a legend. “The most well-known case in Ventas, the one that affected the prisoners in the strongest way, and that then became a legend, was the execution of the thirteen minors, the thirteen roses” (El caso más conocido de Ventas, el que más afectó a las reclusas, y que luego, ya fue una leyenda, fue el fusilamiento de las trece menores, las trece rosas). She narrates the 34. Cuevas, Prison of Women, 90–91. 35. In the early 1980s, Tomasa Cuevas, active in the JSU and PCE during the war, and later imprisoned, traveled all over Spain in order to collect the testimonies of those women who had been in prison with her. As in most cases of women’s testimonies of the Spanish Civil War and postwar years, Cuevas herself financed the publication of her work.

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account of another party member who had overheard conversations while she was in the prison of Ventas. Yet even though the hopelessness and despair come across much more than in the other testimonies, we also encounter another symbol of solidarity and resistance that no other account mentions. Here, the last will of the thirteen minors is to have their handcuffs join their hands. And these thirteen girls, minors, well, they took them away to be executed. And they dressed one of them, she could not dress herself. Her hair had been chopped off. She was a pretty girl, a child, seventeen years old. They helped her to get dressed, and since they said in prison that wearing something borrowed meant good luck, they gave her a black suit. The girl was letting them dress her as though she were an automaton. And when they were coming out, another one who was very calm, Julia Conesa, was cheering her up. And that girl looked at all the others with an undefined look, like asking someone for help, who could not do so. That girl was not saying a word. Her lips were purple, very discolored, one could say she was already dead. She was pale, pointed, and when she looked at them with that look: Tell my mother I am innocent. And they took them to the church, and they spent the night in the chapel. When they already were in the chapel, the priest came to give them confession, but they refused. They allowed them to write a letter to their families and a nurse who was with them said they looked like schoolgirls doing their homework. When they realized in the morning that the pardon was not coming and that they were going to come and get them, their last wish was to be handcuffed together, joining each other’s hands. They got on the truck, and when it left they started singing the hymn “Joven Guardia.” Some moments passed, and then the shots from the platoon could be heard. Then, one by one, the coups de grâce. (Y a estas trece chicas, menores de edad, pues las sacaron. Y a una de ellas la vistieron, que no se podía vestir. Tenía rapado el pelo. Era muy bonita la chica, la niña, diecisiete años. La ayudaron a vestirse y, como decían en la cárcel que daba suerte ponerse algo prestado, le pusieron un traje de chaqueta negro. La chica se dejaba vestir como una autómata. Y al salir, otra que era muy templada, Julia Conesa, le daba ánimos. Y esa chica miró a todas con una mirada indefinible, como el que pide una ayuda al que no podía darle ninguna. Esa niña no hablaba ni palabra. Llevaba los labios ya morados, lívidos, por no decir que estaba muerta. Iba pálida, afilada, y cuando las miró con aquella mirada: Decidle a mi madre que soy inocente. Y las llevaron a la iglesia y allí pasaron la noche en capilla. Cuando estaban ya en la capilla fue el sacerdote a

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Death Stories confesarlas, pero se negaron. Las dejaron escribir una carta a su familia y una enfermera que estaba con ellas dijo que daban la sensación de escolares haciendo sus deberes. Cuando vieron hacia la mañana que el indulto no llegaba y que iban a por ellas, pidieron como última voluntad que las esposaran de dos en dos, una con la mano de la otra. Subieron a la camioneta y cuando arrancó empezaron a cantar el himno de la Joven Guardia. Pasaron unos momentos y se oyó la descarga del pelotón. Después, uno por uno, los trece tiros de gracia.)36

Since this particular excerpt is, as García notes, a secondhand account of the deaths of the Trece Rosas, Soledad Real’s account might come closer to the ways in which the story of the Trece Rosas was told over and over again in the prison, shortly after their deaths. In comparison to the earlier testimony, a number of motifs appear again: one of the minors is compared to an automaton; she appears to be already dead. It seems that this pretty seventeen-year-old girl, along with the other women, is in denial about what is imminent when they give her the suit that is supposed to bring her good luck. The execution of the young women is no longer heroic or a worthwhile sacrifice; instead, it is cruel and senseless. The innocence and youth of the women are also remarked with such phrases as “they looked like schoolgirls doing their homework.” Unlike the other accounts, the women’s resistance to the Francoist prison guards and executioners is now less vocal yet still present. Such acts of resistance as refusing to confess to the priest are smaller yet maybe more realistic, bearing in mind the repression the women had to endure in Franco’s prisons. Yet my point is not so much that this, as well as Cuesta’s account, appears to be more realistic or even less ideological than the other ones, but rather that anti-Francoist resistance in the postwar era attains a broader meaning. Not merely the big acts, such as the assassination of Gabaldón or the maquis (anti-Francoist guerrilla), are part of this resistance but also the small acts, like refusing to confess and narrating the story of the Trece Rosas over and over again, are now part of the history of the struggle of those who were defeated at the end of the civil war. Soledad Real herself was also a member of the Communist Party, and even though she repeatedly emphasized the preponderant role that her party membership played throughout her life, the execution of the Trece Rosas is here much less linked to a political sacrifice. The fact that Real describes this case as the one that deeply affected the imprisoned women, and that she even calls it a legend, suggests that this particular narrative attained a symbolic meaning within the prison walls. 36. García, Las cárceles de Soledad Real, 122–23.

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The other imprisoned women’s gestures are also, in many ways, symbolic. This can be seen in the testimony included in José Manuel Sabín’s book Prisión y muerte en la España de la postguerra (Prison and Death in Postwar Spain), a text centering on the political repression in the early postwar years. The last chapter is dedicated to imprisoned women, and it is here where Sabín refers to the Trece Rosas. He states that the thirteen young women were accused of killing Lieutenant Colonel Gabaldón and his daughter. He adds that like most war trials, this was a fast one and cites the following testimony: We had just gotten underneath the blankets when they came to get them. The door opened and a prison guard appeared, pale like wax and wrapped in her navy blue cape. She did not need to say anything. We had to wake up Victoria and Martina. Victoria was eighteen, and her brother Gregorio was in the same group of condemned prisoners. They came out of their cells, more serene than the other prisoners. Then, I do not know why, they called some of us so we could say good-bye when they were already in the chapel. The church in the Ventas Prison, where the thirteen minors were in the chapel, was big and cheerful. It was a very modern building, full of light and life. Its appearance was a contrast to the situation that night from August 4 to August 5: the priest wanting to confess the condemned, the director asking us not to scream, controlled panic attacks, lifeless eyes, it was as though we were drugged with the tension we were living. The priest said that it was not the moment to think about the world, but to think about God, and for us, we were so young, all that seemed an injustice, because the priests collaborated with Francoism. One of the girls called him a son of a bitch many times. The first Sunday after the executions he dedicated his homily to the blessed that suffer hunger and thirst for justice. The prisoners got up and began stomping their feet... (Acabábamos de meternos bajo las mantas cuando vinieron a buscarlas. Se abrió la puerta y apareció una funcionaria, pálida como la cera y envuelta en su capa azul marino. No necesitó decir nada. Hubo que despertar a Victoria y a Martina. Victoria tenía dieciocho años y en el mismo expediente iba un hermano suyo que se llamaba Gregorio. Salieron de sus celdas más serenas de lo que estábamos las demás reclusas. Después no sé por qué gracia fueron llamándonos a algunas para que nos despidiéramos de ellas cuando ya estaban en capilla. La iglesia en la cárcel [de Ventas] donde estaban en capilla las trece menores era alegre y grande. Se trataba de una nave muy moderna, llena de luz y de vida. Su aspecto contrastaba con la situación que se vivió aquella noche del 4 al 5 de agosto: el cura queriendo confesar a las condenadas, la directora pidiendo

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Similar to Soledad Real’s description, the resistance to the Francoist executioners, here also represented by the priests, is more subdued and maybe even more likely under the circumstances. The reaction of the imprisoned women toward the words of the priest on the Sunday after the execution suggests also that these deaths convey a certain spirit of resistance. The Francoists could kill young militants, but not their memory. Moreover, the description of the prison official, pale as wax and wrapped in her navy blue cape, makes the event even more somber and sinister. She does not need to say a word; everybody knows that the minors are about to be executed. As opposed to the other testimonies that emphasize the event in itself or the courageous behavior of the minors, this particular testimony is more concerned with re-creating the mood of that night, the controlled nervous breakdowns, the lifeless eyes, as well as the feeling of impotence of the other women, who all felt as though they had been drugged. The acts of resistance are small, maybe insignificant in the sense that they certainly cannot prevent the deaths of the young women. Nevertheless, they are there, as one of the girls “called him a son of a bitch many times.” Even though the aim here is to describe the individual deaths of the minors, this particular account is also a collective narrative of women in prison who cannot prevent these women from being executed, but who can still stand up and stomp their feet in order to protest not only the actual deaths but also the entire political machinery that has killed these thirteen minors in the name of the Francoist state. In this testimony, as well as in Josefa Amalia Villa’s, which Giuliana di Febo cites in Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España (Resistance and Women’s Movement in Spain), the Trece Rosas are the victims of a political conspiracy, which becomes even more apparent once it is clear, as Villa explains, that this 37. Sabín, Prisión y muerte, 263.

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exemplary execution could have been avoided. Villa explains that Carmen Castro, the nun who was in charge of the imprisoned minors, had left the petitions for the pardon that family members and friends had avidly written waiting on her desk until after the execution. It is said that Franco officially pardoned the minors the day after their deaths. But, of course, the pardon came far too late for the thirteen women who knew they were going to die on the night of August 5. Unlike Cuesta, who says that Anita went to sleep with everybody else that night, Villa describes Anita as wanting to remain awake. She did not want her executioners to find her asleep. Then Villa describes three of the women, one by one: Martina, with her beautiful curly hair and her pale features, so that her freckles looked like spots; Victoria with only two tears slowly running down her face, saying very softly: “First Goyito (her brother, executed in the same place), and now me. My poor mother!” Anita, blond and very beautiful, tall, with her face paler than ever. They dressed with the others’ help, our hands trembled more than theirs. Anita, when they were finished, asked us in a serene, low voice: “Are my stockings straight?” We told her they were, but who was looking at them? We embraced once and again. What a horrible mix of screams and silence! They asked and got permission to say good-bye to a comrade in the name of all the prisoners. Juanita, from Madrid, a nurse, could only tell us that they had showed great courage and enormous dignity. Then we knew that the reason they had been locked up in the chapel so late was because they were first going to execute the boys who were in the same proceedings. When the shots sounded, it was already day, a very clear day, one of those days with a very blue summer sky in Madrid. (Martina, con su hermoso pelo rizado y la tez tan descolorida que las pecas se le destacaban como manchas; Victoria, con sólo dos lágrimas, que la caían lentamente por las mejillas, diciendo muy bajo: “Primero Goyito (su hermano fusilado desde la misma comisaría), y ahora yo. ¡Mi pobre madre!”; Anita, rubia y guapísima, alta con la cara más blanca que nunca. Se vistieron ayudadas por las demás, nuestras manos temblaban mucho más que las suyas. Anita, al terminar, nos preguntó con voz serena, un poco baja: “¿Llevo las medias derechas?” Le dijimos que sí, pero ¿quién las miró? Las abrazamos una y otra vez. ¡Qué horrible mezcla de gritos y silencio! Pidieron y consiguieron permiso para despedirse de una camarada en nombre de toda la reclusión. Juanita, madrileña, enfermera, sólo pudo decirnos que habían mantenido un gran valor, una enorme dignidad. Después supimos que la causa de lo tardío de su encierro en capilla es que antes iban a fusilar a los muchachos de su expediente. Cuando sonaron las

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Villa’s testimony, like the two earlier ones, places emphasis not on the women’s heroism, but on their fear. At the same time, Anita’s dignified question, “Are my stockings straight?” as well as the clear blue Madrid sky she refers to at the end contrast with the horrible mix of screams and silence, reflecting the contrast between the innocence and dignity of the girls and the brutality of their executioners. Still, Villa also emphasizes that the minors, in spite of the dramatic circumstances, are more serene than the other women: “our hands trembled as much as theirs.” Different from the accounts that appear in Romeu Alfaro’s book, as well as La Pasionaria’s memoir, here the political significance of their sacrifice loses (at least partially) its coherence. In addition to a series of anecdotes, even details that vary in these testimonies, it should be clear that the narrative of the last night of the thirteen minors attains different functions in each text. Yet all emphasize the innocence of the young women as well as the strong impression their execution left on the other prisoners. Naturally, it is not possible to establish once and for all whether their deaths were heroic sacrifices or senseless murders that a dictatorial regime committed, as both meanings are made equally coherent. Moreover, it should become clear that these executions, and with them the name Trece Rosas and the poems, are always interwoven with different myths and narratives. More than sixty years after their deaths, and a quarter of a century after Franco’s, it is not possible to disentangle what was the true story of the thirteen minors from these layers of myth and narrative. This story is told only because thirteen young women were punished with death for their political activism, accused of a murder they did not commit. This story can be told only in a common discursive language that is not able to articulate the complexities of women’s participation in revolution and war. This story, finally, emerges out of the constant negotiation with dominant myths and narratives, yet only this constant negotiation makes it possible to allow the execution of the Trece Rosas to become part of the history of political repression in postwar Spain.

The Reconstruction of a Death Story In the summer of 1994, journalist and fiction writer Rosa Montero published an article titled “Las ‘Trece Rosas’” in El País Semanal. In her article Montero 38. Di Febo, Resistencia y movimiento, 100.

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refers first to the death of Socialist María Lacrampe, and from there she begins to narrate the story of the Trece Rosas. In addition to briefly telling the chilling story of the minors’ last night, as it appears in Fernanda Romeu Alfaro’s book, Montero also uses the article in order to write against the forgetting and silencing that have in many ways marked women’s participation and women’s deaths during the Spanish Civil War. Romeu Alfaro’s book, in addition to providing valuable information on women’s resistance against Francoism from the very first years of the dictatorship, also includes the letters that Julia Conesa, one of the executed minors, wrote to her mother from prison. These letters end with a very short note that Conesa wrote only a few hours before her death, a note that concludes with the following wish: “Do not allow my name to vanish in history” (Que mi nombre no se borre en la historia, 285). Thus, the deaths of the Trece Rosas also become a denunciation against active forgetting in contemporary Spain. As Romeu Alfaro explains in the prologue to her book, she encountered great difficulties in publishing the final work. The Instituto de la Mujer had sponsored her research yet rejected her work for publication. So did two other official organisms of the Valencian autonomous community: the Institució Alfons el Magnànim and the Instituto de la Dona. Private publishing houses rejected Romeu Alfaro’s work on such grounds as “‘The topic does not fit in our publishing line. Nobody is interested,’ or ‘it is a subjective interpretation of history’” (“El tema no encaja en la línea de nuestra editorial. No interesa,” o “es una interpretación subjetiva de la historia,” 19). In response to the book that Romeu Alfaro eventually published herself, Montero wrote in 1994: It is necessary to know history, to know what we were in order to know who we are. We owe it to all the ignored women in the world, but, more than anything we owe it to ourselves: because I want to be the owner of my memories. (Es necesario conocer la historia, saber lo que fuimos para saber quienes somos. Se lo debemos a las muchas mujeres ignoradas que ha habido en el mundo, pero sobre todo nos lo debemos a nosotros mismos: porque yo quiero ser dueña de mis propios recuerdos.)

It is in Romeu Alfaro’s book, and with the help of Montero’s article, that the execution of the Trece Rosas becomes not only a document of women’s resistance but also a warning against forgetting in history and memory. The death story of these minors consists of poems, testimonies, a name—“that name, tender and trite, the thirteen roses” (ese apelativo, tiernamente cursi, de las trece rosas)—they never would have received had they not been executed, and finally

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the letters of a young woman who slowly realizes she will have to face a firing squad.39 The striking letters that bear witness to Julia Conesa’s realization are also what ultimately sparked media attention, though limited, on the Trece Rosas. The year Montero’s article appeared, two Madrid newspapers informed their readers that on August 5, 1994, a group of women gathered to commemorate the deaths of the Trece Rosas at the Cementerio de Este, today Cementerio de la Almudena. A plaque, sponsored by Comisiones Obreras, a workers’ organization, that commemorates the execution of the minors was placed on the cemetery wall, apparently not very far from the spot where the women were killed (fig. 10). Every August 5, a small group of people gathers to remember the Trece Rosas, yet not every year does this gathering capture media attention. Julia Conesa’s letters are usually mentioned in articles that describe the brief event.40 When thirteen young women become Trece Rosas, they are not only given a particular role to play when their life story turns into a death story. The women’s deaths also foster a series of resistant narratives, though they are articulated only through preexisting conventions: figures, metaphors, tropes, and images. Yet today this death story ultimately reveals more about collective amnesia and what history forgets than about women’s political participation in the Spanish revolution and civil war. The itinerary of these subjects—the crooked and meandering two-way street described in the second chapter—is a trace of thunder and bones, of wilted flowers that once stood beautifully in the bloodstained battlefields, a young woman’s last words, doomed to enter history and memory through the back door, if at all. This is what Julia Conesa wrote to her mother, reproduced in Romeu Alfaro’s book: Dearest mother brothers with all my love and enthusiasm I ask you not to cry for me, none of you. I leave without crying. Take care of my mother. They kill me innocent but I die like an innocent should die. Mother dear Mother, I will be united with my sister and Father in the other world but keep in mind that I die because I am an honest person. Good-bye dear mother good-bye forever. Your daughter who will never again kiss you and embrace you. Julia Conesa Kisses so that you and my comrades do not cry. Do not allow my name to vanish in history. 39. Montero, “Las ‘Trece Rosas,’ ” 4. 40. See Emma Lira, “En memoria de ‘las Trece Rosas’”; Rafa Bosch, “Trece Rosas en el paredón del recuerdo”; and Alex Niño, “Y mataron a las ‘Trece Rosas.’”

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 10. The young women called “Las Trece Rosas” gave their lives for freedom and democracy on August 5, 1939. The people of Madrid remember their sacrifice on August 5, 1988.

(Madre hermanos con todo el cariño y el entusiasmo os pido que no me lloreis nadie. Salgo sin lloral. Cuidar a mi madre. Me matan inocente pero muero como debe morir una inocente. Madre Madrecita me voy a reunir con mi hermana y Papá al otro mundo pero ten presente que muero por persona honrada. Adios madre querida adios para siempre. Tu hija que lla jamas te podra besar ni abrazar Julia Conesa Besos para todos que ni tu ni mis compañeras lloreis. Que mi nombre no se borre en la historia.) (285)

So did Conesa’s name vanish in history? And what does a contemporary response to Conesa’s last wish imply? The death of the thirteen minors turned them into scapegoats for a crime they did not commit, yet their own writing into history—Julia Conesa’s letters, the poems, as well as the poems and testimonies written on their deaths—exist only as a consequence of that very first inscription, the violence that lies at the origin of any death story.

Pa r t I I I

Writing Violence

5 D a n c i n g w i t h P a n c h o V i l l a’s H e a d Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho

A Disobedient Writer How does a woman write her desire to kill the general who assaulted her mother? Why does the same author rewrite the story of a fearless coronela, who receives the death penalty and is said to be buried underneath an anthill in an earlier version, but survives and leaves the battlefields in a later version of the same story? Why do two young girls marvel at the vision of a general’s guts, carried on a platter, as though they were John the Baptist’s head? How can a revolution become child’s play and every instance of child’s play become part of a revolution? Finally, why do the remains of the author of these stories disappear from the Mexican literary, historical, and even geographical landscape, only to appear again a decade later, as though they had been buried underneath an anthill? These questions speak to the intersections of different forms of violence in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico.1 In the brief vignettes that compose the novel, the young narrator’s gaze observes and frames the men and women who willingly and unwillingly join the revolution. Young Nellie not merely sees but also dreams of and even touches the bodies of dead and dying men, anatomies that, different from what one might expect, neither frighten nor intimidate her. Instead, she patiently listens to the stories of revolution, war, 1. Different editions of the novel were published between 1931 and 1999. Some contain significant changes I will address later in the chapter. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, stem from Doris Meyer and Irene Matthews’s translation. I use “Campobello” when I refer to the author, “Nellie” when I refer to the narrator in Cartucho.

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violence, and unsettling tenderness that appear engraved on their broken anatomies. These stories form a heterogeneous mosaic, an uneven yet intimate choreography of revolution and war that according to the author represents historically accurate events of the Mexican Revolution. Nellie Campobello’s novel also reveals the different levels of violence that intersect in this literary representation of gendered subjects’ itineraries in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. Though not necessarily continuous, violence, political emancipation, and agency are undoubtedly linked in Campobello’s text. Thus, one of the questions that lie at the core of this chapter and Campobello’s novel as a whole is whether perpetrating acts of violence is the sole means to achieve emancipation in the context of a revolutionary struggle. Should this not be the case, in which other ways is women’s agency displayed and codified in Campobello’s writing? The continuities between acts of violence committed in the public sphere and acts of violence committed in the private sphere are just one of the issues that will surface in my reading of Cartucho. Physical violence intersects with other less explicit forms of violence in the text. The very subtle references to the mother’s rape, the revisions of Nacha Ceniceros’s story that at the end domesticate the coronela by literally reconstructing the separation between the public and the domestic spheres, and particularly the author’s own disappearance from literary history and even memory in Mexico represent instances of epistemic violence. Campobello’s own relationship to the intersection of the different forms of violence that come across in her novel and also in the biographical introduction to her collected works illustrates the difficulties that the representation of revolutionary violence entailed for a woman writer in Mexico in the 1930s. Thus, it is also important to point out here that critiques of the novel that routinely dismiss Campobello’s text as a childlike, even anecdotal, yet at the same time transparent representation of a young girl’s experience of the Mexican Revolution erase the intricacies of the same text. I propose instead that the novel itself, and particularly Campobello’s language, brings the sheer possibility of representing the Mexican Revolution (and with it the entire literary project of the novel of the Mexican Revolution) into crisis. While the other novels of the Mexican Revolution are by no means devoid of violence, what differentiates Cartucho is that this text is marked by a constant tension between a traumatic past and a haunted present, inhabited by the specters of the revolution.2 2. In Cartucho, not only Nacha Ceniceros’s death foreshadows the author’s own destiny. The novel in itself, unlike most other texts that form the genre the novela de la Revolución Mexicana,

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Sometimes explicit and sometimes unspoken, violence is never extraordinary in Nellie’s eyes. My insistence on the trace of these different forms of violence not only implies that a violent event has taken place, leaving behind a path of carnage, death, and destruction, but also refers to the texture of its imprint in the author’s language and the narrator’s perspective. In a 1965 interview, the author claimed that at only four years of age, “imprinted on my face, the tragedy of the Revolution could be seen” (se me notaba, impresa en el rostro, la tragedia de la Revolución). This “reality imprint” on the author’s own face alludes to invisible scars and never-healing wounds from which, as this chapter will demonstrate, the stories in Cartucho emerge.3 I have already briefly referred to Nacha Ceniceros, the coronela who appears and disappears in the different revisions of Campobello’s novel. In the 1931 version, Pancho Villa orders her to be executed, and she is said to be buried underneath an anthill. In the later version, Nacha Ceniceros avoids the firing squad. Instead, she returns to home and hearth, in order to fill the holes and crevices that bullets and shrapnel of the revolution left behind. Nacha’s ambiguous yet at the same time evocative burial ground foreshadows Nellie Campobello’s fifteenyear simultaneous absence and presence in Mexico. About a half century after the first publication of Cartucho, the aging author vanished, only to reappear, years later, once her remains were found in a grave she had to share with three other corpses. The tragic end of Campobello’s life seems to echo a story the author herself may have been written; its strangeness also almost overshadows Campobello’s actual literary and cultural legacy. Investigations have now revealed that Cristina Belmont, a protégée of Campobello, and Belmont’s husband, Claudio Fuentes or Claudio Niño Cienfuentes, kidnapped the aging dancer and writer, attempting to appropriate her valuable estate. In 1998, the group ¿Dónde está Nellie? (Where Is Nellie?) presented an official complaint to the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District. Campobello had last been seen in public in Mexico City at a court hearing in 1985. She died in 1986; her remains were found in a nameless grave in 1998 and finally transported to her home state of Durango in 1999. The fact that Campobello herself vanished from both the literary landscape and the collective memory in Mexico is certainly significant. The point is not just that Campobello

anticipates the ghostly presences and voices that haunt both the village of Comala in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) and Ixtepec in Elena Garro’s Remembrance of Things Past (1977), novels written between fifteen and twenty years after the first publication of Cartucho. 3. Emanuel Carballo, “Nellie Campobello,” 328; Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 7.

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disappeared; the fact that the whereabouts of the only female author of the novel of the Mexican Revolution did not intrigue public opinion in Mexico until the late nineties is certainly revealing.4 Nacha’s disappearance and the author’s own literal vanishing are more than a strange coincidence or a bizarre analogy. Rather, they reflect the same kind of epistemic violence that elides women’s participation in war and women’s relationship to violence, ultimately precluding women’s agency (and with it subjectivity) as soldaderas, as coronelas, and as writers. In Mis libros (My Books), an introduction to her collected work published in 1960, Campobello’s own language alludes to a trace of violence. She yearns for her words to become a weapon, as she expresses her desire to write with “arrowheads sharpened by the copper hands of comanches at war” (puntas de flecha pulidas por las manos cobrizas de comanches en guerra, 91). Campobello connects the reference to arrowheads to a nostalgic vision of an indigenous ancestry, which points again to the constant deferment of violence, yet the fact that she yearns to write with arrowheads is still significant. More than thirty years after Campobello wrote her introduction, and thirteen years after the author’s death, Elena Poniatowska defined Campobello as a lettered soldadera: “She goes with the troops, and the intellectuals of her time use her or demean her” (Va con la impedimenta, y los intelectuales de su época la usan o la menosprecian).5 To an extent, Campobello’s fate seems to mimic the soldaderas’ destiny, becoming a spectral and haunting presence: once again, the pain of a phantom limb makes its appearance. Yet chances are that Campobello—novelist, poet, chronicler, dancer, choreographer, ballet instructor, and director of the National School of Dance in Mexico for more than two decades—would not quite accept Poniatowska’s description. The term soldadera bears certain connotations that associate Campobello with a social class to which she did not belong. Also, if one considers the fact that unlike most soldaderas, Campobello not only survived the revolution but also had the chance to flourish in the world of dance and literature in Mexico, at least for a number of years, the term is hardly appropriate for her. Nevertheless, the similarity between Campobello’s tragic disappearances in literary history and the ways in which women’s participation was written out of the history of the revolution is more than a peculiarity. 4. In her introduction to Irene Matthews’s Nellie Campobello: La centaura del Norte, Elena Poniatowska comments: “If Nellie were male, we would already have an answer. Mexico would not have allowed one of its male novelists to disappear just like that” (ii). 5. Poniatowska, Las Soldaderas, 26.

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Almost ironically, twenty years before her confinement and solitary death, Campobello articulated a thirst for freedom from which she was deprived at the end of her life: “My freedom, which I love more than the waves of the sea, and more, much more than love itself ” (Mi libertad, a la que amo más que a las olas del mar, y más, mucho más, que al amor, Libros, 94). The author’s desire for freedom was also tightly intertwined with her desire to write. In the introduction to her collected works, Campobello explains that she felt compelled to reveal a historical truth that the official propaganda of the Mexican state had attempted to hide, regardless of the consequences that this would imply: “That is why I had to write, tell the truth in the world of lies where I lived” (Por eso yo tenía que escribir, decir verdades en el mundo de mentiras que vivía, Libros, 98). The author was well aware that two factors situated her in a precarious situation: First, she was writing against the grain of official propaganda. Second, she starkly and passionately defended Pancho Villa, who in the 1930s was far from being considered a national hero. “My topic was discredited, my heroes were outlawed. Francisco Villa was considered to be worse than Atila” (Mi tema era despreciado, mis héroes estaban proscritos. A Francisco Villa lo consideraban peor que al propio Atila, Libros, 99). Last but not least, Campobello was also aware that writing about the revolution, about dead and wounded men Nellie sometimes touched and, in a sense, desired, implied a radical transgression. I understood that telling the truth left me in a situation of great disadvantage facing the organized slanderers. I was in danger of being crushed by those enemy voices, always strategically placed in the highest places of authority. (Comprendí que decir verdades me ponía en situación de gran desventaja frente a los calumniadores organizados. Me ponía en peligro de que me aplastaran aquellas voces enemigas, siempre incrustadas en lugares estratégicos de la más alta autoridad.) (Libros, 99)

Campobello addresses her gender in this introduction, albeit briefly, and never in relationship to the fact that writing about violence implies transgressing the cultural, social, and linguistic taboos that were prevalent in the 1930s.6 Yet more than being openly concerned about her decency, Campobello’s more pressing concern was gaining access to the competitive world of the letrados, the lettered men who 6. Franco explains in Plotting Women: “Traditionally strong in times of war and civil strife, Mexican women were slow to challenge the domestication of women and often fearful of taking a step into areas where their decency would be put into question” (93).

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would hardly accept a woman as another rival. Yet the reaction to the publication of Campobello’s novels was not as scandalous as even the author herself anticipated. Rather, Campobello’s “biggest mischief ever committed” (travesura más grande que había cometido, Libros, 115) remained in the shadows until very recently. During her lifetime, Campobello did receive limited recognition as a writer of the Mexican Revolution, when Antonio Castro Leal included Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands in his anthology of 1958, The Novel of the Mexican Revolution; when Spanish critic José Domenchina praised Campobello’s work that same year; and when several studies, usually centered on the intersections of gender and revolution in Mexico brought renewed attention to Campobello’s life and her work. In recent years, Campobello’s work has received renewed awareness, yet this attention can hardly be dissociated from the author’s life (and death) story. Not unlike her writing, Campobello’s life story appears traced with arrowheads across the Mexican literary and political landscape. Contrary to what the author herself would claim, Campobello was born in 1901 (not 1909, 1910, or 1911), in Villa Ocampo in the northern state of Durango. After her mother’s death, Campobello moved to Mexico City together with her sister Gloria, where the young women began their ballet training. In 1930, the sisters traveled to Cuba, where Nellie Campobello wrote a great part of Cartucho, a text she published in Mexico for the first time in 1931. A new and revised edition of Cartucho appeared in 1940, published by EDIAPSA, Martín Luis Guzmán’s publishing house. In 1959 the novel appeared in Antonio Castro Leal’s anthology The Novel of the Mexican Revolution, and in 1960 Campobello’s own collection My Books included all of her works.7 At their return from Cuba, both Campobello sisters began working at the Escuela Nacional de Danza (National School of Dance) of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (the Ministry of Public Education). Nellie later became director of the National School of Dance. The Campobello sisters traveled extensively across the Mexican republic, teaching and studying indigenous dance. They organized massive performances of their choreographies in stadiums and arenas. In 1937, Editorial Juventudes de Izquierda published My Mother’s Hands, a text that again appeared in a 1949 edition that included eight illustrations by muralist José Clemente Orozco. Just like Cartucho, My Mother’s Hands was also in7. Factoría Ediciones and Editorial Era published the most recent editions of Cartucho, in 1999 and 2000, respectively.

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cluded in Leal’s 1958 edition of The Novel of the Mexican Revolution. Campobello’s own 1960 edition of My Books appeared in Compañía General de Ediciones, also owned by writer Martín Luis Guzmán. Campobello’s writings also include the collections of poetry Yo, por Francisca (Me, by Francisca [1929]), Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Pancho Villa (Notes on Pancho Villa’s Military Life [1940]), and Ritmos y danzas indígenas (Indigenous Rhythms and Dances [1940]). But neither the author’s prolific writing nor her activities as a dancer and choreographer could prevent the ninguneo (disregard) Campobello had to endure, as it was not until very recently that she has received renewed attention, often more related to her kidnapping than her work. It is in the author’s first novel, Cartucho, however, that her own engagement with the violence of the revolution as well as the violence that writing about a revolution implies is most noticeable. Moreover, the different editions of Cartucho reveal a domestication of Campobello’s writing and her characters, turning the different editions of the novel into a chronicle of the ways in which women’s participation in the revolution is assimilated into the postrevolutionary imaginary. The analysis of Campobello’s writing and her particular language will reveal that she refers to women’s acts of violence in a subtle and veiled manner, partially because she might be adhering to conventions that discourage women from writing about violence, but also because the narrator’s idiosyncratic perspective in Cartucho is part and parcel of a traumatic structure that destabilizes any attempt to represent the violence of the Mexican Revolution.

A Language of Violence “Nacha Ceniceros” Only very few of the women in Cartucho actually perpetuate violent acts. These characters overthrow old paradigms of Mexican womanhood, representing another of Campobello’s multiple transgressions. According to Irene Matthews, the Mexican Revolution offered women the chance to transgress and, possibly, a glimpse at happiness and pleasure in the rebellion.8 This potential emancipation, however, cannot be dissociated from the violent world the women inhabited. In Cartucho, women are not merely the self-sacrificing soldaderas but an array of personalities who sometimes survive and sometimes die in the struggle as well. Two characters deserve further attention, Nacha Ceniceros and Rafaela 8. Matthews, Nellie Campobello, 192.

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Luna, Nellie’s mother, who will be discussed in more detail in relation to the vignette “General Rueda.” I have earlier argued that women’s experiences in revolutions and wars appear articulated in discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication, and that redrawing the boundary between the domestic and the public domains implies the domestication of revolutionary women. The question that arises now is how the negotiations between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication come across in representations of fearless women’s acts of violence. Campobello describes such acts in subtle ways: the reader is never quite sure that they are the ones pulling the trigger or drawing the knife. Moreover, for women to be at the receiving end of violence is common, as long as women remain behind the lines and do not transgress established boundaries.9 Campobello’s constant negotiations with these taboos are certainly significant. The changes in the subsequent editions of Cartucho suggest that throughout the years the author not merely resists but also accommodates expectations and taboos regarding women’s participation in and women’s writing on the revolution and its multilayered violence. Even though these changes alter a series of details in more or less significant ways, the most radical changes appear in the vignette “Nacha Ceniceros.” As explained in the beginning, Nacha Ceniceros is a coronela who kills her beloved with only one shot. Whereas in the 1931 version the vignette ends with Nacha Ceniceros’s execution and a description of her burial site, “Today there is an anthill where they say she was buried” (36), in the 1960 version Nacha is not executed after all.10 Instead, she leaves the battlefields and returns to her home, to literally rebuild the boundary between the public and the domestic spheres. Nacha Ceniceros is not just any woman. This coronela de la revolución wears her hair in long braids and carries a pistol. By accident, narrates the vignette, Nacha Ceniceros shoots Gallardo, the man she loves. But was Gallardo’s death really an accident? In the beginning of the vignette, Nacha Ceniceros is crying 9. Commenting on literary representations of World War I, Margaret R. Higonnet asserts in “Not So Quiet in No-Woman’s Land”: “The woman writer who trespasses onto the territory of war fiction transgresses many taboos. First and most important, she articulates knowledge of a ‘line of battle’ presumed to be directly known and lived only by men. Women, many still believe, should remain ‘behind the lines’ at the ‘home front’ as the symbolic preservers of peace and of the race. . . . Where men fight, women should be silent. They cannot be permitted to speak because their knowledge has no official standing” (206). 10. I am quoting Meyer and Matthews’s translation from the 1960 version of Cartucho; the 1931 version ends with the exact same words.

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in her tent while an old soldadera is giving her counsel. Whereas in the 1931 version Campobello uses the term soldadera, in the 1960 version not a soldadera but just “an old woman” (una vieja) listens to Nacha Ceniceros. The change is significant: substituting soldadera with una vieja implies removal from the immediacy of the battlefield. Nacha Ceniceros has already begun her journey behind and beyond the lines. Even though Campobello never clearly explains why Nacha Ceniceros is crying, it seems that her beloved’s behavior might be the reason for her tears. Before dying, Gallardo was talking to another woman in the tent adjacent to the one where Nacha was confiding in the soldadera–una vieja. When Nacha, possibly still blinded by her tears, cleans her rifle, it goes off, and the first and only shot hits and kills Gallardo. Again, what was the soldadera–una vieja advising Nacha Ceniceros? As in most instances in this novel, a woman’s act of violence is described in an ambiguous manner: it is never clear whether Nacha intended to kill Gallardo, yet his “accidental” death is certainly suspicious. When Pancho Villa—whose display of violence is neither subtle nor ambiguous—finds out that Nacha killed Gallardo, he orders her to be executed. Once she is to be punished, the fact that Nacha is a woman ceases to be relevant. She is already a tragic heroine. “She made a handsome figure, unforgettable for everyone who saw the execution. Today there is an anthill where they say she was buried” (36). Irene Matthews associates this image with the regeneration and domestication of both nature and the female body, foreshadowing Nacha Ceniceros’s simultaneous absence and presence, as well as her complicated location between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication.11 This will also come across in the different versions of this story in the later editions of Cartucho. In a revised version of the novel that appeared in the 1960 collection of Campobello’s work, Nacha Ceniceros survives. Campobello justifies this change, claiming that the vignette, “at the end, was inaccurate, since Nacha Ceniceros 11. In Nellie Campobello, Matthews understands this metaphor to be a symbol for “the chastity of a body returned to nature, and a domesticated nature, the perverse fertility of the burial site” (90). The reference to the anthill, as Matthews also suggests, bears the connotation of a particular kind of torture. It might be worthwhile to remember that in Niggli’s Soldadera, the Old One suggests spreading honey on the prisoner’s face so that ants would slowly devour him. Such methods of torture, explains Niggli in a footnote, were apparently common during the Mexican Revolution. I do not mean to suggest that the mentioning of the ants in Soldadera is a direct reference to Nacha Ceniceros and her burial site, yet it is certainly no coincidence that in both texts women’s acts of violence (and retribution) are associated with nature.

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was not executed, making this the only affirmation that is not historical in Cartucho” (a la postre resultó inexacta, pues a Nacha Ceniceros no la fusilaron, afirmación que es lo único no histórico en Cartucho, Libros, 118). Nacha Ceniceros has not found her final resting place underneath an anthill. Instead, she was able to return to her home, “undoubtedly disillusioned by the attitude of those few who tried to divide among themselves the triumphs of the majority.” Nacha, who “could have been one of the most famous women of the revolution,” chose to exchange the bullets and the bandoliers for bricks and mortar (Cartucho, 21). What explains this return to the domestic sphere, the reconstruction of the walls that divide the domestic from the public, and what does this reveal about Nellie Campobello, (dis)obedient writer of the Mexican Revolution? The first answer is Campobello’s own. The author explains that she aims to unravel the lies that have been told about Nacha Ceniceros, about the men of the North, about Pancho Villa himself. The narrations in Cartucho, I have to clarify once and for all, are historical truth, they are tragic events seen by my child’s eyes in a city, just like other events could have been analogous in Berlin or London during the world war; it was the same for my little heart, crying without tears. (Las narraciones de Cartucho, debo aclararlo de una vez para siempre, son verdad histórica, son hechos trágicos vistos por mis ojos de niña en una ciudad, como otros pudieron ser hechos análogos en Berlín o Londres durante la Guerra Mundial; caso igual para mi pequeño corazón, que lloraba sin lágrimas.) (Libros, 104)

In the 1960 version of the vignette, Campobello emphasizes the historical veracity of this story, accentuating that her writing aims to reveal the truth about the revolution in northern Mexico. “The curtain of lies against General Villa, spread by organized groups of slanderers and propagators of the black legend, will fall, just as will the bronze statues that have been erected with their contributions” (Cartucho, 22). A possible implication here is that one should not take for granted representations of women as they appear in the literature and cultural production of the Mexican Revolution. Instead, studying women’s participation implies confronting contradictory and fragmented texts. After all, many of these are buried, just like Nacha Ceniceros, underneath anthills that consist of excluding historiographies, myths, and legends that have taken the place of women’s stories. The literary production of the Mexican Revolution will not re-

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veal women’s real experiences, allowing us instead to understand how such experiences have been constructed. Another possible explanation for the changes between 1931 and 1960 is that the author revised her novel in order to present a more acceptable, more feminine, and also more domesticated novel. This is also the argument that Matthews puts forth in her analysis of the changes in the different editions of Cartucho. She argues that Campobello created this more refined text influenced by her work at the National School of Dance and the writing of My Mother’s Hands. Thus, only a turn, or rather a return, to more feminine writing, where the scratching arrowheads are substituted with an elegant fountain pen, makes her an acceptable, albeit eccentric, writer of the novel of the Mexican Revolution. Be that as it may, the crucial issue here is to stress that the differences between these two versions reveal the ways in which fearless women like Nacha Ceniceros are assimilated into the Mexican literary landscape. Epistemic violence within Campobello’s own text and within the literary apparatus in which Cartucho is usually considered curtails the possibility of open-ended narratives where the boundaries between the public and the domestic domains are far from being restored. Finally, Campobello’s rewriting of the vignette also presents a kinder, gentler version of Pancho Villa. His cruelty is also lessened and the violence of Campobello’s language mitigated. Matthews also argues that Nacha’s return to the home does not necessarily imply the domestication of the coronela. Instead, Nacha Ceniceros’s revolutionary itinerary would idealize figures like Rafaela Luna, Nellie’s mother.12 Nacha Ceniceros’s return to the domestic sphere would consequently unsettle the entire notion of the hero (or the heroine) as they were described in the previous two chapters. The women in Cartucho who do not perform acts of violence, argues Matthews, still have political agency and at the same time manage to break the cycle of violence. Matthews’s point is well taken: the revisions of Cartucho suggest that domestication of fearless women is a complex process. The changes in the text reveal a multifaceted understanding of women’s participation in combat, and even women’s heroism of the revolution. Moreover, in Matthews’s interpretation, a violent death ceases to be the prerequisite for female heroism. Yet the fact remains that in the revised version not only the soldadera becomes an old woman but Nacha Ceniceros herself is also a less transgressive character: she literally rebuilds the boundaries between the domestic and the public domains. 12. Ibid., 91.

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More important, the changes in the different versions of Cartucho also reveal the ways in which women’s participation in and women’s writing on the Mexican Revolution have been assimilated in literary, political, and historical landscapes. The revised version of Cartucho reveals a deferment of violence, yet its trace remains. Nacha Ceniceros might, as Matthews would have it, project an “idealized biography, the synthesis of military and domestic abilities of revolutionary women.”13 Yet a part of this biography remains hidden underneath the anthill. Moreover, nothing saves Rafaela Luna, the woman who would correspond to this idealized biography, from dying, “tired of hearing the 30–30” (Cartucho, 33–34). Nellie’s mother dies, tired of the physical violence of a revolution that, in spite of a heroine’s best efforts to rebuild the walls of one’s home, never stops short of violating the home itself and all it is meant to enclose and protect. This is the precise conflict that comes across most clearly in the vignette “General Rueda.”

“General Rueda” The conflicts between discourses of emancipation and discourses of domestication are undoubtedly related to the codification of the public and private domains. Jean Franco argues that in the Mexican case, the origin of this dichotomy lies in the postindependence nineteenth-century nationalism.14 Domestic stability, however, was a benefit that indigenous women and lower-class women never had, as they lacked the doubtful privilege of domestic stability and decency. The revolution further accentuated the continuities between violence in both the public and the domestic domains. The vignette “General Rueda” reveals young Nellie’s reactions to an act of violence that takes place in the past and remains unsolved in the present. This again leads to the questions that lie at the core of the text: Is resorting to violence a sign of emancipation? Does women’s agency exclusively materialize in acts of retaliation, or are there other means to exercise agency? “General Rueda” reveals that perpetrating acts of violence is often not exactly a matter of choice for Cam13. Ibid. 14. Franco states in Plotting Women: “Women were especially crucial to the imagined community as mothers of the new men and as guardians of private life, which from Independence onward was increasingly seen as a shelter from political turmoil. Two aspects of the re-codification of gender deserve special attention; the carving out of a territory of domestic stability and decency from which all low elements were expelled, and the displacement of the religious onto the national, which once again made ‘purity’ the responsibility of women” (81).

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pobello’s female characters. Here young Nellie’s reactions to an act of violence that takes place in the past remain unsolved in the present. At the same time, the (im)possibility of retribution will also mark the traumatic past that remains at the center of these “tales of the struggle in northern Mexico.” The vignette begins with a description of General Rueda, a man who together with his troops enters and unsettles young Nellie’s home. The style is fast, almost choppy, swallowing words, missing verbs.15 The vignette begins with a description of General Rueda, a “tall man with a blond mustache.” For the narrator, this man who “spoke forcefully” will be forever associated with his crime. Questioning Nellie’s mother about Pancho Villa’s whereabouts, the general threatens the mother and frightens the children: “They all shoved and bullied us. The man with the blond mustache was about to hit Mama, then he said, ‘Tear the place apart. Look everywhere’” (33). The soldier’s invasion of Campobello’s home highlights the fact that the violence of the revolution does not stop short at the private and domestic sphere, thereby revealing that challenging the boundary between the public and the domestic will not immediately result in opportunities for women to freely enter the public realm and become political subjects: “Even with a machine gun she couldn’t have fought them all.” The mother is left defenseless and remains as a spectral presence in the narrator’s language and her memory. “I have never forgotten the picture of my mother, back up against the wall, eyes fixed on the black table, listening to the insults.” But she is not the only presence that remains with Nellie: “That blond man, too, has been engraved in my memory ever since” (33). Her only possibility of retribution is returning to her childhood and symbolically executing the general with the deadly smile of a young girl. Even though Campobello never states this clearly, her language suggests that the general, and maybe also the other men, raped Nellie’s mother: “Mama didn’t cry. She told them to do what they pleased but not to touch her children.” Moreover, the words that follow speak to a desolating numbness, often associated with the trauma of rape: “Mama’s eyes, grown large with revolt, did not cry. They had hardened, reloaded in the rifle barrel of her memory” (33). The description intimates that the men were holding the gun close to her eyes, to her face, an act that strongly suggests sexual assault. Campobello only hints at this threat— hardly uncommon in revolutionary Mexico—in Cartucho and her later novel My 15. Fornet argues in Reescrituras de la memoria that Campobello displays the “breakneck speed of film” in her writing (23).

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Mother’s Hands. Although openly bringing up the issue of rape in postrevolutionary Mexico might very well be a taboo Campobello refused or was unable to transgress, the vignette also reveals the ways in which the trauma of sexual violence comes across.16 The constant references to the general’s blond moustache in the text are one of the ways in which the traumatic experience weaves its way through Campobello’s text. Years later, after the family moved to Chihuahua, Nellie finds out that General Rueda has been sentenced to death in a war trial. The narrator immediately relates his death sentence to her personal experience. She remembers her mother’s suffering: “Mama was no longer with us. Without being sick, she closed her eyes one day and remained asleep, back in Chihuahua. (I know Mama was tired of hearing the 30–30)” (33–34). The mother’s suffering here also explains her death: she died without being ill, tired of and traumatized by what men do in peacetime and in wartime, only more so.17 Once the general has been apprehended and condemned, his masculinity and the threat he once represented are destabilized. This appears symbolized in the descriptions of the man’s moustache that moves from “a tall man with a blond mustache” to “he had a smaller mustache then,” to finally “his mustache was even smaller” when he receives the death sentence (33). The ever shrinking moustache symbolizes the connections among war, violence, and masculinity, a relationship that the young narrator certainly recognizes.18 However, even though the general ages, even though Nellie grows up, and even though her mother has long passed away, the moment of the attack and the possible rape remains unresolved in the past and unassimilated in the young girl’s memory. The instant Nellie finds out that Rueda is about to be executed, she wishes to 16. Leys explains in Trauma: A Genealogy that this kind of traumatic experience is usually manifested in the form of “flashbacks, traumatic nightmares and other repetitive phenomena” (266). 17. I am paraphrasing MacKinnon: “The trouble has been that men do in war what they do in peace, only more so, so when it comes to women, the complacency that surrounds peacetime extends to wartime, no matter what the law says” (“Rape, Genocide, and Rights,” 53). 18. Ruddick provides one possible psychological explanation for this construction: “In extraordinary circumstances, soldiers must control ordinary emotions of fear, rage and desire. Understandably, many rage against absent women and the emotionality they represent. They may also blame women for their own longings for women that allegedly divert them from soldierly duty, thereby endangering them and their comrades. In this strained emotional ambience of danger and separation, commanders often encourage ‘masculine’ aggressive impulses. Given the encouragement and the pressures to which their ‘normal masculine’ defenses are subject, it is not surprising if many soldiers imaginatively elaborate or actually engage in rapes and assaults on women” (“Feminist Peace Politics,” 111).

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become a man and shoot the general. She spends the day “thinking about being a man, having my own pistol and firing a hundred shots into him” (33). Symbolically, the soldiers carry out a death sentence a young girl established many years earlier: “The soldiers who fired at him had taken hold of my pistol with a hundred shots. All night long, I kept saying to myself, ‘They killed him because he abused Mama, because he was bad to her.’ Mama’s hardened eyes were mine now, and I repeated ‘He was bad to Mama. That’s why they shot him.’ ” The narrator uses the general’s crimes in the past in order to rewrite her own present. She cannot carry out this symbolic, and at the same time violent, retribution as an adult; only a child dreaming of a pistol that would fire a hundred bullets is able to perform such a task. “When I saw his picture on the front page of the Mexico City newspapers, I sent a child’s smile to those soldiers who held in their hands my pistol with its hundred bullets, turned into a carbine resting against their shoulders” (34). Here Campobello still refers to child’s play and to a traumatic past that will not be resolved, not even when she writes the “tales of the struggle in northern Mexico” many years after this traumatic event took place, embarking on a perpetual cycle of past and present. When Nellie kills the general with her girlish smile and her hundred imaginary bullets, she intervenes in the same spectral space that the ghosts of the “men of the North” inhabit. In this vignette, Campobello strategically writes her way around the taboo that prevents the narrator from carrying out her act of retribution. At the same time, she critically engages with the multilayered violence of the revolution. This violence, as already anticipated, is also cyclical: Cartucho is a haunting and haunted text. At first glance, the novel might appear to be an innocent and childlike perspective on the Mexican Revolution. Yet a closer look at Campobello’s language reveals that physical violence (perpetrated in both the public and the domestic domains) is neither extraordinary nor shocking for young Nellie. In what remains, I show that the narrator’s perspective, rather than innocent or childlike, brings the sheer possibility of representing the Mexican Revolution (and its violence) into crisis. Similar to María Teresa León’s soldaderas who oscillate between losing fear and killing fear—the latter implying agency and even strategy—the narrator’s perspective oscillates between a compulsive and a strategic deferment of violence. Dennis Parle has described Cartucho as paradoxically the most poetic and the most violent novel of the revolution. What follows shows that this apparent paradox is not such. Campobello’s writing proves that the violence of the revolution

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might be most adequately represented in a language Parle has chosen to call poetic. Her writing corrodes the notion that the texts belonging to the novel of the Mexican Revolution are a transparent representation of history, which ironically is often considered to be even more accurate than historiography itself.19 Even though Cartucho and My Mother’s Hands are often considered to be the only texts authored by a woman that deserve to be part of the novel of the Mexican Revolution genre, Campobello herself claims that she was neither writing from nor writing within a particular literary convention. “It is important to clarify here that when I wrote Cartucho I had not read any book about the Revolution, no matter whether they were accurately written or not” (Conviene aclarar aquí que en la época en que escribí Cartucho yo no había leído ningún libro de la Revolución, ya estuvieron escritos con acierto o sin él, Libros, 116). Most critics, however, tend to overlook Campobello’s dissatisfaction within the specific framing of the canon. They emphasize instead that the novel’s greatest contribution is its different, female, and sincere perspective within this same canon, thereby including a reluctant and disobedient Nellie Campobello in a tradition she did want to belong to and whose limits she clearly delineates in Cartucho. For Jorge Fornet, Campobello’s originality relies on the fact that as a woman, or as a young girl, her “eye-witness account” of the revolution is going to be radically different from her male counterparts’, since she also narrates the struggle from the perspective of her own experience. In the same essay, Fornet attributes Campobello’s success to her idiosyncratic perspective in Cartucho.20 Even though Campobello’s work has received considerable attention in the past years, this was not always the case. The same idiosyncrasy that for Fornet explains her success as writer of the revolution was also used in order to justify Campobello’s exclusion from the canon. Gabriela de Beer shows that in most critical discussions of the novel of the Mexican Revolution, Campobello’s novels are often either absent or dismissed as 19. See Parle, “Narrative Style and Technique in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho,” 201. Although most critics consider these novels to function like snapshots of the events of the revolution, a limited number contend that the novels reflect an even more accurate representation of Mexican history than historiographic discourse could ever convey. They include Beatrice Berler, “The Mexican Revolution as Reflected in the Novel”; Juan Bruce-Nova, “La novela de la Revolución Mexicana: La topología del final”; Antonio Castro Leal’s introduction to the anthology La novela de la Revolución Mexicana; Silvia Lorente-Murphy, “La Revolución Mexicana en la novela”; and Carmen Ramos Escandón, “¿El texto como historia o la historia como texto?” 20. In Reescrituras de la memoria, Fornet suggests that Campobello, instead of mimicking a more established voice, “took the risk of being herself and triumphed” (25).

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mere anecdotal perspectives on the revolution. Even though de Beer recognizes and even emphasizes that the canon of Mexican literature has ignored Campobello, she does not challenge the literary apparatus that has dismissed Cartucho as an anecdotal and therefore marginal work. She argues that Campobello’s style is “impressionistic” and “almost photographic” and concludes that, consequently, Campobello’s work fits into the most popular forms of revolutionary literary writing, memories and snapshots.21 Cartucho here becomes another collection of snapshots of the revolution, much like Mariano Azuela’s novel The Underdogs has been defined. The difference between Cartucho and more canonical texts would rely on the fact that here Campobello centers on women’s experiences of the revolution. Yet such an argument can hardly be taken for granted: I have already suggested that Campobello’s Cartucho brings representation of the Mexican Revolution, and with it the sheer possibility of a novel of the Mexican Revolution, into crisis. Contrary to what de Beer and also Doris Meyer argue, I propose that Cartucho does not simply provide access to the unmediated experience of a young girl in revolutionary Mexico. Rather, the text in itself reveals the impossibility of gaining such access. Meyer understands Cartucho to be primarily a counterhegemonic autobiographical text. She explains that the novel includes popular voices (songs, stories, myths) that challenge the dominant narratives of the Mexican Revolution. Through the use of these traditions, Campobello redeems Pancho Villa and restores his honor, turning him into a popular hero.22 Yet the complex textual maneuvers in Cartucho do more than challenge the official narrative of the Mexican Revolution. They also constantly gesture to what will always remain unknown. As Irene Matthews reminds us, Campobello’s claim that she was a young child during the revolutionary years does not seem to be accurate. Yet this is only the first step to explaining why taking the novel for granted as an unmediated path to a young girl’s experience during the revolution neglects the complexities of the novel. Rather, the narrative voice of Cartucho underscores the complex relationship among writing, representation, violence, and gender. The result is not just a counterhegemonic autobiography that defies dominant narratives of the Mexican Revolution: the text itself questions whether an event like the revolution in northern Mexico can be fully represented. 21. De Beer, “Nellie Campobello, escritora de la Revolución Mexicana,” 213. 22. Meyer, “Dialogics of Testimony,” 61. Earlier in her article, Meyer argues that “the sketches that became Cartucho allowed Campobello to bring to life—to dramatize with stark verbal images—truths that official history had suppressed” (50).

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A quick detour to the introduction of the 1931 version of Cartucho further clarifies this point. The text is anonymous; its author may be Germán Lizt Azurbide, who took charge of publication of the novel. Yet the conflation of author and the narrator and the references to dance suggest that Campobello herself may have written these lines: Nellie Campobello . . . takes the first bullet-ridden doll out of her remembrance and lays it down in the Cuban heat; and as she dances, in her hands she has the head of the last Baptist, prophet of incendiary speeches: Pancho Villa. (Nellie Campobello . . . saca de su recuerdo el primer muñeco desquebrajado por las balas y lo extiende sobre la calentura de Cuba; y mientras danza, tiene entre sus manos la cabeza del último Bautista, profeta de discursos del incendio: Pancho Villa.)23

Willingly or unwillingly, Campobello becomes a Mexican Salomé who gazes directly at the wounds inflicted in the years of revolutionary violence. Following Cathy Caruth’s reading of Sigmund Freud’s work on trauma theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Campobello’s goal here would be to speak to “a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound.” This voice bears witness to—paraphrasing Caruth, paraphrasing Freud—a truth that Campobello herself cannot fully know, and by extension cannot represent in a transparent language. Instead, such a truth belongs to the realm of the spectral, and specters, following Jacques Derrida, are located, or rather trapped, between existence and nonexistence, between certainly and uncertainty, or, if we like, between the representable and the unrepresentable. In her analysis of trauma, Caruth emphasizes the narrative structure of a traumatic event: a trauma is always a “story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.”24 Not unlike the haunting pain of the phantom limb, a traumatic experience oscillates between what is known and what is unknown; it is a truth that always appears delayed or belated, as the references to General Rueda’s shrinking moustache clearly show. It also reveals more about what is unknown than about what is known, this is to say, about an experience that has not been assimilated and often cannot be put into words.

23. The introduction is reproduced in the edition of Cartucho published by Factoría Ediciones in 1999; the quote is on p. 99. 24. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3–4. See also Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6.

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The traumatic structure of the text becomes even more consequential when considering the politics of gender in the 1930s. Campobello herself admits having been very naughty when she wrote and published Cartucho. And with Cartucho, Campobello even breaks the ultimate taboo: not only does she write about the dead or dying male bodies that young Nellie touches, loves, and even desires, but she also writes about women who perpetrate acts of violence. The allusion to Salomé, a femme fatale and therefore a threatening and transgressive figure, is significant: Nellie Campobello, writer and dancer of the Mexican Revolution, dances with Pancho Villa’s head in her hands, turning the fragments, scraps, broken bodies, and broken souls of the revolution into a radical and, at the same time, open-ended narrative.

Where Life Remains Captured in the Images of the Revolution In Cartucho, the violence of the revolution permeates every aspect of young Nellie’s life. It should not come as a surprise that in the vignette “From a Window” a corpse that appears underneath the girl’s window is likened to a doll. “Since he lay out there for three nights, I became accustomed to seeing the scrawl of his body, fallen toward the left with his hands on his face, sleeping there, next to me. The dead men seemed mine. There were moments when, fearful he would be taken away, I would get up and run to the window. He was my obsession at night. I liked to look at him because I thought he was very afraid” (37). The body absorbs and displays the fear that young Nellie herself does not put into words. She admits being obsessed about the body day and night: she has to ensure he remains underneath her window, because the body, not Nellie herself, was very afraid. At the same time, young Nellie cannot play (think, dream) without constantly referring to violence and death. Instead of romanticizing death, Campobello’s writing displays death and violence in their crudest forms: during a bloody revolution, when one dead body is readily available to substitute for any other. They all become cartuchos, empty shells. Yet in Nellie’s eyes they are, to use María Teresa León’s terms when she describes the women who lost (and killed) fear, “life, among the absence of life” (“Miedo”). Once the body is removed from underneath the girl’s window, Nellie now yearns to find another corpse to substitute for the one that was taken. “That night I went to sleep dreaming they would shoot someone else and hoping it would be next to my home” (64). Consequently, Cartucho reveals that Nellie, the young eyewitness, not only loses fear

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but kills fear as well. She defers and displaces the violence of the revolution. Yet she can articulate such a traumatic displacement only in a language that is necessarily violent and necessarily poetic. In Cartucho, dead bodies become the girl’s dolls, but her toys also participate in the revolution and its violence, radically unsettling any expectations that it is possible to protect a young girl from the violence of the revolution in a safe and detached domestic space. An interesting contrast here would be Elena Fortún’s novel Celia en la revolución (Celia in the Revolution), a text that this Spanish author of children’s books wrote in 1943 but was published only posthumously. Celia, the heroine of Fortún’s earlier novels, is no longer a child, but an eighteen-year-old woman who, like Campobello, finds herself trapped in the turmoil of a violent revolutionary struggle. Unlike young Nellie in Cartucho, Celia openly expresses her fear, her hunger, her suffering. Yet Fortún also briefly refers to younger children’s reactions to the violent acts they are witnessing. When a number of executed bodies appear underneath the window of a boarding school where Celia is helping out, one of Celia’s friends who also works at the school describes the effect the bodies had on some of the young children: “Have you not heard, miss? There were some dead fascists next to the wall, and the ants were going inside their noses. How funny! Because children are cruel . . .” (¿No sabe señorita? Había unos fascistas muertos junto a la tapia y les entraban las hormigas por las narices. ¡Qué risa! Porque las criaturas son crueles . . .).25 Both authors convey the ways in which living within revolutionary violence affects young women, yet they do so in radically different ways. A more elaborate comparison between these novels would again highlight the fact that the narrator’s perspective in Cartucho is a complex construction, structured by trauma, and not merely a child’s direct and innocent perspective. The point is not just that the narrator is so used to this violence that she fails to recognize it. Instead, her language reveals that there is nothing extraordinary in the violence that surrounds her. This is particularly visible in the vignette “General Sobarzo’s Guts.” Here, Nellie observes how two men are carrying something that looks quite interesting on a platter. “From up the street we had been able to see that there was something pretty and red in the basin. The soldiers smiled at each other, lowered the tray, and showed it to us. ‘They’re guts’ said the youngest one, fixing his eyes on the two of us to see if we were frightened. When we heard ‘they’re guts’ we moved up close to see them. They were all rolled up together, as if they had no end. ‘Guts! How nice!’” (35). 25. Fortún, Celia en la revolución, 66.

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The general’s guts do not frighten the girls: the revolution and its violence have killed their fear (yet not their curiosity), or at least displaced it. Even though one of the men who carry the guts attempts to frighten the girls, they defy him. Their reaction displaces the man’s as well as the reader’s expectations. The girls ask who might be the owner of the guts, as though they were a daily object—the general’s shoes, the general’s hat, the general’s gun—somebody may have left behind, or as though the general could come back and pick up his rolled-up guts that he had misplaced. Jorge Fornet compares the narrator’s perspective here to the lens of a camera that provides a transparent and nonjudgmental representation of an event. This allows Campobello, argues Fornet, to narrate the most horrifying events as though they were completely natural.26 Yet Campobello’s language and the narrator’s particular perspective transmit something more than the nature of a child that has grown accustomed to violence, to death, and even to guts carried around on a platter. Instead, the violence of the revolution penetrates young Nellie’s home and her daily life, producing a language of violence that speaks to the incommensurability between a violent and traumatic event and its representation in language. Hannah Arendt argues in On Revolution that violence is incapable of speech.27 Yet Campobello’s writing challenges Arendt’s contention, as Cartucho reveals a far more complicated and intricate relationship between violence and its (literary) representation. Briefly, Cartucho poses the same question that Beatrice Hanssen asks in relationship to Arendt’s differentiation between violence and speech. Whereas Arendt argues that they are mutually exclusive, Hanssen suggests that in the particular case of a traumatic experience, a silenced memory may speak through the body. Yet Hanssen does not take this language of violence at face value: referring to Adorno’s famous statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric, she wonders whether it is possible to represent violence, particularly the violence of genocide, “without mimetically reproducing its calamitous effects or palliating is horrendous magnitude.”28 26. Fornet, Reescrituras de la memoria, 12. 27. Arendt asserts in On Revolution: “The point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. Because of this speechlessness political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to technicians. For political thought can only follow the articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains bound to what appears in the domain of human affairs; and these appearances, in contradistinction to physical matters, need speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be manifest at all” (18–19). 28. Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, 164.

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Hanssen’s comments on Arendt’s notion of violence, as well has her own brief reference to trauma theory, suggest that Campobello’s language of violence inscribes a traumatic past that, following Cathy Caruth, would “be released through the wound.”29 Furthermore, Campobello’s idiosyncratic use of language also allows the author to speak about the violence of the revolution without, to use Hanssen’s terms, “mimetically reproducing its calamitous effects or palliating its horrendous magnitude.” Campobello’s language effectively undoes the entire possibility of mimetic reproduction. The infiltration of violence in Campobello’s writing underscores that Cartucho is not just a chronicle of a traumatic and always already violent experience in the past. The dead in Cartucho remain as “still lifes” or a ghostly presence, scarring the Mexican landscape with Campobello’s yearned-for arrowheads. Even more striking and at the same time more revealing in this sense is the vignette “Grime” that tells the story of José Díaz, the most beautiful young man Nellie ever remembers knowing.30 José Díaz dies burned in an alley that smells of urine, a street “so narrow that it seems sad to the feet” (tan angosto que se hace triste a los pies, Cartucho, 51). The narrator again obsessively projects her own traumatic experience on José Díaz’s body, making him part of her child’s play, and with that her dreams, her hopes, as well as her nightmares. In Nellie’s eyes, José Díaz, the young and handsome soldier, becomes the boyfriend of the girl’s doll, Pitaflorida: “Three times I said to myself. ‘Yes I’m going to make him Pitaflorida’s beau.’ (Pitaflorida was my doll princess).” Nellie does not communicate this pronouncement to her mother or her siblings. Instead, she softly whispers to herself: “I spoke very softly, closing my eyes” (30). Even though this vignette might easily be dismissed as a young girl’s innocent and even playful dream that refuses to understand the crude reality of the revolution, Campobello’s voice is hardly innocent. Rather, the emphatic repetitions as well as the displacement of the soldier’s demise on a toy are signs that here the narrator endeavors, yet consistently fails, to put into words the haunting pain that the soldier’s death implies. Thus, in young Nellie’s eyes, José Díaz can become only her doll’s beau, and never hers. Caruth emphasizes that a traumatic experience is always a repetitive phenomenon, that is, it is not an event that happens only once; instead, a trauma 29. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 2. 30. In Meyer and Matthews’s translation, some paragraphs from the 1960 version of this vignette are missing. Since they are crucial for my analysis, I am including my own translations of the missing passages from the 1960 edition. Both quotations stem from the original version of Cartucho, published by Factoría Ediciones, on p. 51.

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manifests itself in the different ways in which its symptoms (nightmares, flashbacks, and so on) haunt the survivors of such an event over and over again.31 Considering this notion of trauma, the vignettes in Cartucho would not represent a young girl’s innocent and even playful memories, but rather highlight the unresolved conflicts and contradictions that the Mexican Revolution signified for the narrator, her memories, and her childhood. On a more collective level, Campobello’s writing also reveals the trauma of this violence, as her language ensures that these spectral presences, as the author herself contends in a later vignette, belong to a world or a place “where life has stopped and has been preserved in the images of the revolution. . .” (86). In the vignette “Grime,” Nellie’s projection of her fears, her desires, her hopes, as well as her nightmares on her doll further accentuates the ways in which the violence of the revolution is deferred. “I used to sit Pitaflorida on the window so she could see him, and when I dressed her, I’d tell her the things he said. My doll was very moved.” Needless to say, Nellie is projecting her own feelings onto Pitaflorida; she is moved by both José Díaz’s seductive words and his imminent death. Bearing in mind that the author was probably an adolescent during the revolution, chances are that Campobello herself underwent a similar traumatic experience. She may have lost a loved one; she may have feared the loss of a loved one. Nellie’s traumatic experience, in Caruth’s sense of the term, is the death of a young man, “devoured by grime” (30). Yet Campobello’s writing, rather than chronicling a young girl’s experience during the revolution, exposes the difficulty (if not impossibility) of assimilating and narrating the multilayered violence of the revolution. In the same vignette, the narrator seamlessly moves to a description of a battle. Later, Nellie and her mother go in search of El Siete, Nellie’s brother, but what they find are José Díaz’s sad remains. The boy who once was beautiful is now nothing but grime. We went down an alley that leads to Mesón del Águila, it smelled of urine— an alley so narrow that it seems sad to the feet—, but when we saw a lump up against a wall we ran; he was face down, the hair messy, dirty, the wide hands, sun burnt. The fingernails were black, on his back he had a folded, gray poncho, he looked like he had drowned in grime, and my heart shrank. “In this ugly alley,” I said when I saw his face. I was afraid. José Díaz, with his red car, the beau of all the girls from Segunda del Rayo, the boy for whom Toña cried! (Nos fuimos por un callejoncito que sale al Mesón del Águila, que olía a orines— es tan angosto que se hace triste a los pies—, pero al ver un bulto pegado a la 31. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.

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The grime, the broken body, and to an extent all broken bodies of the revolution now also penetrate Nellie’s playful projections. “No, no! He was never the beau of Pitaflorida, my doll who broke her head when she fell out the window. She never laughed with him!” (30). The fact that the beautiful doll falls out of Nellie’s window, cracking her head, is hardly an accident. Rather than a simple symbolic representation of the end or even death of innocence or childhood, the doll’s broken head gestures at the impossibility of putting her experience into words. At the end, only the shards of the doll’s broken porcelain head remain, crafting a fragmented narrative, not unlike Josephina Niggli’s Adelita, whose story is written in the thunder and bones of an explosion. The last sentences of the vignette are a brief yet ambiguous dedication to the soldier’s memory: “Young, handsome José Díaz died devoured by grime. He got his bullet wounds so he wouldn’t hate the sun.” This ironic comment reveals an additional disconcerting characteristic of José Díaz. Earlier in the text, Nellie explains why José Díaz hated the sun—“because it was bad for his face and his hands”—highlighting racial and class prejudice that the young narrator shares, “and I thought it was just fine, on account of Pitaflorida. I would never dream of marrying my princess to a swarthy type” (30). This brief ironic note is not the only reference to the construction of race, class, and gender (and the crossings among them) in the novel. For example, in the vignette “For a Kiss,” a Yaqui soldier who fights with the carrancistas attempts to kidnap Nellie’s cousin. With the help of Nellie’s mother, Nellie’s aunt convinces the carrancista general to punish the soldier. The next day, the general orders the execution of a token Yaqui soldier who “had never laid eyes on my cousin Luisa.” Nellie reflects on the event: “The man was a Yaqui Indian who spoke no Spanish. He died for a kiss the officer gallantly awarded him.” Nellie’s aunt, however, is quite satisfied with this uneven retribution: “I think my aunt gave a coquettish smile to the changos’ general” (25). This vignette clearly reveals the multilayered processes of subalternization during the revolution. Ultimately, it asks who is in a more precarious position: the young woman who might be abducted and raped by a troop of soldiers or the indigenous soldier who is killed in an exemplary execution. It also

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suggests that ultimately both the woman as well as the Yaqui soldier will be excluded from the kind of justice that will emerge out of this struggle. The irony of the final comment in “Grime,” “He got his bullet wounds so he wouldn’t hate the sun,” again reveals that the narrator’s point of view is not the natural voice of a young and innocent child. It represents a complex perspective, oscillating between a strategic and a compulsive gesturing at the spectral presence of the dead, the grime that stubbornly remains in the crevices and gnarls of Mexican landscape and Mexican memory. Campobello’s men and women from the North are doomed to remain absent and present, wedged between life and death in the Mexican literary landscape. Like Nacha Ceniceros, who does and does not kill her beloved, who is and is not executed, who does and does not return to the domestic realm, the author herself, as well as her work, suffered a destiny of invisibility and ambiguity. In order to further nuance the points raised in this reading of Cartucho, it would be useful here to question whether other women who write about the intersections of gender, revolution, and violence encounter similar difficulties and produce similar texts. Although some of the discussed aspects, such as Campobello’s perpetual trace of violence, refer more particularly to Campobello’s work and life, this reading still aims to show that the often uncomfortable relationship among emancipation, political agency, and acts of violence permeates women’s writing on revolutionary women. Moreover, the fact that the woman considered to be the only female author of a novel included in the novel of the Mexican Revolution genre completely disappeared from the Mexican landscape for almost a decade might not provide a deeper understanding of her novels, but it certainly speaks to the ways in which women’s writing on the revolution and on women in the revolution has (not) been assimilated in Mexico today. Only four years after the publication of Cartucho, María Teresa León published a very different work, a collection of short stories titled Tales from Contemporary Spain. In spite of radical differences in context, content, style, and overt political affiliation, the intersection of physical violence, epistemic violence, and cyclical violence also marks this later text. As in the case of Cartucho, these stories also question the continuities and discontinuities among women’s acts of violence, agency, and emancipation.

6 In the Shadows María Teresa León’s Short Stories

“Me . . . a miliciana” A young woman, crippled after spending her childhood working long hours in a humid and dark school basement, instigates a fire. The woman’s old schoolhouse, a convent, burns down. A mother, accustomed to smuggling weapons under her dress, oversees how her young family fabricates homemade bombs. A working-class woman observes political unrest and revolutionary fervor in the streets from her window and chooses to take a first step toward her own liberation from an oppressive and confining marriage—with a rifle in her hands. After being confronted by the pain of a mother who lost her child in a bombing, a woman violently slaps a soldier’s face and cries out: “That’s it. You give us babies only to kill them later” (Eso es. Nos hacéis hijos para luego matarlos, Morirás, 150). These stories of revolution, war, and violence belong to María Teresa León’s collections Tales from Contemporary Spain (1935) and You Will Die Far Away (1942). León’s writing narrates the plight of illiterate, often unemployed workers, of women and children who find themselves immersed in and sometimes dragged along a revolutionary struggle. The stories also trace what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as “a subliminal and discontinuous emergence of the subaltern.”1 León’s writing unequivocally gestures to the ambiguous space between losing fear and killing fear, a space inhabited by those subjects whose stories will remain marginal and most probably forgotten in the broader spectrum of Spanish history, memory, and literature. These fearless women’s actions also disavow the existence of a peaceful “repose of the warrior,” a private and domestic sphere 1. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, xi.

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where violence and revolution do not reach. This chapter proves that the women that disown this same space (and the way it has been politically inscribed) do so with counterhegemonic, nonrepresentational acts of subaltern insurgency, unevenly written into the history of the revolutionary Left in Spain. In the area between losing and killing fear, these women’s stories emerge. As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of the “repose of the warrior” is based on Jean Franco’s understanding of the term in the essay “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, and Children.” Even though Franco’s essay addresses a more recent problem in Latin America, the points she raises still speak to the negotiations León’s characters carry out in the different stories. The crucial question here is whether refusing to become the “repose of the warrior” or even destroying the place once thought to be the “repose of the warrior” automatically implies political agency and even the possibility of emancipation for women during the Spanish Civil War and its preceding years. In her essay, Franco is mainly concerned with the disappearance of traditionally safe (and gendered) spaces of asylum, this is to say, potential sites of resistance against state-sanctioned violence. In spite of the fact that such spaces have strongly contributed to the perpetuation of sexism, racism, and classism, Franco considers the family and the convent to be alternatives to state power and potential sites of resistance against state-sanctioned violence.2 The condition of possibility for such a resistance is a gendered separation of spaces and roles. This separation, however, is always class based. Franco’s ultimate concern is that the disappearance of such spaces results in an even more precarious situation for women and children, as it represents the dubious accomplishments of counterinsurgency movements in Latin America in the 1960s. Franco, who is very aware of the patriarchal nature of this division of spaces, does not attempt to glorify the separate domains. However, she still underscores the importance of “the oppositional potentialities of these female territories whose importance as the only sanctuaries became obvious at the moment of their disappearance.”3 Bearing in mind that León’s short stories stem from a different historical and cultural moment—undoubtedly marked by strong anticlerical sentiments—the possibility of resistance is linked to leaving or even destroying 2. Franco argues: “But the family has been a powerful rival to the state, somehow more real, often the source of maternal power which is by no means to be despised, particularly when, as in contemporary Latin America, the disappearance of political spaces has turned the family (and the mother in particular) into a major institution of resistance” (“Killing Priests,” 11). 3. Ibid., 12, 16.

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the repose. At the same time, destroying or disavowing the space of the repose often leaves these women without a space from which they can articulate this same resistance. While León’s stories insert themselves in the aesthetic and political doctrine of socialist realism—thereby underscoring a call for social change that can be carried out only with a violent overthrow of the old social order—they also reveal that the possibilities, responsibilities, and access to the public arena that a revolution conveys always exclude certain subjects. Mostly female, uneducated, and illiterate, these subjects are doomed to remain in nebulous shadows, like children lost in a forest whose song will never be heard (Memoria, 66). At a different level the author herself never quite moves out of the shadows of her more famous husband, Rafael Alberti; the shadows of a literary establishment that has not been interested in the complexity of her work; and the shadows of a Spanish Left that never had the patience to study the contradictions that come across in León’s writing. In the broader scope of León’s work, even these stories remain in the shadows. In her 1977 memoir, Memoria de la Melancolía (Memory of Melancholy), León barely mentions the stories that belong to both collections.4 Her only references to this particular area of her literary production are brief comments on Soviet writer Maxim Gorki, whose characters she defines as “the landless, the unfortunate, the hopeless” (los sin tierra, los sin fortuna, los sin esperanza, Memoria, 57). These are undoubtedly also the fearless subjects that circulate in and out of León’s short stories, the only exception being that León mainly, yet not exclusively, writes about women with no land, women without fortune, without hope, briefly, women who lost fear or killed fear and who are doomed to a spectral presence. This chapter critically engages with a limited sample of León’s short stories in order to reveal the ways in which women’s struggles are written in and out of these texts. As in the earlier chapter, the continuities and discontinuities among political agency, emancipation, and violence are highlighted. Moreover, as in Campobello’s case, the author’s itinerary in literary history and even in life mirrors the marginality of her characters. I propose that the slow vanishing of both authors in their respective canons, together with the literal confinement and forgetting that Campobello and León had to endure toward the end of their lives, 4. The only direct reference in Memory of Melancholy to Tales from Contemporary Spain is a brief comment on the story “El barco” (The Ship) in her memoir. “I remembered that Gorki had written a few words about the story a Spanish woman had written. It was called The Ship” (Yo recordaba dentro de mí que Gorki había escrito unas palabras sobre el cuento que escribió una mujer española. Se llamaba El barco, 58).

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reflects the same kind of epistemic violence that elides women’s participation in war and women’s relationship to violence, ultimately effacing women’s agency in narratives of revolutions and wars. As emphasized in the previous chapter, such epistemic violence curtails the possibility of open-ended narratives in which the boundaries between the public and the domestic domains are far from being restored. The section that follows therefore discusses an anecdote in the author’s memoir that raises questions concerning political commitment and violence in León’s texts. Beyond relating León’s construction of subjectivity in her own autobiography, this section aims to set the questions that will mark the reading of the short stories.5 In 1939, shortly before the triumph of the Nationalist forces would bring the Spanish Civil War to an end, María Teresa León and her husband, Rafael Alberti, left their home country in a small military airplane and embarked on a meandering path that led them to a thirty-year exile. León and Alberti returned to Spain only in 1977, after Franco’s death, when León was already suffering the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Yet on that significant winter morning in 1939, León and Alberti, accompanied by two officials of the now defeated Republican army, landed at the military airport in Oran, Algeria. They were on their way to Paris, but needed to stop and refuel the plane. León remembers her exodus in her memoir: They say that romantic Spaniards always had a gun and ounce of gold ready. We only had the gun. When we landed at the military airport in Oran, they pointed at my waist: “Madam, your gun.” I gave it to them, with a little melancholy, biting my lips. I was the interpreter: “That man is General Antonio Cordón, secretary of war, and the other one is Núñez Mazas, secretary of air. That one, a poet and me . . . a miliciana.” (Dicen que los románticos españoles tenían siempre preparada una pistola y una onza de oro. Nosotros llevábamos solamente la pistola. Al aterrizar en el aeródromo militar de Orán, me señalaron la cintura: “Señora, su pistola.” La entregué, con una pequeña melancolía, mordiéndome los labios. Serví de intérprete: “Ese señor es el general Antonio Cordón, ministro de la Guerra, y ese otro es el señor Núñez Mazas, ministro del Aire. Aquél, un poeta, y yo . . . una miliciana.) (Memoria, 229) 5. For studies of León’s autobiography, see Angel Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain; Mangini, Memories of Resistance; Randolph Pope, “La autobiografía del exilio: El ser previamente preocupado de Rafael Alberti y María Teresa León”; and Michael Ugarte, “Women and Exile: The Civil War Autobiographies of Constancia de la Mora and María Teresa León.”

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Even though some prefer to remember her as Rafael Alberti’s wife, María Teresa León was a writer, activist, cultural ambassador, director of the itinerant group Guerrillas del Teatro, and a crucial member of the Committee for Protection and Defense of the National Artistic Treasure. It is quite puzzling that León chooses to call herself, albeit hesitantly, a miliciana, particularly if we consider that she found herself in potentially hostile territory. She was also in the presence of two members of an army that in 1937 had officially repudiated the presence of women at the front. Moreover, as I explained in earlier chapters, the term miliciana had already acquired negative connotations for most sectors of the Republican army after the initial months of war. So why does León call herself a miliciana? The term miliciana speaks to the conflicts and contradictions that mark women’s participation in and women’s writing on the Spanish Civil War. This self-definition produces an effect similar to Elena Poniatowska’s also very problematic gesture, when she calls Nellie Campobello a soldadera. Without completely identifying the woman writer with the woman warrior, the implication here still is that separating the different roles that León played is inadequate, particularly bearing in mind that most rojas and milicianas ended up in prison, in the cemeteries (like the Trece Rosas), in exile, or simply in the murky forgetting of the Spanish Left that, to quote Rosa Montero, “had more important deaths to remember.”6 Consequently, in this brief yet very significant anecdote, León, on the one hand, becomes “just” a miliciana, a woman who like so many others felt compelled to fight for what she believed was just and right. León is defending the milicianas’ heroism. She also claims the repudiated term in order to name her own struggle in the civil war. At the same time, this exact gesture also reveals that miliciana is a too confining but nevertheless necessary expression that underscores her presence in the public arena, in literal and discursive battlefields. Bearing in mind that in 1939 milicianas had acquired a negative stigma, and considering further that in 1977 vindicating the rights and uncovering the histories of rojas and milicianas was not exactly on the agenda of the different leftist sectors in Spain and abroad, León might be selling herself short. The fact that her husband is still a poet whereas León, who had been writing and publishing fiction since her early teens, does not call herself a writer is certainly significant. Such a practice is not uncommon in León’s memoir, as she also situates herself 6. Montero, “Las ‘Trece Rosas,’ ” 4.

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in Rafael Alberti’s shadow, following him, like “the tail of a comet” (la cola del cometa, Memoria, 229), bearing witness to her own disappearance.7 Of course, León is hardly the first woman writer (artist, activist, composer . . .) who disappears in the shadow of her male companion. Montserrat Roig considers that such uneven relationships are an all too common pattern in the era. She argues that León would be far more known had she not been—by choice—in Alberti’s shadow.8 Be that as it may, the fact that in their own writing many of these women do not disavow, but instead underscore and reinscribe, these uneven relationships is certainly significant. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that female writers in the early twentieth century “often felt even more imperiled than men did by the sexual combat in which they were obliged to engage.” Even though Gilbert and Gubar are referring specifically to a more discursive battle of the sexes and not to a context of revolution and war, the point they make about women’s unwillingness to envision aggression and violence is certainly pertinent to my understanding of León’s writing.9 She rarely, aggressively or not, refers to her own 7. Similar to Nellie Campobello, who disappeared from memory as well as literary criticism, María Teresa León also spent the last years of her life confined, albeit in an asylum near Madrid. Although some of her fiction was published in the late 1970s, her fiction was absent from bookshelves in libraries and literary histories until very recently. Galaxia Gutenberg published an edition of Memoria de la melancolía in 2000, and León’s centenary in 2003 promoted the reedition of Juego limpio and Fábulas del tiempo amargo. Moreover, most critics of León’s work tend to associate it with the work of Rafael Alberti to such an extent that she becomes an appendix or an afterthought. A 1976 edition of the journal La Mano en el Cajón, for example, is revealing in this sense. The magazine claims to pay homage to both Alberti and León, yet while 90 percent of the issue is dedicated to Alberti’s work, only the very last section consists of a brief fragment of Memoria de la Melancolía. Again, as in Campobello’s case, León has received renewed critical attention in the past years, yet I want to emphasize that both authors, like the fearless women that appear in the pages of their work, had become spectral presences in the literary and cultural histories of their respective nations. 8. Roig, “La recuperación de la palabra,” viii. 9. Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 66. Gilbert and Gubar further argue that contrary to male authors, who anxiously display fear even of the “smallest female steps toward autonomy,” women writers “respond to such anxious reactionformations with a nervous sense of guilt and a paradoxical sense of vulnerability” (66). The consequence is that women’s responses to this battle of the sexes tend to be more complex and multilayered than those of their male counterparts. “No doubt because of this complexity, where male-authored descriptions of sexual conflict are generally quite straightforward and almost always feature literal duels, battles, or wrestling matches, women’s works—though they sometimes include physical confrontations—frequently imagine female victory either through duplicity and subterfuge or through providential circumstance. In women’s texts, men generally win tests of bodily

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uneven relationship with Alberti, the Communist Party, or the Left in Spain. She concentrates instead on creating female characters whose often very precarious situations force them to commit acts of aggression and violence. Like Campobello, León narrates such acts in an indirect and often veiling manner. The price the fearless women she describes have to pay for their transgression is usually their own disappearance. Thus, in these early short stories, León condemns her characters to a spectral existence in the margins of history and memory, without a place from which their actions can be vindicated or defended. Before embarking on a reading of León’s short stories, it is important to dwell on another apparently small detail from the earlier anecdote. León carried a gun at her belt, a weapon she was forced to give up at the airport in Oran. Even though there are no accounts that she ever fired that gun, its sheer presence bears witness to her participation in a violent struggle. It is a detail, easy to oversee, but one that still overtly refers to the different manifestations of physical violence in and about her writing. There are hidden guns everywhere in León’s stories, guns that neither León nor her characters at the end get to keep or at least bring out of their hiding places. The sad irony here is that, similar to Nellie Campobello who years before her own vanishing created her enigmatic Nacha Ceniceros, María Teresa León’s short stories also seem to foreshadow the author’s own ambivalent presence in Spain today. Absent and present at the same time, León speaks from the shadows. María Teresa León was born in 1904 in Logroño. She married at age sixteen, gave birth to two sons, and divorced quickly afterward. Between 1929 and 1930 she met poet Rafael Alberti, and in 1934 they were married in a civil ceremony. León was forced to leave his side when she was confined to an asylum at the couple’s return to Spain in 1977. Before and during the civil war, León was an active member of the Communist Party, and her writing appeared in the publication Octubre before the war, as well as in El Mono Azul during the war. She was the director of the Guerrillas del Teatro and played an important role when the Committee for the Protection and Defense of the National Artistic Treasure rescued paintings from the Prado Museum in Madrid.10 strength, but women outwit or outlast men who fortuitously succumb to fatal mischances. Unwilling or unable to envision female aggression even in the face of male assault, a number of literary women create characters who reap the benefits of battle without having to endure the risks of combat or who win their struggle with a male antagonist through such sacrificial but murderous gestures as infanticide” (67). 10. This group organized in order to save artwork from the bombs of the civil war. León played a leading role when the masterpieces were transported to Valencia.

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Alberti and León left Spain at the end of the war. After a brief stay in Paris, where the couple worked as translators for Radio Paris-Mondial, they settled in Argentina in 1940 and remained there for twenty-three years. Alberti and León spent the final years of their exile in Rome. In 1977 they returned to Spain, yet it was almost too late for León: she was losing her memory and was soon diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Interned in an asylum for the remaining years of her life, María Teresa León died in 1988. Her work represents a heterogeneous, prolific, and extensive corpus. It includes collections of short stories: Cuentos para soñar (Tales for Dreaming) (1928), La bella del mal amor (The Beauty of Bad Love) (1930), Rosa-Fría, patinadora de la luna (Rosa-Fría, Moon Skater) (1934), Tales from Contemporary Spain (1935), Morirás lejos (You Will Die Far Away) (1942), Las peregrinaciones de Teresa (Teresa’s Pilgrimages) (1942), and Fábulas del tiempo amargo (Fables of Bitter Times) (1962); novels: Contra viento y marea (Against All Odds) (1941), Juego limpio (Clean Game) (1954), and Menesteos, marinero de abril (Menesteos, Seaman of April) (1965); drama: Huelga en el Puerto (Strike at the Harbor) (1933) and La libertad en el tejado (Freedom on the Roof ) (written in exile and published in 1989); and fictionalized biography: El gran amor de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Great Love) (1946), Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador (1954), Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar (1968), and Cervantes, El soldado que nos enseñó a hablar (Cervantes, the Soldier Who Taught Us to Speak) (1978). Her most famous and commented work is her own memoir, Memory of Melancholy (1977). She also authored more political and journalistic texts: La historia tiene la palabra (History Has the Word) (1944) and Sonríe China (China Smiles) (1958). León participated in a series of leftist newspapers and publications, the already mentioned Octubre and El Mono Azul, as well as Nueva Cultura, Nuestro Cine, and Ayuda. During her Argentinean exile, León worked in broadcasting and authored scripts for the radio that included Nuestro hogar de cada día (Our Daily Home) (1958), as well as scripts for motion pictures: Los ojos más bellos del mundo (The Most Beautiful Eyes in the World) (1943) and La dama duende (The Phantom Lady) (1945). Finally, León also translated a series of work of fiction, particularly fairy tales, from French into Spanish and wrote introductions to translations and editions of popular narrative and poetry.

Corroding Socialist Realism Unable to pay justice to the complexity of María Teresa León’s extensive work, this chapter centers on four of her short stories that coincidentally are also León’s

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least-commented works. The first three stories—“Liberación de octubre” (October Liberation), “Una estrella roja” (A Red Star), and “Infancia quemada” (Burnt Childhood)—were published in the collection Tales from Contemporary Spain in Mexico in 1935. These stories center on the years of revolutionary struggle that led up to the civil war. “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” was written after the war and published in the collection You Will Die Far Away, already marked by her exile in Latin America. Most critics agree that Tales from Contemporary Spain represents an attempt to write in the style of socialist realism. This aesthetic method was adopted in the Soviet Union in the 1930s as the official artistic praxis that would contribute in a pedagogical sense to the consolidation of socialism.11 In You Will Die Far Away, and after the war, León begins to abandon the prescription and limits of socialist realism, which could also explain her rejection of violence and war in her later work. This by no means implies that her writing is any less political in this later story. Rather, “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” clearly shows the continuities between acts of violence committed in the private and the public domains. Joaquín Marco, responsible for the edition and prologue of the 1976 anthology of León’s short stories, A Red Star, argues that her earlier stories can be understood as a precursor to the romanceros of the civil war, overtly inscribing these stories in a political tradition of compromised literature.12 The stories would therefore aim to denounce the condition of the Spanish working class and fervently call for social change that can be carried out only with the instrumental use of physical violence. Yet as in Campobello’s writing, the continuities and discontinuities among political agency, emancipation, and violent acts lie at the core of these texts. Different from Campobello, however, whose language questions the sheer possibility of representing and narrating a violent and traumatic event, León’s language at first glance appears to be more transparent. For Campobello the revolution is located in an unresolved and haunting past, the implication being that she refers to events not as they happened, but rather how they have not been assimilated, to resurface later in repetitions, fragments, or even nightmares. For León, on the other hand, the revolution seems to evoke a utopian future, uncontaminated by the specters of the past. In Cartucho the narration oscillates between a conscious strategy to narrate a particular, subalternized his11. Nicholas Luker, From Furmanov to Sholokhov: An Anthology of the Classics of Socialist Realism, 22. 12. Marco, prologue to Una estrella roja, 12.

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tory and a compulsive unraveling of the trauma of revolution in a young girl’s life. Yet the transparency of León’s language is deceptive, as it gestures to “other” voices, to the aforementioned counterhegemonic, subalternist, and nonrepresentational acts that cannot be dissociated from the different levels of violence within the texts. I analyze these stories not as a linear development, but rather as different sites of a map, in order to show that the earlier stories already foreshadow that the utopian future is just as unresolved and haunting as the past in Cartucho. The stories included in Tales from Contemporary Spain also represent a radical change of style and content for León, after Rosa-Fría, Moon Skater, published in 1934, a collection of short stories undoubtedly influenced by the avant-garde. A number of factors, among them León’s membership in the Communist Party, her participation in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and, ultimately, the outbreak of revolution and civil war in Spain, explain León’s change of style after the completion of her previous work. At the congress, socialist realism was adopted as the only possible and official form of literary and cultural production in the Soviet Union. The actual doctrine was promulgated by Andrey Zhdanov (1896–1948), the party’s spokesman, secretary of the Central Committee, and, according to Nicholas Luker, “Stalin’s satrap in cultural affairs.” Zhdanov refers to the following anecdote in order to define socialist realism: Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What duties does the title impose upon you? In the first place it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to depict reality in its revolutionary development. In addition to this, the truthfulness and ideological concreteness of the artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remodeling and education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.13

Following her own tradition as an avid short story writer, León might have adopted the genre and applied it to revolutionary Spain. However, her writing sabotages the Stalinist “engineering” of human soul. Her references to the marginalized and subaltern, the women who lost fear, and her critique of the repose of the warrior clearly reveal the limits of a literary method that “should be able to portray our heroes; it should be able to glimpse our tomorrow.” Her writing 13. Luker, From Furmanov to Sholokhov, 19.

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precisely shows who will be excluded from that tomorrow, “already being prepared for today by dint of conscious, planned work.” This is precisely the conflict that most critics of these stories fail to recognize. Even though not all critics blatantly relate everything that León writes to Alberti’s guidance, turning her into la cola del cometa, these stories are often considered a mere exercise in a literary methodology that would simply never quite adapt to León’s talent.14 Both Juan Carlos Estébanez Gil and Joaquín Marco agree that León’s language in certain moments supercedes the limits of socialist realism. They argue her style is more literary and poetic than what is commonly known as socialist realism. Yet neither Estébanez Gil nor Marco questions beyond the sheer presence of lyrical details or poetic notes in León’s writing. Estébanez Gil contends that the author adds a lyrical element to the socially oriented literature of her period. Such lyricism, he argues, can be seen in León’s attention to detail, psychological observations, and also her sensibility and tenderness. Marco seems to agree, as he emphasizes that a literary quality (which he never quite defines) is what ends up differentiating León’s writing from pamphlets or romancelike and idealistic texts written for militants.15 Different from these critics, I would argue that María Teresa León’s use of poetic or figurative language clearly reveals the author’s ambivalence regarding the continuities and discontinuities among emancipatory possibilities, political agency, and violent acts. Instead of restoring the aesthetic quality of these stories, León’s use of figurative language—what Marco has called “literature, only literature”—at the end allows us to study the contradictions, conflicts, and aporias that are part and parcel of any representation of fearless women, a term that, in a way, León herself coins in her 1936 essay “The Woman Who Lost Fear.” I have discussed this piece in relation to “To the Spanish Women,” a text aired on the radio in Madrid on November 16, 1936, and published three days later 14. Ibid. Marco argues in his prologue to the 1979 edition of the anthology “A Red Star” that León “situates her characters within a specific action and orients them towards the didactic-social end for which they were created” (12). In Los espacios de la memoria: La obra literaria de María Teresa León, Gregorio Torres Nebrera aligns these stories with the publication Octubre and obsessively turns León’s writing into a mere consequence or coda of Rafael Alberti’s work. Torres Nebrera refers to multiple connections between León’s and Alberti’s work—often based on speculation—clearly undermining León’s autonomy, agency, and subjectivity as a writer. He claims, for example, that the village where the story “Sistema Pedagógico” takes place could have been inspired by Alberti’s childhood memories, as they appear in the poet’s memoir, La arboleda perdida (90). 15. See Estébanez Gil, María Teresa León: Estudio de su obra literaria, 162; and Marco, prologue to Una estrella roja, 16.

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as a column in El Mono Azul. Here, León changes her focus from soldaderas to women fighting for the Spanish republic. She explains that working-class and peasant women have taken a stance to defend besieged Madrid and by extension the republic as a whole. What differentiates these warrior maidens from the soldaderas is León’s faith in a fast victory. Similar to the earlier essay, however, the lower-class (poor, uneducated, illiterate, subaltern) women once again become a symbol in a text that is ultimately aimed at someone else. Thus, both texts are, maybe unintentionally but nevertheless intrinsically, involved in the production of “women who lost/killed fear” as subaltern subjects. The problem is that her representations of soldaderas, warrior maidens, as well as the characters in her short stories do not “speak in a way that would carry any sort of authority or meaning for us without altering the relations of power/knowledge that constitute [them] as subaltern in the first place.”16 In “To the Spanish Women” León also briefly refers to her Catholic childhood under the protection of the enclosure of an old convent, where nevertheless stark class differences were prevalent. The same school now has become a hospital for the Socorro Rojo (Red Aid): In the most modest part, a number of poor girls were taught to sew, the cold covered their hands with chilblains, we had white gloves; they were our protégées, that was how we called them, with the calm conceit of false Christian charity. From what were we protecting them? From the cold, hunger, future prostitution? (En la parte más humilde se enseñaba a coser a algunas niñas pobres, el frío les llenaba las manos de sabañones, nosotras teníamos guantes blancos; eran las protegidas, las llamábamos así, con el impudor tranquilo de la falsa caridad cristiana. ¿De qué las protegíamos? ¿Del frío, del hambre, de la futura prostitución?) (Mujeres, 96)

In her essay León interpellates her old classmates at the Sagrado Corazón, arguing that working-class girls that received hand-me-downs from the upper-class students are now taking action and writing history. Yet we cannot forget that after all, León herself, who wrote and published this piece in El Mono Azul, enjoyed the privilege of the education at the Sagrado Corazón. Ultimately, the effort to 16. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 29. Paraphrasing Spivak, Beverley argues that “almost by definition, the subaltern is subaltern in part because it cannot be represented adequately by academic knowledge (and theory)” (2).

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protect the warrior maidens not from cold, hunger, or prostitution but from becoming women who lost fear also remains in the shadows. León’s writing certainly bears witness to women’s presence and participation in the revolutionary fervor that was taking over leftist Spain before the war, yet it does not and cannot provide unmediated access to a particular female experience of revolution and war, which is always radically heterogeneous and usually absent from dominant narratives. Thus, even though León advocates women’s participation in the struggle, her essay ultimately shows more concern with establishing crucial links of solidarity among women, and ultimately conceals the multilayered violence that the warrior maidens’ participation in battle implies. I emphasize this text not only because it reveals León’s own attitude toward women’s participation in revolution and war but also to contrast it to the story “Burnt Childhood,” a text that clearly shows how difficult and multilayered such links of solidarity may be.

Writing in Flames “Burnt Childhood” has mostly been read as a depiction of a young, educated, and upper-class woman’s change in political consciousness.17 I focus my reading not on the protagonist, but on a nameless character: a young and disabled woman who instigates the fire that burns down the schoolhouse both characters once unevenly shared. This second woman, however, disappears from the story: her radical and violent act demonstrates that she was never allowed to have a childhood. All she can do (instead of writing an article like León) is write into history with the flames that slowly devour the space that in the past brutally and consistently ensured the perpetuation of class and gender hierarchies. The woman attempts to “abolish the mark of [her] own subalternity”; she “speaks” by destroying the space that once kept her confined.18 Yet the fact that the story centers not on her but on the awakening consciousness of the upper-class woman reveals that the precarious situation of a subaltern subject (and her act of counterwriting) is seen only from an elite perspective. The autobiographical content in this short story implies that León is addressing her own change in political consciousness. Al17. Torres Nebrera states in Los espacios de la memoria that this story reflects the dialectic between the owners and the dispossessed; it is the story of a young bourgeois woman’s change in political consciousness when she faces her own privilege vis-à-vis the injustices that sparked the vengeful furor of others who did not share such privilege (93). 18. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 33.

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though she clearly supports the burning of her past, and with it her own privilege, the story is still involved in the production of the insurgent woman’s subalternity. The story constructs itself in the dialogue between the upper-class woman and her interlocutors, several working-class women and particularly a mason whose daughter is the instigator of the fire. She suffers from rheumatism as a consequence of having worked in the dark basement of that same schoolhouse as a child. This space was, of course, reserved for working-class children who could not afford tuition and were considered worthy of charity. Little by little, it becomes clear that the convent was not just one but an entire array of different spaces. Initially, the upper-class woman is horrified that her school is going up in flames, as she feels the flames on her skin, erasing her memory, herself. Her school! It was vanishing in smoke, her braids, her eyes, her ink-stained fingers, her prayers, her voice were scorching. They were burning her alive. The big magnolia trees in the garden, which made studying in the spring so difficult, were already feeling a very different life burning on their flower-covered trunks. (¡Su colegio! se iba en humo, se abrasaban sus trenzas, sus ojos, sus dedos manchados de tinta, sus oraciones, su voz. La quemaban viva. Los grandes magnolios del jardín, que no dejaban estudiar las primaveras, sentían ya en el tronco llamearle una vida distinta a la suya, prieta de flores blancas.)19

The woman’s past, her innocence, her memories are burning, yet only the fire will make the woman realize that there was another side to her childhood memories, a side she clearly had been exposed to but was only now learning to perceive. The woman begins discussing her burning childhood with the mason whose daughter now suffers a debilitating disability. He reminds her of the radical differences between “the girls from downstairs” (las de abajo) and “the girls from upstairs” (las de arriba), emphasizing how class hierarchies define the gendered spaces both women once inhabited. “My daughter, she was from downstairs. From being there, she got incurable rheumatism in her right hand, so that learning to embroider was absolutely useless for her” (Mi hija, de las de abajo. De estar allí, tiene reúma incurable en la mano derecha, y de nada le sirvió aprender a bordar). After hearing about the girl’s fate, the upper-class woman remembers, 19. All citations come from León, Una estrella roja, and subsequently appear parenthetically in the text. This quote comes from p. 61.

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maybe for the first time, that other side of her childhood, a side she always contemplated from above, an always burning childhood: “She remembered those humid classrooms well, always covered in saltpeter where the free school was located. They took the rich girls down there so they would feel piety and compassion. It was like a laboratory of virtue” (Ella se acordaba muy bien de aquellas salas húmedas, tenaces en cubrirse de salitre, donde el colegio gratuito estaba instalado. Las bajaban allí para que sintieran la piedad. Era como un laboratorio de virtudes, 61). In the same way in which the schoolhouse now collapses under the flames, the woman’s world begins to collapse, and a new political consciousness awakens, millimeter by millimeter. She now feels ashamed when she remembers how as a young girl she had been assigned to teach religion to a fellow student and how this working-class girl immediately promised to become her servant when she grew up. Now, the fire that burns the convent is also burning inside the woman. “The young lady felt the burn inside of her, her tongue and the bones of her cranium were consumed in the fire” (La señorita se notaba arder por dentro, consumirse su lengua y los huesos de su cráneo, 63). León’s images here foreshadow the burning bodies, in and outside of convents, in and outside of churches, in and outside of homes during the civil war. Yet she deems these flames necessary: the woman’s memories were but a facade that concealed the reality of her past. Thus, while the upper-class woman is confused and devastated, the other bystanders applaud the fire. The dialogue between these two subjects clearly exposes the differences between “las de abajo” and “las de arriba.” The woman’s growing awareness is, however, interrupted by a sudden explosion in the convent, frightening the witnesses, mixing and confounding the bystanders. Yet the fire and only the fire is what brings these different characters together, burning the past, and with that the retired, private space of the repose. “The two different childhoods were burning and falling apart. Everything was halfway burnt” (Las dos infancias diferentes se derrumbaban y ardían. Todo estaba a medio quemar, 65). After the turmoil, and sheltered in a restaurant, the woman again faces the mason whose daughter used to be one of the charity cases of the school. And so she was facing the enemy. What kind of a twenty-century-long battle separated them? Twenty centuries of promises of heaven, while they possessed the earth. Charity, that strategy that the rich used to get rid of the poor, it was twisting among the apologies on her lips.

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(Y así, frente a frente, se encontró con el enemigo. ¿Qué lucha de veinte siglos les separaba? ¡Veinte siglos de promesas de cielo mientras ellos poseían la tierra! La caridad, esa estratagema de los ricos para apartar a los pobres, se enredó en sus labios entre disculpas.) (65)

Her words, the acts of charity, the only words of a world she once knew now fail the woman. Language has misled her and ultimately remains tangled up and stagnant before ever leaving her lips. The mason does not allow the woman to speak, as an apology would hardly solve a burning and haunting past. Similar to Josephina Niggli’s Adelita whose attempt to counterwrite with her body implies the sacrifice of her own life, the mason’s daughter also commits a radical act of counterwriting: she was the one who started the fire that would burn down not only her own but also the other woman’s childhood. You don’t understand why the school is burning? Well, I do. The charity cases have lit the fire. Charity cases! You need to understand, the charity cases, the ones who do not pay, the ones who barter with indulgences. My daughter was a charity case and you paid for your education. Are you any way similar? There she goes, running around with boys who are like her, greasy with lime, uncombed. They sing and predict a better world. I wouldn’t want to die without seeing it. They are the ones who today went out to the streets early in the morning. When they got here, my daughter raised her almost paralyzed hand and said: “This is my free school, burn it.” Because her childhood is only good for burning as soon as possible, so it will disappear from sight. (¿Usted no entiende por qué arde el colegio? Pues yo sí. Lo han prendido las gratuitas. ¡Gratuitas! Comprenda usted, las gratuitas, las que no pagan, las que se truecan en indulgencias. Mi hija era gratuita y usted pensionada. ¿Es que se parecen en algo?, ella va por ahí con otros chicos que la corresponden, grasientos de la lima, despeinados. Cantan y predicen un mundo mejor. No me quisiera morir sin verlo. Son los que hoy han salido temprano a la calle. Cuando han llegado aquí mi hija levantando su mano casi paralítica ha dicho: “Es mi escuela gratuita, prendedla.” Porque su infancia sólo sirve para quemarla cuanto antes, para perderla de vista.) (65)

Yet the disabled woman’s rage is referred only indirectly. Her father tells her story, and the burning of the convent awakens the upper-class woman’s class consciousness, whereas the disabled woman quickly disappears, without ever having said a word. Even though the upper-class woman is undergoing a change in consciousness, León’s short story still does not prophesy a harmonious and classless

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society as an immediate result of the revolution. This is at least what the last sentence of the story implies: “When they got to the street, a gust of wind scattered them to two different streets” (Al llegar a la calle un soplo de viento los dispersó por dos calles distintas, 66). The main character might have undergone a transformation of consciousness, yet such a change is not enough to start a revolution. Without the fire, without the disabled woman’s action, this temporary reconciliation never would have happened. In the story that follows, León addresses a similar issue: here the political reconciliation is just as temporary. To make matters more complicated, only the sacrifice of a young girl’s life makes the reconciliation possible.

Hiding Bombs “A Red Star” appears in Tales from Contemporary Spain and was also published in El Mono Azul in 1936. In the story, an anarchist father raises his son and daughter in the spirit of his ideology: once the libertarian revolution triumphs, nothing will stand in the way of the children’s future. In this anarchist household, paintings of Mikhail Bakunin and Eliseo Reclús gaze down at father and son, who are busy manufacturing bombs out of tomato cans: “On the table, with torn and twisted paper labels that once happily showed tomatoes, the cans were receiving their load” (Sobre la mesa, con los papeles alegres de haber sido conservas de tomate, rasgados, retorcidos, los botes iban recibiendo la carga, 39). These are not empty cans that contained goods the family once was able to consume; these are cans that the children found in the garbage, “because to us, eating tomatoes . . . is a luxury that belongs to those jerks” (porque lo que es nosotros comer tomate . . . un lujo de esos canallas, 39). For the father, and by extension the mother, there is only one possible way out of poverty and oppression: a violent overthrow of the present system: “His children had to be educated in action, the kind of action champions of justice put to use. Heroism does not grow without dung, and there on the old blankets, he had planted heroism. And it was growing” (Sus hijos tenían que estar educados en la acción como corresponde a los campeones de la justicia. El heroísmo no crece sin estiércol, y allí en las mantas viejas había sembrado heroísmo. Y crecía). The references to gardening and nature reflect the common use of such tropes in literary texts geared toward popular audiences from the era. Moreover, the father used to be a gardener, but instead of cultivating and nurturing plants, he now is concerned only with bequeathing his children a libertarian education. “His little ones would at-

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tend the Libertarian University, once the regime of equality had found its place with its red and black wings on the buildings” (Sus chiquillos irían a la Universidad Libertaria cuando el régimen de igualdad se posase con alas rojas y negras sobre los edificios, 40). The father cannot dream of any other viable political future for his children. “All children carry their destiny, like the egg carries the chicken, even when they are eating chocolate somebody gives them at the café. His children would be that and nothing else” (Todos los niños llevan su destino como un huevo el pollito, aunque estén comiendo chocolate que les dan en el café. Sus hijos serían eso y no otra cosa, 39). Yet the father’s egalitarian and utopian ideas do not challenge the gendered structure of his own household. Whereas the entire story is narrated from the father’s perspective, the mother appears only briefly. Even though the revolution also affects this woman’s life—she now hides guns underneath her clothes—it has not subverted traditional gender roles at a structural level. “Everything already was before. Even her. The only woman who knew how to hide weapons in her chest. So brave!” (Todo ya era antes. Hasta ella. La única mujer que sabía guardarse armas en el pecho. ¡Tan brava!). The mother does not articulate a word in the entire story: she silently hides the weapons in a struggle that has failed to notice her. The father, on the other hand, is so focused on a utopian vision of the future that he overlooks the problems of the present. His vision of the future, however, can become a reality only if his silent wife hides weapons in her chest and if his children agree to carry bombs in their baskets. “They understood each other. At six years old, it is possible to carry a basket without anyone being suspicious. A poor child always carries a basket with a bottle of oil, pieces of cod, a piece of soap, bombs...” (Se entendían. A los seis años se puede llevar una cesta al brazo sin que nadie sospeche. Un niño pobre siempre lleva una cesta con una botella de aceite, bacalao, un trozo de jabón, bombas..., 40). Yet in spite of the father’s aspirations, the four walls of his house limit the libertarian utopia he dreams of for his children. At a café in the neighborhood, a group of Communists use chocolate and other treats to lure the man’s young daughter, in order to convince her to state that she is also a Communist, and they seem to succeed in their endeavor. With the sweet taste of chocolate in her mouth, the child happily states: “I am a Communist” (Yo soy comunista, 40). She even quickly learns to repeat phrases like “Frente Rojo” (Red Front), without fully understanding their meaning. Yet the next morning the young girl is killed in an explosion in the streets, dying “like revolutionaries die” (como mueren los revolucionarios, 43). Like Dromundo’s Adelita who becomes a Dorado, not

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a Dorada, with her heroic death, the girl dies like a revolucionario, not like a revolucionaria. In an earlier conversation, father and son might have precluded this exact possibility for a young girl. Only men (and not women, much less little girls) die “in the streets, in an execution, standing tall, in the barricades...” (En la calle, en un paseo, de pie, en las barricadas..., 40). The girl, however, torn between her father’s anarchist aspirations and the sweet seduction of more candy, cheerful songs, and a new red tie the Communist had promised her, dies a like a revolutionary, a hero’s death. The implications here are not only that natural death is not an option for impoverished working-class families but also that it is the man’s as well as his children’s duty to die in a struggle for a better life. However, the man is unprepared for the shock that in lieu of an anonymous anarchist hero, his own daughter is sacrificed for a political cause she barely understood: the man’s utopian dreams clash with the reality of a violent, revolutionary struggle. Upon seeing his daughter’s lifeless body, covered with gun powder, all the man can mutter is: “My poor little Communist” (Mi pobrecita comunista, 43). At the end of the story, father and son return to the coffee shop where the Communists gather and ask for a pin of the “Frente Único” (United Front). León’s language strongly suggests that the daughter’s sacrifice results in a symbolic reconciliation, precisely, the United Front. All hands rushed to tear out their pins. The most fortunate one stretched out the United Front to the anarchist’s hands. He did not thank. They vanished in the fog of cigarette smoke like a ship and a little boat. In the light of a lantern, they made it shine. It was a red star. (Todas las manos se apresuraron a arrancarse las insignias. Una más afortunada extendió el Frente Único hasta las manos del anarquista. No agradeció. Hendieron la niebla de los cigarros como una barca y una barquichuela. A la luz de un farol, la hicieron brillar. Era una estrella roja.) (43)

Joaquín Marco argues that with this symbolic reconciliation, León insinuates that a revolution in Spain could be carried out only by the Communist leadership. León, of course, belonged to the Communist Party, and Marco argues that instead of clearly differentiating the anarchist from the Communist persuasion, the story instead coincides with the author’s revolutionary consciousness. Gregorio Torres Nebrera’s reading concurs with Marco’s; the critic calls the story propagandistic and recognizes a didacticism that calls for the union of anarchists and

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Communists in the struggle.20 The pin of the red star, “which his daughter would have worn with pride” (lo que su hija hubiera lucido con orgullo, 43), symbolizes the truce. Yet where does the daughter’s pride come from, but the sweet taste of chocolate, the texture of the promised red tie, the cheerful songs? Where is the common ideology here? Does not the hand that succeeds in offering the father the pin undermine a future marked only by solidarity and equality? Unlike Marco and Torres Nebrera, I would argue that the girl’s seduction into ideology is just as ineffective as the father’s indoctrination of the children. Neither her father’s anarchist education nor the Communists’ lure are going to prevent the girl’s death. Instead, the (temporary) reconciliation between anarchists and Communists appears written, or maybe even excessively overwritten, in gunpowder on the girl’s dead body. The pertinent question here would not be whether anarchists and Communists reconcile, but whether such reconciliation would be possible without the girl’s sacrifice. The girl’s death and the mother’s silence gesture at the discontinuities between violence and political agency. Even though a revolutionary struggle might unsettle the traditionally domestic realm, the boundaries that separate the domestic from the public domain will not simply fade away. Circulating outside the confining “repose of the warrior” does not automatically lead to emancipation or political agency. The story that follows precisely centers on and further scrutinizes this exact problem.

“October Liberation” In “October Liberation,” the narration is set against the backdrop of the events in October 1934, when the conservative government brutally repressed a miners’ insurrection in Asturias. The response to this repression eventually led to the coalition of different leftist fractions that sparked the creation of the Popular Front. In the story, Rosa, an illiterate working-class woman, observes the outbreak of the revolution from the distance of her small apartment. Reflecting upon her personal, sexual, and political dissatisfaction as well as her limited opportunities, Rosa decides to join the armed struggle at the end of the story. The title alludes to the workers’ liberation and the Russian Revolution, but also refers to the main character’s literal and symbolic emancipation. 20. Marco, prologue to Una estrella roja, 14; Torres Nebrera, Los espacios de la memoria, 94.

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Rosa is engaged in much more than a class struggle: she seeks liberation from an asphyxiating sex-gender system. In a crucial moment in the story, Rosa refuses to function as the maternal “repose of the warrior.” Thus, the story reveals the fictionality of the boundaries between the private, domestic domain and the public domain, but at the same time shows that the revolutionary Left is not ready to accept the radical challenges that this entails, particularly in relation to gender roles and expectations. As she waits for her husband to return on the night of October 4, Rosa overhears a drunken man calling out revolutionary slogans. At this point, the man’s words are only empty phrases she repeats: And she laughed because she was repeating the outcry she had just heard from the drunkard, or because of her ignorance and lack of interest in life it was like an empty word rolling among the commonly used words, which had no need for meaning, only sound. (Y se rió mucho porque repetía aquel grito que acababa de oír al borracho o que para su ignorancia y su falta de interés por la vida era como una palabra que rueda entre las palabras habituales, sin necesidad de significación, sólo por adopción y por sonido.) (30)

Similar to Niggli’s Adelita or the slain laundress Encarnación Jiménez, Rosa neither understands nor relates to the emancipatory possibilities of the revolution. Toward the end of the story Ramón, Rosa’s husband, returns home with the apparent intention of seeing his wife one last time before joining the revolution in the streets. Different from what one may expect, Ramón is just as bewildered about the uproar in the streets as Rosa. “Ramón did not know exactly where he was going, but in front of Rosa he had to pretend he did” (Ramón no sabía muy bien adonde iba. Pero delante de Rosa tenía que aparentar, 31). At this point, a group of revolutionaries enters the couple’s modest apartment. The other men expect Ramón to join them at once, yet the broader ideological implications of the struggle remain vague. Although the entire scene is still very puzzling for Ramón, Rosa all of a sudden begins to understand, as she realizes that the so-called liberation needs to function in both the domestic and the public realms. Rosa understood very well. Rosa threw herself into the revolution. She realized that freedom meant freeing herself from the anguish of her daily toils, from waiting for death with her arms crossed, day after day; the father, in the fields, the

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mother attending the long hours of childbirth of the neighboring women in the village. Rosa guessed that the man was afraid, she sensed that he wanted to be saved in her and by her from the long silence of the October night, to owe her his life. (Rosa comprendía muy bien. Rosa se precipitó en la revolución. Adivinaba que libertad quiere decir liberarse de la angustia del jornal miserable, de la espera de la muerte con los brazos cruzados, día a día; el padre, de la azada; la madre de los largos partos de las vecinas del pueblo. Rosa adivinó que el hombre sentía miedo, notó que pretendía rescatarse en ella y por ella del gran silencio de la noche de octubre, deberle la vida.) (30)

For Ramón’s sake, Rosa is to incorporate a “mythic war time role” and become a mater dolorosa, thereby symbolically restoring the boundary between the public and the domestic that the revolution has just thrown out of joint.21 “He hoped that Rosa would give birth to him, with a scream from her deaf insides” (Esperaba que Rosa lo hiciera nacer con un grito de sus entrañas sordas, 32). Yet instead of doing exactly what her husband and the other revolutionaries expect from her, Rosa asks for one of the guns and decides to leave with them, refusing to become the maternal “repose of the warrior.” Ramón’s need for Rosa to play this maternal and nurturing role is produced by certain patriarchal expectations and perceptions: the “myth of motherhood” that permeated the Second Republic and the unchallenged notion of the “repose of the warrior,” a correlative to this myth.22 As I have earlier argued, women’s liberation was a thorny issue during the republic. Even though the immediacy of revolution and war often radically changed women’s roles, be it at the front or the rear guard, gender roles often did not change at a structural level. Moreover, the quick changes that the war effort demanded were often carried out only 21. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 16. 22. In the article “Myth as Suppression: Motherhood and the Historical Consciousness of the Women in Madrid, 1936–1939,” Elena Cabezali, Matilde Cuevas, and María Teresa Chicote define this myth in the following terms: “There can be no doubt that, in the rebel zone, a traditional model was advocated for women, which in principle denied them any change in their social role. It is equally certain that sections of the Popular Front in the pre-war period threw up different images to meet the needs of the moment, with a clearly instrumental purpose. Owing to these contradictory factors, a particularly confused image arises which does not make clear what ‘liberation’ was thought to mean. It was rather a faulty construct without solidity, perhaps including the following irreconcilable characteristics: that of a woman with full civil rights, better educated, having the right to work, but basically dedicated to housework, basically a mother, basically beautiful, feminine, in other words the same as ever” (165).

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for the duration of the war. “October Liberation” therefore already anticipates that the changes are going to be more instrumental than structural, particularly bearing in mind the weight that “the myth of motherhood,” and with it traditional gender roles and expectations, carries in this story. According to Juan Carlos Estébanez Gil, Rosa represents the paradigmatic proletarian woman who undergoes a radical change in consciousness. She is a woman ready to give her life for “a new society without the evils that had damaged women’s dignity.”23 Yet in opposition to the critic’s claims, I propose that nothing in this short story indicates that the new society in the making will be less “damaging to women’s dignity,” unless traditional gender roles, greatly defined by a “the myth of motherhood,” are questioned. Rosa is not a mere victim but poor, illiterate, and childless. “Rosa only knew the numbers. When she was growing up, during soft and long hours, she tried to hold on to the letters with her fingers, red from bleach. Impossible” (Rosa no conocía más que los números. Cuando fue criada, en unas horas blandas y largas, pretendió sujetar las letras con sus dedos rojos de lejía. Imposible, 27). Like Niggli’s Adelita who uses her fingers to write words into the air, like the flames the young revolutionary from the earlier story uses to counterwrite the memory of her childhood, Rosa’s words are also doomed to vanish, as though they would go down the sink with the dirty water of her daily toils. Yet not only letters and words escape from Rosa’s fingers; she is also childless, a very precarious situation for a woman in a sex-gender system where a “myth of motherhood” prevails. “The child did not come. And Rosa felt tremulous, like a dry leaf, lost like something miserable that will vanish on the sidewalk, at any given moment, with just one kick” (El hijo no llegaba. Y Rosa se sentía vacilante como una hoja seca, perdida como algo miserable que desaparecerá de la acera, en cualquier momento, de un puntapié, 28). Rosa feels she will disappear together with the vanishing words and letters she desperately tries to hold, overburdened by her daily toils. Yet even more poignant then León’s critique of the “myth of motherhood” are her comments on the woman’s frustrated sexuality, a point that most critics ignore. For Rosa, marriage is an oppressive and brutal institution, which only substitutes the constraints that family or the church might have imposed on her in the past. Before marrying Ramón, she arrived from her village, her body tied up in tight undergarments and “her breasts asleep in a corset that held them pris23. Estébanez Gil, María Teresa León, 159. The critic argues the following: “Rosa, a victim of social oppression, is proposed by the author as a heroine, ready to give her life for a new society without the evils that had damaged women’s dignity” (159).

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oner” (los pechos dormidos en un corsé que los afianzaba, prisionero). Her marriage to Ramón does not liberate Rosa from the ties of the past. “Could he awake them? He was never interested either” (¿Pudo despertarlos? No se interesó tampoco, 28). The relationship between Rosa and Ramón becomes what Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has described as the “bloody, sometimes bloodless annihilation of the feminine, which can never become a subject, but forever must remain an object, subjugated to employment contracts not recognized by society, called marriage.”24 Rosa can understand the concept of marriage only in terms of her own annihilation and sacrifice. “Rosa thought that the carnal brutality of marriage was hidden from young women, so they would not get frightened, so the virgins would accept the sacrifice” (Rosa pensaba que aquella brutalidad carnal del matrimonio se oculta a las jóvenes para no espantarlas, para que las vírgenes acepten el sacrificio, 29). Rosa, a “proletarian heroine” for Estébanez Gil, is dominated and asphyxiated by social and political constraints; this becomes even clearer in two brief references to the Catholic Church. Before joining the revolutionaries, Rosa attempted to transgress a woman’s accepted and acceptable behavior only twice before. First, she got inebriated at a baptism, bitterly unsettling but never transcending the “myth of motherhood.” “It is true that she lived in a miserable country. How is it possible that a woman’s only day of happiness was when she got drunk at a baptism?” (Es cierto que vivía en un país miserable. ¿Cómo es posible que el único día feliz de una mujer fuese una borrachera en un bautizo? 28). Rosa’s drunkenness represents a shy effort to transgress that remains just as unfruitful and just as invisible as her other shot at breaking the rules. Compelled by a desire she does not understand, Rosa licks the white and soft hands of the priest who is giving her confession. “Rosa got up one day, moved by irresistible desire, she leaned down and licked the white hand, which did not move away until the woman disappeared behind the door’s oilskin curtains” (Rosa se levantó un día y, movida por un deseo irresistible, se inclinó y lamió la mano blanca, que no se retiró hasta que la mujer se perdió entre las cortinas de hule de la puerta, 29). The fact that even the most radical sectors of the Republican spectrum did not question the myth of motherhood—anarchist leader Federica Montseny was to have said, “Women without children are like a tree without a fruit, a rosebush without roses”—makes Rosa’s predicament even more obvious.25 She has no 24. Jelinek quoted in Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 211. 25. Montseny quoted in Cabezali, Cuevas, and Chicote, “Myth as Suppression,” 171.

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children, no words, no story to tell, no story to pass on, only a gun and the numbers on her calendar that mark the significant night between October 4 and October 5. It is in this impossible space between two dates where Rosa’s own engagement with physical violence appears written. However, there are no indications in the story that Rosa’s gun will automatically aid her on the path toward emancipation and political agency. At first glance it seems that Rosa’s gender is not going to be an obstacle, at least not in the initial moments of the revolutionary struggle. “The revolutionaries do not understand the extraordinary” (Los revolucionarios no comprenden lo insólito, 32), notes León before the men hand Rosa a gun. Yet this liberation, if it is one, necessarily entails death and violence. Rosa embarks on a struggle in which the means will quickly overcome the end. At least, this is what the image that closes the story implies. The group got lost in the yellow tension of dawn. The new day, October 5, was coming. Underneath the street light, the drunkard was still lying down, with a stain of red wine around his head, as though he were the first one to die. (El grupo se perdió entre la tensión amarilla del amanecer. Era el 5 de octubre lo que clareaba. Debajo del farol, el borracho seguía tendido con una bocanada de vino tinto a la altura de la cabeza, como si fuera el primer muerto.) (32)

A prophecy of death and violence is therefore also part of Rosa’s liberation. Bearing in mind León’s appeal to the warrior maidens in her radio address, the author certainly supports women’s decision to leave the domestic domain and embark on a complex and tumultuous itinerary that might lead these subjects out of subalternity and silence. Yet León’s warning in “The Woman Who Lost Fear” as well as this short story entail that such an itinerary might very well be, as I have argued in earlier chapters, a crooked and meandering path that leads nowhere. These earlier texts, written before the war in Spain, already allow us a glimpse at the conflicts, contradictions, and aporias that women’s participation in the Spanish revolution and war entailed. One could assume now that a story like “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” might provide a slightly different perspective. After all, the story was written and published after the war, when León was already in exile. Although this last story accentuates the discontinuities among emancipation, political agency, and violence, the continuities between war and peace or violence and peace appear to be more evident than ever before.

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By Other Means At first glance, the premise in “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” is fundamentally different from the stories in Tales from Contemporary Spain.26 Even though León still writes about war, she seems to have given up on socialist realism as an aesthetic approach. As opposed to the earlier stories, there are no references here to political parties, to ideologies, or even to the political and social circumstances in Spain. The setting is rural, not urban, and the main character, a nameless woman, is not engaged in any revolutionary activity. Time is suspended, as memories of a hopelessly peaceful past invade the devastating present, revealing that there is no ultimate schism between past and present, between war and peace. Also, the violence of revolution and war that penetrates the village, and the story as a whole, is neither exterior nor extraordinary. The story therefore discloses a far more complex perspective on war and its violence than the earlier texts. It also reveals that violence is unmistakably linked to the circulation and negotiation of power between opposing parties in war, between men and women, between worlds and words. The different levels of violence discussed (physical violence, epistemic violence, and cyclical violence) also intersect here, showing that violence in the domestic sphere always mirrors violence in the public sphere. Ultimately, my reading of this short story demonstrates that the “repose of the warrior” is always permeated or even inscribed by a fundamental violence at its very origin. In order to further understand the complex circulation of power and violence in this story, it is useful to remember military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s understanding of war as “the continuation of politics by other means.” Hannah Arendt turns this dictum around in her 1968 essay On Violence. She argues that during the cold war, peace became the continuation of war by other means. In Critique of Violence, Beatrice Hanssen explains that Arendt’s model “has been criticized by Foucault, whose theory of force relations likewise sought to provide a corrective to Arendt’s model already apparent when he addressed epistemic and discursive manifestations of violence.”27 Consequently, explains Hanssen, “the relation between war and politics was no longer one of possible reversal or ascendancy, as Arendt still held, but war and politics—in the battlefields as well as the bedroom—now appeared as the very 26. All citations come from Leon, Morirás lejos, and subsequently appear parenthetically in the text. 27. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 19, 27.

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encodings of force relations, strategies or micro-powers.” Michel Foucault thus reverses both Clausewitz’s and Arendt’s statements, encouraging an understanding of politics as the continuation of war by other means, which is exactly the predicament that the main character of this short story has to face. The questions that arise out of this conception of power are, following Foucault: “Isn’t power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldn’t one therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of war? Isn’t power a sort of generalized war which assumes at particular moments the form of peace and the state? Peace would then be a form of war, and the state a means of waging it.”28 Bearing these questions in mind, León’s story does not reflect a pacifist sentiment.29 Rather, the story accentuates the forms of war in moments of peace and the forms of peace in moments of war, the continuities between these two, as well as the continuities between violence in the public and the private spheres. Thus, “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” not only reveals that peace (and politics) might be the continuation of war by other means, but also suggests that, following Elfriede Jelinek’s reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum, institutionalized love or marriage can be regarded as “the continuation of war by other means.” Consequently, even though the women in this last short story remain in the rear guard, they hardly live in peace, particularly bearing in mind that there is “a lengthy feminist tradition of questioning the attribution of ‘peace’ to the home/household where male tyranny presides.”30 The young protagonist of this short story expresses her rage in the face of the tyranny of civilian bombings and the tyranny of a lover whose violence she used to tolerate with a small, maybe insignificant act of retribution: she slaps the man’s face. This young woman is not a proletarian heroine. Instead, she is a rural woman, impatiently awaiting the return of her beloved, a soldier who has left for the front. León introduces the story with one outcry: “She has been waiting 28. Ibid., 28; Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 65. 29. Marco has defined “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” as an antiwar story (relato antibélico). For the critic, it becomes a timeless story, located, however, in a particular cultural context within Spain. The final outcry, “You give us babies only to kill them later,” is a popular uproar “that women have repeated since the beginning of time and that independently from the initial violence in Tales from Contemporary Spain now becomes part of the anti-war story” (prologue to Una estrella roja, 19). With this comment, Marco essentializes women as nurturers and peace weavers, and even though one might argue that León’s own encounters with violence during the civil war might explain such sentiments, the story nevertheless allows for a more complicated reading. 30. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 211; Kelly, “Wars against Women,” 48.

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for him for so long!” (¡Cuánto tiempo estuvo esperándole!), while ending with a very different outcry: “That’s it. You give us babies only to kill them later” (Eso es. Nos hacéis hijos para luego matarlos, 150). Framed by these two exclamations, the story unravels. In the beginning, the landscape appears bucolic and timeless: everything follows its expected pace—the seasons, the animals, even the insects. “Everything was rhythmical and safe, like her lined notebook when she was a girl” (Todo era rítmico y seguro, igual que el cuaderno rayado de cuando era niña, 145). Yet in spite of this assuring rhythm, the young female protagonist feels shipwrecked on an island of uncertainty, too frightened even to think that the worst might already have happened. She did not dare either to demand aloud where he was, afraid that her voice would become frightened by its own sound, and would never return to her throat. And where could she find something that was not his somethings, things that were not his? Surrounded by him, stuck on an island that kept her in a sea of loneliness, how could she make her foot move to that precise yet unknown point where he was without feeling shipwrecked? Where he was! Was he really somewhere? (Tampoco se atrevía a reclamarle en voz alta por miedo a que la voz se aterrase al oírse y no volviese a su garganta. ¿Y dónde encontrar algo que no fuesen sus algos, cosas que no fuesen las suyas? Rodeada de él, metida en la isla que guardaba su mar de ausencia, ¿cómo conseguir sin naufragio que su pie se adelantase hacia ese punto justo y desconocido donde él se encuentra? ¡Se encuentra! ¿De verdad, se encuentra en alguna parte?) (145)

The young woman, apparently safely secluded on an island amid a sea of solitude, knows she does not live in peace: the world that surrounds her is already torn apart even before the bombing ever takes place. Her memories are nebulous and fragmented, expressing nostalgia for a peaceful world that never was. Moreover, the main character is not the only one who experiences this fragmentation; all the women in the village are going through the same traumatic experience. Like soldiers in the field, they are constantly aware, careful not to alter the circumstances, not to move, even not to breathe, as though even the smallest action were tied to a fatal destiny. They prefer not to breathe the tame air, so that the virile smell is not altered. They keep their man whole, in pieces: here is a hand left from the day he sharp-

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León’s constant references to death and broken bodies bridge the gap between the battlefields of revolution and war and a rear guard that never was the “repose of the warrior,” as the deterritorialized violence of the war undermines the very possibility of a safe and peaceful home. The boundaries between discursive and domestic and public battlefields are also dismantled when the narrator refers to the letters that the soldiers write from the front. Letters arrived. Letters written next to the can of monkey meat, in bad light and some uncertainty. These did not tell her about the epic thundering that tears the eardrums. Those are things for peace. War letters do not tell war stories, but rather the story of a lost spoon, or the anecdotes of a cat, which with man’s greatest cruelty remains tied to the mesh wire that hides the battery. (Llegaban cartas. Cartas escritas junto al bote de carne de mono, con mala luz y alguna inquietud. No solían hablarla del estruendo épico que rasga los tímpanos. Éstas son cosa para la paz. Las cartas de guerra no cuentan la historia de la guerra, sino la de una cuchara perdida o el anecdotario de un gato que en la mayor crueldad de los hombres sigue sujeto a la tela metálica que camufla una batería.) (147)

These are not letters that discern the heroism or even the epic of war, but instead narrate daily, even banal, anecdotes, reflecting, as Miriam Cooke argues, the ways in which women’s narratives of war can challenge the dominant pattern of the War Story.31 “Light for the Peaches and the Girls,” more than an antiwar story that would take the paradigm of the War Story for granted, shows that the difference between peace and war, between home front and front, is far more obscure than it appears. In this story, a very different war story, consisting of the “monkey meat” as well as the woman’s fragmented memories, unravels. The woman’s relationship with the soldier further challenges the apparent har31. Cooke argues that women’s war stories “should allow for the narration of war’s dynamism and incomprehensibility, but also of other aspects usually excluded from the War Story” (Women and the War Story, 41).

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mony of the first lines of the story, as it is expressed in a transfer of semantic fields between the violence of war and the relationships between men and women in the village. It is here where we will find again what Jelinek has called “the bloodless, sometimes bloody annihilation of the feminine,” which the literal destruction of the village only exacerbates: “When they were again parting, a hole, like the funnel that a grenade leaves behind, remained” (Al marcharse de nuevo, dejaban un hoyo como el embudo de una Granada, 147). This image foreshadows the imminent bombing of the village. León fuses violence, religion, and sensuality in her descriptions of the sexual encounters among the main character, the nameless young woman, and her beloved, a soldier. Critics have linked this story to traditional folklore, as well as to Federico García Lorca’s poem “The Faithless Wife.” Yet whereas García Lorca’s poem centers, among other issues, on the woman’s sensuality and her act of infidelity, the woman’s lover in “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” is not a “proper gypsy.”32 Instead, he becomes the woman’s educator and confessor. They were so happy, walking by the river. He was educating her systematically. “I don’t like it when you say yes.” “All right; I’ll say no.” “Monologues with two people are absurd. They make me angry.” “I don’t understand you. It will be difficult for you to educate me.” “So then you will not forget!” (¡Iban tan alegres a lo largo del río! Él hacía su educación sistemática. “No me gusta que me digas sí.” —Bueno; diré no. —Son absurdos los monólogos de dos personas. Me crispan. —No te entiendo. Te va a ser difícil educarme. — Pues para que no se te olvide.) (147)

The woman’s resistance to this sentimental education is unsettling, as it reveals the domestic violence of the soldier who at the same time educates and seduces the woman. He becomes her lover, her confessor, and her teacher while she slowly vanishes from the scene. This moment in the text clearly reveals that the “repose of the warrior” is haunted by a fusion of sexuality, religion, and violence that inscribes women’s bodies, deemed passive and willing. Then, underneath the sun cut by the leaves of the elm tree, the Episcopal hand places its mark. She was leaning, face down over the bridge, and began look32. The actual verses I am referring to read: “I behaved like what I am / Like a proper gypsy. / I gave a big sewing box of straw-colored satin. / I didn’t want to fall in love, / for, though she had a husband, / she said she was a maiden / when I took her to the river” (García Lorca, Selected Poems, 83).

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Writing Violence ing at the brusque and compact river. She did not feel water coming to her eyes. When she turned her head to the authoritative confessor, he, who had just lit a cigarette, could see himself on the white background of a facade. (Entonces, bajo el sol recortado por las hojas de un olmo, la mano episcopal plantó su señalamiento. Ella, echada de bruces sobre el pretil del puente se puso a mirar al río brusco y compacto. No sintió que le subiera agua a los ojos. Cuando giró su cabeza para mirar al confirmador autoritario, éste, que acababa de encender un cigarrillo, puedo verse entero sobre el fondo blanco de una fachada.) (147)

León’s language is subtle and complicated, but her references to the Episcopal hand or authoritative confessor underscore the man’s authority, as well as the violent way in which the woman disappears from the scene. That there is violence in this relationship from the very beginning is clear, yet it cannot be detached from the sexuality and sensuality of their relationship. The woman refers to him as “that extraordinary being who became her groom, because he dared to lean his open palm against her cheek. At times, her cheek burns” (aquel ser extraordinario que se hizo su novio porque se atrevió a apoyar la palma abierta de la mano contra su mejilla. A veces, le escuece la mejilla, 147). Yet does her face tingle because of the passion she feels for the man or because he hit her? At the same time this sensation foreshadows the end of the story, when the woman’s act of aggression symbolically punishes the man. In this earlier scene, however, the man as a matter of fact hit the woman. This becomes particularly clear if we carefully observe her reaction after this first sexual encounter by the river. As she ran up the stairs to her room, the girl started laughing. Good-bye to all the words, advice and warnings from the older girls in her class! Oh they would laugh at her! The lioness allowed herself to be hit. A terrible taste of womanhood was on her lips. “And he can kill me,” she repeated to herself, with primitive joy. (Al subir la escalera de su cuarto, la muchacha se echo a reír. ¡Adiós todas las palabras, consejos y amonestaciones de las mayores de su curso! ¡Cuánto se reirían de ella! La leona se había dejado pegar. Un terrible sabor a mujer le asomaba en los labios. “Y me puede matar,” se repetía, primitivamente gozosa.) (147)

Her primitive joy, the “terrible taste of womanhood,” and the “hurt lioness” allude to essentialist notions of femininity, if not masochistic pleasure. Why, then,

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is there such violence in this act, and why does the woman accept it? The last incident in the story, after the bombings have interrupted the illusion of peace in the village, provides an answer. After the bombing shakes up the village, after everything has changed, “when peace soothed the airs, nobody kept back their earlier gaze” (cuando la paz serenó los aires nadie conservaba su mirada anterior, 148), the woman’s beloved finally returns. She receives him in an expected manner: she faints and falls into his arms. Both are drawn back to the river, needing one another. But the man does not have the lead any more. “They would never remember who was the first to press lips on lips, and even less, who dragged whom to the fresh banks of the river” (No recordarán nunca quién fue el primero que apretó los labios sobre los labios y, menos quién arrastró hacia las márgenes frescas del río al otro, 149). At first glance, the encounter appears peaceful and idyllic. With their eyes closed and wrinkled by the sun, she had lost all contact with her will. On the border of her eyelashes the peaches from the tree that sheltered them were trembling. So much sun! So much sun suddenly shining on the girl’s skin! (Cerrados los ojos, fruncidos por el sol, ella había perdido todo contacto con su voluntad, temblándole en la frontera de las pestañas los duraznos del árbol que les daba cobijo. ¡Cuánto sol! ¡Qué sol a voleo sobre la piel de la muchacha!) (149)

The sun shines on the peaches’ skin, as it shines on the woman’s young face. At the man’s return from war, he might have left the battlefields behind, yet acts of physical violence still haunt this almost too bucolic scene. The sound of “Los peces en el río” (The Fish in the River), a popular “villancico,” a Christmas song, interrupts the intimacy of this apparently peaceful moment: “The Virgin washes baby clothes / and hangs them on the rosemary bush” (La Virgen lava pañales / y los tiende en el romero, 149). Now more than ever, the harmonious and essentialist vision of nature (and femininity) portrayed in the earlier scene turns out to be an illusion. The character singing is not a virginal mother; she is an abject figure that corrodes the myth of a grieving yet dignified mother who, like La Pasionaria, perpetually mourns the sons that the war has taken from her. A hollering woman was walking toward them. When she was in front of them, they were unable to move. Yes, it was a woman. A woman covered in horse dung,

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Facing the soldier, the abject figure reenacts her own tragedy and interpellates the soldier: “Why have you come back? The child is gone” (¿Para qué has vuelto? El niño ya no está, 149). Confronted with the pain of the woman who lost her child in the bombing, “the son’s body that the bombs had left open, like a cat . . .” (el hijo que las bombas dejaron con el vientre abierto en cruz, como un gato . . . , 150), the otherwise confident soldier is speechless. He is unable to articulate a word, unable to express the violence of the young child’s death, unable to explain why the means, violence, and its arbitrary nature have long overcome the end. He could not give her a man’s reasons for the destruction, death and war. They looked at each other mute, when, lifting her right hand, millions of beings who were never asked turned the fingers of the sweet bride into stone. On the man’s cheek, like a confirmation and like rage, fell the torrent of the impotent mass of women, maddened and sad. “That’s it. You give us babies only to kill them later.” (Él no supo darla razones de hombre sobre los porqués de la destrucción, la muerte y la guerra. Se miraban, enemigos y mudos, cuando al levantar la mano diestra, millones de seres a los que no se les consulta volvieron de piedra los dedos de la dulce novia. Sobre la mejilla del hombre, en forma de confirmación y de ira, cayó el torrente de la impotente masa mujeril, enloquecida y triste. —Eso es. Nos hacéis hijos para luego matarlos.) (150)

The young woman is no longer reduced to the soft skin of a peach; instead, the confrontation with the grieving mother awakens her anger. She hits the man in the face, punishing him for a rage she cannot express in any other way. She cannot be the “sweet bride” any longer; neither can she be the lioness smelling of womanhood. The end of the story precludes the sheer possibility of peace and harmony at the home front and shows that the “felicitous” spaces of the “repose of the warrior” are a patriarchal myth. The torrent of the impotent mass of women falls on the man’s cheek, protesting the violence of a war that has never stopped short of killing priests, nuns,

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women, and children. The women’s gesture, however, is a far more complex response than an antiwar protest. It represents the most poignant answer to the aforementioned question: emancipation, political agency, and violent acts are unmistakably linked, but this still does not mean that they are necessarily continuous. Even though all stories in Tales from Contemporary Spain advocate a leftist revolution that does not shy away from the use of violence as a means to an end, the earlier stories suggest that it is impossible to define the moment when the means will overcome the end. Arendt has argued that violent action is ruled by the “means-end category.” León’s stories reveal that in addition to possibly providing the means for social change, the main characteristic of violence “has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it.”33 Yet the same question concerning the continuities and discontinuities among revolutionary struggles, violence, and political agency are underscored even further in “Light for the Peaches and the Girls.” Whereas the other three stories finish with a more or less open and ambiguous ending, and the women’s (potential) use of violence is referred to only indirectly, in the last story the violence of revolution and war radically interrupts the narrative. Although León’s stories in many ways trace the itineraries of gendered and subaltern subjects before and during the Spanish Civil War, it is also important to bear in mind that the author herself is hardly considered in the broader spectrum of civil war literature. María Teresa León’s short stories are not only worth studying because they represent an ignored and forgotten phantom limb, severed from the corpus of Spanish Civil War literature. The texts discussed in this chapter also reveal that although revolutions and wars radically unsettle gender roles, patriarchal structures, and last but not least language, women’s emancipation and political agency are not automatic consequences. Moreover, the intersections among political violence, domestic violence, and epistemic violence that take place in these stories show that these not only display the normality of war but also reveal the wars of normality that often, to use Jelinek’s terms again, contribute to the “bloody, sometimes bloodless annihilation of the feminine.” Ultimately, critically reading León’s short stories, as well as her disappearance from the canon and from memory, provides a useful set of questions that allow us to challenge the ways in which wars are still lived out by other means today. 33. Arendt, On Violence, 4.

Pa r t I V

A Remainder and a Reminder

7 To R e m e m b e r I s a G h o s t l y Ve r b

In 1936, when explosions and carnage of one revolution were finally ceasing and a new postrevolutionary state was in the making on one shore of the Atlantic, another revolution, soon to become part of a civil war, was breaking out on its other shore. That same year, a writer whose work and memory have been overshadowed within the formation of a particular canon and official recollection until very recently published a brief article dedicated to the fearless women who participated in the Mexican Revolution. The article is María Teresa León’s “Woman Who Lost Fear.” This book began with a commentary on León’s take on the story of Fearless John, the youth who went forth to learn what fear is. Fearless John’s story is a trope León uses to discuss the ways in which the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution became fearless women; a very different trope now serves to initiate the book’s ending. This time it does not stem from European folklore; instead, it originates in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, “Funes, His Memory.” Irineo Funes, not unlike Juan, is young, of modest background, and lives in the countryside—not in the forests of central Europe, but near the town of Fray Bentos in Uruguay. The story takes place at the end of the nineteenth century and is told by a well-educated, upper-class Argentine who happens upon Funes during his vacation in the neighboring republic. Juan may not know fear, but Funes’s predicament is even more arduous, if not terrifying. In Borges’s text, the narrator is surprised by Funes’s precision when he first meets him: the young man not only knows the narrator’s cousin’s name but is also aware of the exact time of their encounter. This precision, however, is only a pale premonition of what is to become of Irineo Funes. At the narrator’s second visit to Uruguay, he immediately inquires about Funes, only to find out that an accident has left him hopelessly crippled. Yet his body’s immobility is only a 223

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small sacrifice for the lucidity he gained with his accident: now Funes is incapable of forgetting. His memory is complete, as he remembers everything and anything that ever happened. He even creates a new numeric system and a classification scheme in order to arrange every single memory that ever existed. The narrator is struck, even perturbed, by Funes’s totalizing memory. “I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract.”1 Smothered by memory, Funes is in many ways rendered mute in a sea of information: he dies, not long after his last conversation with the story’s narrator, of pulmonary congestion. Juan sin Miedo’s story, on the other hand, concludes with an optimistic, if not happy, ending: the young man finally finds fear thanks to a trivial event. Now he is allowed to feel, to sense, to know what curiosity and inquisitiveness are. The moral of the story is quite apparent: fear might be a bothersome sensation at times; however, knowing what fear is might very well be what makes us human. Borges’s work is far thornier, if not far more cynical, than those of his storytelling counterparts from earlier centuries: to have a complete memory like Funes is a disabling and silencing burden, a far more dismal predicament than Juan’s lack of fear. Yet both afflictions are not entirely unrelated: this is also what the last two chapters of this book purport to show. I argued earlier that losing fear has an unexpected corollary: a story that is always under erasure when a subject is not allowed to fear. The fearless women discussed in the previous chapters are not only struggling with the implications of a lost fear. Their voices also speak—either in traditional, representational fashion or with nonrepresentational acts of subaltern insurgency such as Adelita’s suicide or the characters’ actions in María Teresa León’s short stories—against forgetting. The women’s stories, therefore, are a reminder and a remainder of the uneven entry into the history and memory of fearless women. The same idea also clearly comes across in León’s descriptions of the soldaderas in the above-mentioned essay, “La mujer que perdió el miedo”: “These women are barely talked about. Or they are discussed in a wrong and official manner. They are the terrible women that later reach epic.” As the preceding chapters have shown, narratives of fearless women that reach the printed word, to later become part of archives and canons as well as iconic representations, are always already inscribed by a struggle against forgetting and disappearance. The implication here is not that fearless women are completely absent from history but that, as a matter of fact, fearless women are often the very subjects of history. “Without them 1. Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” in Collected Fictions, 137.

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we would live without history” (“Miedo”). The texts discussed in this book bear witness to women’s presence and women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, yet they do so only conditionally: a spectral presence haunts the textual bodies that today form the canons of revolutionary literature and culture in Mexico and in Spain. It should be noted at this point that the term forgetting has been used in a purposely loose manner, revealing obvious slippages between history and memory, as well as individual and social or collective memory. The main reason for these slippages is the fact that fearless women’s stories are located in ambiguous and spectral spaces, where history and memory invariably intersect. Assuming that these terms are equivalent would be naive, yet it may be just as naive to disregard the continuities between the ways in which forgetting takes place in history and in memory. Maurice Halbwachs, who together with Pierre Nora may be the most important figure in contemporary memory studies, certainly established that writing is what principally, but not exclusively, differentiates historical from collective memory.2 The task of historical memory can be carried out only with the use of the written word. Historical memory, consequently, requires an analysis centered on discursive practices. Yet the distinction between orality and literacy is not the sole factor that has allowed thinkers like Halbwachs and Nora to differentiate between history and memory; the continuities and discontinuities between the individual and the communal also shape the relations between history and memory. A crucial factor to bear in mind here is that Halbwachs also differentiates between individual and social memory, even though the difference between these two forms of memory is in degree, and not in kind. The latter is always shaped and reshaped by the role that different institutions have in the construction of particular memories. Institutions certainly also play an important role in the writing of history, yet the crucial factor here is that collective memory speaks not only to what happened in the past but also to the ways in which the past is still made intelligible in the present in a variety of ways.3 For the purposes of my analysis, I would like to emphasize the constructed 2. In her introduction to the collection of essays Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, Liliane Weissberg notes that collective memory “hardly relies on writing,” whereas historical memory “sets in when the collective memory disappears (15). The groundbreaking texts here would be Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory, originally published in 1950, and Pierre Nora’s seminal essay “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire” (1989). 3. Halbwachs explains On Collective Memory: “Sensations and images of lived experience become memories as they are integrated into modes of thought and behavior which flow from society to the reminiscing subject” (quoted in Joan Ramón Resina, “Short of Memory: The Reclamation of the Past since the Spanish Transition to Democracy,” 88).

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and the collective nature of memory, as well as the fact that both history and memory, whether individual or social, are neither finite nor complete. Rather, these different forms of engagement with the past are open-ended struggles. The previous chapters demonstrate that fearless women’s stories are always fragments, stemming from historical sources, popular memories, and, of course, literature.4 Adelita’s countless appearances in different forms of cultural production, ranging from comics to literary texts, always function as a remainder and a reminder of three key issues: first, women were widely present in the revolution; second, this same presence hardly appears recorded in most historiographies; and third, a figure that emerges from the popular ballads of the revolution becomes an acceptable signifier for women in the struggle. The story of the Trece Rosas exists only because history, memory, and literature intersect in such a way that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. The plaque that on the Cementerio de la Almudena commemorates the death of the thirteen minors with the words Trece Rosas written on it is a consequence of the women’s prior deaths and disappearance. Moreover, one cannot forget that literature—I have argued that the trope “Trece Rosas” emerges from the discursive battlefields of civil war poetry—is what places their story on the sometimes unreadable map of remembrance. Along similar lines, the posthumous homage that Nellie Campobello finally received shortly before her recovered body was returned to her home state of Durango is a consequence of the author’s prior disappearance.5 It will remain unknown whether the only female author of the novel of the Mexican Revolution would have ever received any kind of homage at all had her kidnapping not made her almost more famous than her work. Briefly, such items as recovered letters, reprinted memoirs, new anthologies, feminist historiographies, and recent novels that seek to reinsert fearless women into the national 4. My use of the term popular memory here is indebted to Raphael Samuel’s definition in Theatres of Memory: “Popular Memory is on the face of it the very antithesis of written history. It eschews notions of determination and seizes instead on omens, portents, and signs. It measures change genealogically, in terms of generations rather than centuries, epochs, or decades. It has no developmental sense of time, but assigns events to the mythicized ‘good old days’ (or ‘bad old days’) of workplace lore, or the ‘once upon a time’ of the storyteller” (6). 5. As explained in Chapter 5, Campobello’s remains were returned to her home state in 1999, a decade after her actual death. Not unlike her characters, Campobello found herself in a spectral space between life and death. Though officially alive, Campobello had passed in 1986. Her kidnappers, wanting to appropriate her estate, spread rumors that Campobello was still alive and in their care. After the kidnappers were imprisoned, Campobello was finally paid posthumous homage at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in June 1999. Her body was then transported to her home state of Durango.

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memory in Mexico and Spain unequivocally speak to a desperate call to remembrance after death. Yet what Funes’s story should have demonstrated is that forgetting is also an intrinsic, yet never politically innocent, aspect of memory. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan wrote that “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” Benedict Anderson takes issue with Renan’s emphasis on the forgotten violence that lies at the origin of any nation and suggests that remembering to forget this original violence plays a preponderant role in the imagining of a community. The fearless women’s stories, pieced together from fragmented narratives, sometimes displayed on politically and culturally inscribed female—usually dead—bodies, are what remain of the processes that constituted communities, national cultures, and literary canons, be it from the point of view of the winners or the vanquished. Anderson cites the Spanish Civil War in order to illustrate the political shifts in the memorization of this particular event, yet his brief reference does not account for the multiple and uneven levels that form the “official memory” of the war. The transition from an international conflict, “in which global and historical forces were at stake,” to Franco’s cruzada, “the worldwide struggle against Bolshevism and atheism,” to an official memory of a civil war does not sufficiently explain a problem that has been addressed throughout these chapters.6 Already in the 1930s—one could make a similar case of the official memory of the Mexican Revolution—the nascent core of what would later become this “official memory” was gendered and uneven. In early narratives of women’s participation and particularly women’s heroic deaths, female bodies become, as Diana Taylor would argue, “excess—they fall out of the picture so that representation of death and sacrifice will continue its magic of affirming community, whether hegemonic or counterhegemonic.” The analysis of women’s heroic deaths in the third and fourth chapters, as well as the multiple disappearances discussed in the subsequent chapters, should sufficiently prove that, again following Taylor, “communities define and strengthen themselves around these morally uplifting icons.”7 The heroic sacrifice of the Adelita characters in both Baltasar Dromundo’s and Josephina Niggli’s texts and 6. Renan, “What Is a Nation?” 11; Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (202). Anderson argues the following: “Only after the crafty tyrant’s death, and the subsequent, startlingly smooth transition to bourgeois democracy—in which it played a crucial role—did this ‘memory’ become official” (202). 7. Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s Dirty War, 86.

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the death stories of Lina Odena, Encarnación Jiménez, and the “Trece Rosas” are valid examples. I have argued so far that in the discursive construction of women’s experience of revolutions and war, the complexities and heterogeneities of women’s struggle appear articulated in accepted and acceptable images, metaphors, and tropes. Even though León believes that fearless women reach the pages of history or epic as demonized “terrible women” (“Miedo”), the previous chapters have demonstrated that discourses of domestication, which also include the silencing and exaltation of revolutionary women, contribute to the gendering of official memories. As the previous chapters have shown, women’s itineraries in revolutionary struggles appear displayed, for the most part, in written sources: novels, short stories, memoirs, letters, testimonials, and oral histories. Even though the latter rely on oral as opposed to written resources, they are still transmitted and edited, therefore part and parcel of a process of discursive production. My reading of them, however, reaches beyond the words that tell the different women’s stories; instead, I have attempted to grasp the meanings of the silences located in the spaces between the words. These are interstitial spaces, where the boundaries between past and present, between history and memory, are blurry at best. It is where any new attempt to rewrite women into the history of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War should take place, and where four novels to be discussed in the concluding chapters situate themselves. The novels are Elena Poniatowska’s Here’s to You, Jesusa (1969), Ángeles Mastretta’s Lovesick (1996), Jesús Ferrero’s Trece Rosas (2003), and Dulce Chacón’s Sleeping Voice (2002). Needless to say, such a space cannot be Funes’s modest and dark bedroom: an infinite new classification system that would pay tribute to every single memory is suffocating and immobilizing.8 To remember, Borges reminds us, is a sacred verb, as this is what the narrator states in the opening sentences of “Funes the Memorious”: “I recall him (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb—only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) holding a dark passionflower in his hand, seeing it as it had never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire lifetime.”9 To remember, as the chapters that follow will 8. “The past is not available in its totality,” states Resina in “Short of Memory,” and then adds that “whatever we remember of it at a given time and place depends on the nature of the institutions that organize social life” (85). 9. Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” 131.

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show, is also a ghostly verb. Memory, in its historical, individual, or collective incarnations, is necessarily limited and always marked by countless absences and silences. What to do with these absences and silences when discussing fearless women in Mexico and in Spain is the subject of the mentioned novels.

What Is a Ghost? In Guillermo del Toro’s film El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) (2001), a disembodied voice, which, as we will find out at the end of the film, is the voice of a specter, asks, “What is a ghost?” Immediately, the audience receives an answer: “An emotion, a terrible moment condemned to repeat itself over and over again.” The connections between the spectral and the structure of trauma have never been more clearly stated. Ghosts are trapped in time, the spectral voice keeps explaining, in an ambiguous space between past and present, “like a blurry photograph... like an insect trapped in amber.” There have been, of course, countless ghostly appearances in the history of horror cinema, and discussing them in relationship to memory and trauma would move beyond the framework of this analysis. What is at stake here, instead, is where del Toro’s particular ghosts come from. The Mexican filmmaker had originally planned to set the film about a ghostly appearance that haunts an orphanage in revolutionary Mexico. As the project evolved, del Toro transposed the project to the context of the Spanish Civil War.10 It would be naive to argue that the struggles are equivalent: both conflicts produced very different ghosts that haunt both national imaginations in different ways. Still, appropriate ghost stories can be easily set in either context. In Mexico as well as Spain, roughly thirty years after the conflicts took place, ghosts began appearing in different attempts to narrate what happened and what was forgotten in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Despite the cultural, colonial, and postcolonial affinities and divergences between these two countries, ghosts certainly have been far more visible in the Mexican context, where the indigenous heritage produced a sense of death, which, as Octavio Paz states, disavows a radical separation between life and its aftermath. Paz argues that in Aztec traditions, “life extended into death and viceversa. Death was not the natural end of life but one phase of an infinite cycle.” Paz also emphasizes that this is not the way death is understood in modern Mexico, even 10. For more information about the production, see Kimberly Chun, “What Is a Ghost? An Interview with Guillermo del Toro.”

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though such festivities as the Day of the Dead suggest a certain acceptance of the ambiguous space between life and death, or past or present. “The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away: he looks at it face to face, with impatience, disdain or irony. ‘If they are going to kill me tomorrow, let them kill me right away.’”11 Spectral presences in Mexico and in Spain have, of course, a more profound significance than the smirk on a dancing skeleton, echoes or murmurs, or any appearances similar to those that startle us in films like The Devil’s Backbone. I referred earlier to Jo Labanyi’s persuasive argument that the whole of modern Spanish culture “can be read as one big ghost story.” I have also argued that the traces of a spectral female corporeality inhabit and haunt the textual bodies that emerge from both revolutionary struggles. The particular question that Labanyi poses is, “But what should one do with improperly buried bodies: give them properly burial, or learn to live with their ghosts?”12 In what remains of this chapter I will discuss different strategies that represent varied attempts to live with the ghosts of the past in the particular context of women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. As I just mentioned, ghostly appearances are hardly a surprise in the bodies of texts that emerged from both struggles. In Chapter 5, I suggested that the voices in Campobello’s Cartucho are in many ways spectral, but it is in Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo where the echoes, voices, murmurs, and other remainders of the subaltern, of those who really lost the revolution, make their strongest presence (as contradictory as this may sound) in Mexican literary history. The village of Comala is a place where all memory is trapped, a place inaccessible to the living.13 Pedro Páramo is a novel where the subaltern, the banished, the sinners, the remainders of a struggle that took them nowhere, wander. Their souls appear trapped in an interstitial space of such sweltering heat that those who actually make it to the gates of hell need to return to Comala for a blanket. All those that the national myth of the revolution never reached seem 11. Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, 54, 58. The last line from the quotation, coincidentally, stems from another corrido about a soldadera, “La Valentina.” 12. Labanyi, “Engaging with Ghosts,” 1; Labanyi, “Rescuing the Living Dead from the Dustbin of History: Popular Memory and Postwar Trauma in Contemporary Spanish Film and Fiction,” 15. 13. “The characters wander around as ghosts,” notes Monsiváis in Mexican Postcards. This way, “the action takes place a long time ago and still is happening” (66).

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to end up in this spectral location where, to paraphrase del Toro, events are condemned to repeat themselves over and over again. To move to the Spanish case, here ghostly presences function rather differently. Whereas in Comala deeply embedded national traditions are at the same time challenged and reinforced, apparitions like the specter in Víctor Erice’s 1979 film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), or the ghosts that haunt the cold hallways of a bank built on the ruins of what used to be the infamous Cine Roxy in Juan Marsé’s writings, choose veritable emblems of modernity for their venues.14 Thus, while in the postrevolutionary context in Mexico ghosts are remnants of a past that only adds to the torments of the present, in Spain specters are also the consequence of an uneven and possibly traumatic entry into modernity. In Mexico, ghostly appearances reveal what lies underneath an official myth that allegedly enfranchised all Mexican people under a banner of national unity but instead led to seventy years of one-party rule with its own ghosts and dirty secrets that only recently have become a matter of national discussion. In Spain, ghostly appearances represent the national trauma of the lost war, the Francoist dictatorship, and, maybe more than anything, the fact that forgetting was part and parcel of a strategy for national reconciliation in Spain.15 Yet in spite of these differences, both conflicts and their respective aftermaths produced haunted and haunting texts. Jo Labanyi and Avery Gordon understand the spectral in a broader sense, and in their theoretical quest to further understand ghosts, both authors ultimately discuss the ways in which different forms of cultural production engage with the silences and absences that have become part and parcel of what we today accept as history and memory.16 14. I am referring to Marsé’s short story “El fantasma del Cine Roxy”; the Cine Roxy also appears in many of Marsé’s novels. “It seems significant,” says Labanyi in “Engaging with Ghosts,” “that the shadowy figures of history’s losers and desaparecidos which insist on returning in so much Spanish fiction and film of the transition and since—for example, the novels of Marsé, Muñoz Molina, Llamazares; the films of Erice, Patino, even Saura—[they] do so via reference to a variety of popular or mass-cultural forms: cinema, the thriller, family photographs” (8). 15. For more information on the role forgetting played in this reconciliation, see Resina, “Short of Memory”; and Teresa Vilarós, El mono del desencanto: Una crítica cultural de la transición española (1973–1993). 16. Gordon argues in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination that haunting “is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it” (7). Gordon later adds that a ghost “is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (8).

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The four above-mentioned novels inhabit these silences and absences. They do so, however, in four radically different ways. It is worthwhile to point out here that with the exception of a brief moment in The Trece Rosas, none of the novels contain direct references to ghostly figures or specters, yet the ways in which fearless women are trapped between past and present clearly show that all four, to use Labanyi’s terms, are actively, even vividly, engaging with ghosts. The four novels are aware of their own limits, aware of where they can and where they cannot go, aware that any attempt to be totalizing or complete would be just as asphyxiating as Funes’s bedroom. In other words, representations of howling ghosts are not exactly necessary to prove that fearless women have become the pain of a phantom limb. The haunting, as the brief discussions of the novels that follow aim to show, comes from elsewhere.

A Train Going Nowhere As the chapter on Nellie Campobello has shown, women have been writing about the Mexican Revolution, its causes, and its consequences since the 1930s. It was in the late sixties and early seventies, however, that women’s writing on the revolution received more critical attention. As one might suspect, women writers like Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska, Silvia Molina, and a few years later Ángeles Mastretta presented new perspectives, which were for the most part concerned with women’s untold experiences during this struggle.17 The work of these authors gestures at the silences in the more canonical literary works, yet it is in Mastretta’s and Poniatowska’s novels where the aforementioned engagement with the past clearly reveals its contradictions. Mastretta’s Lovesick, winner of the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize (Mastretta is the first woman ever to have won the award), is a best-selling novel. Although some critics merely choose to label the novel light literature, others have emphasized the subversive nature of this “female bildungsroman,” and argue that it “undoes and demystifies hegemonic discourse.”18 Unlike Cartucho or Pedro Páramo, Lovesick is not a text that unleashes the echoes or murmurs of the revolution; neither is it concerned with the gendered subaltern. Yet past and present still fuse in the author’s representation of the main female characters, Emilia Sauri and Milagros Veytia, as Mastretta places an almost 17. I am referring to Garro’s Recuerdos del porvenir (1963), Molina’s Familia vino del Norte, as well as Mastretta’s novel. 18. Judy Maloof, “Mal de amores: Un bildungsroman femenino,” 36–37.

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transparent feminist consciousness on these sexually and professionally liberated and emancipated women. Although this gesture may be revolutionary in and of itself, the novel still adheres to certain conventions that, more than the novel of the Mexican Revolution, marked novels written in Latin America in the nineteenth century. In spite of this feminist subversion, Lovesick is what Doris Sommer has called a foundational fiction. Lovesick is a love story of epic proportions that takes place in an era when, according to the author, “people don’t care who you make love with, if you get married or you don’t, if you’re living with someone with or without papers. Those things become absolutely secondary. The important thing is life” (37). Unlike the characters in The Underdogs and Cartucho, Emilia Sauri and Milagros Veytia are upper-class women who find themselves in the center stage of revolutionary Mexico. Emilia’s lifelong romances with the revolutionary leader Daniel Cuenca and doctor Antonio Zavalza are also foundational romances, which delineate a new and certainly idealized Mexico where women play a preponderant role. Mastretta herself explains that her characters represent a mirror for contemporary Mexican women. “Mexican women are not getting to know themselves through these books. They’re recognizing themselves as they are: they’re not trying to become like the protagonists” (40). Lovesick is a foundational fiction set in the past that draws a picture of how the present should look like. Even though Sommer’s notion of the foundational fiction describes a particular group of nineteenthcentury texts, the model also works for Lovesick. Commenting on such novels as María, Amalia, Enriquillo, Torn from the Nest, and Sab, Sommer argues that in these foundational texts, romance integrates the nation and creates a unified, homogeneous society. She also quickly recognizes that these romances and fictions of national unity are based on “pretty lies,” and this is exactly what another text of the Mexican Revolution, Carlos Fuentes’s Death of Artemio Cruz, reveals.19 Thus, whereas nineteenth-century authors narrate the nation by writing love stories, it becomes the task of the “boom” authors to reveal what lies underneath these fictions. Needless to say, foundational fictions have always been part of a hegemonic national project. Thus, since the novel may speak to and for middle19. In “Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America,” Sommer recognizes in the nineteenth-century texts a common need “to reconcile and amalgamate national constituencies, and form the strategy to cast the previously unreconciled parties, races, classes, or regions, as lovers who are ‘naturally’ attracted and right for one another” (81). When it comes to the novels that are part of the “boom” of Latin American literature, the foundational love affairs are revealed as rapes, or as “power plays that need to traffic in women” (91).

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and upper-class subjects, its strength also relies on the awareness of its own limits. With Lovesick, the author is not interested in plotting particular, even feminist, histories on subaltern subjects; the text also does not try to fill the silences that always haunt history and memory. Such an attempt would, in a sense, represent just another improper burial of the ghosts of the past. In other words, Mastretta does not engage with the always already lost voices of subaltern subjects and the ways in which they circulated across the discursive battlefields of revolutionary Mexico. Instead, we see them through Emilia’s gaze: her sense of solidarity with the marginalized is strong, but she certainly acknowledges her position of privilege. In her pursuits of love, adventure, and maybe a healed Mexico, Emilia traverses different social settings of revolutionary Mexico. Contrary to the soldaderas she encounters in her travels, she can switch locations the same way she switches her personal attire: because she has a choice. Shortly before the coup against Madero, Emilia spends a few weeks with her beloved Daniel in Izúcar, a small village, sharing the experiences of a small group of revolutionaries and soldaderas whom Emilia keenly observes. “While the men were away, the women worked from sunup to sunset. There was no rest from their labors or respite from their tongues.”20 But when the situation in the village starts to become critical and Emilia refuses to leave, one of the soldaderas explains that it is time for her to go. “If Emilia stayed in the village, she said, she would end up being a burden; they would have to protect her, feed her, spend too much time taking care of her. On the other hand, if she went back to Puebla and helped them from there, she could be more useful than in a camp of armed men” (195). Emilia’s choices precisely show that more than just one struggle is fought in the revolution, and that no matter how much changes with the revolution, certain locations will remain the same. Emilia’s story, the story that serves as a mirror for women in contemporary Mexico who read novels like Lovesick, provides but a limited perspective; maybe this is all a novel of this nature can do. Much later in the text, Emilia has again joined Daniel and they are both traveling, like so many soldiers and soldaderas of the revolution would, in a train that seems to be going nowhere. It is here where Emilia learns ancient and subalternized medical knowledge from Teodora, an old healer. Even though the two women seem to share a close bond, as Daniel observes when Emilia and Teodora have to bid farewell, Emilia’s origins will always separate her from Teodora, who does not have the chance of leaving the train, and the world, or “the experience 20. Mastretta, Lovesick, 192. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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of horror that becomes routine” it carries inside (233). “Daniel opened his eyes and saw Emilia near the window, face-to-face with Teodora, her hands locked behind the tiny woman’s neck, whispering as if there were still things left they could tell each other” (239). Emilia can leave the misery of this world behind, while Teodora and the other soldiers and soldaderas remain perched on top of the revolutionary train, gazing at a landscape that may not be changing as fast as they hope. Emilia is a witness of the revolution; she learns from the revolution, and much like the restless Daniel, the revolution becomes part of her innermost self. However, there are parts of the revolution that Emilia cannot speak for, that she cannot mend. In this new foundational fiction the soldaderas once again remain at the margins. This is all the text can do, aware that speaking for the soldaderas or equating Emilia’s experience with theirs would just deepen their silencing. The happy marriage in this novel is not Emilia’s lifelong romance with Daniel, or her calmed joy with Antonio. Rather, it is a marriage between a tumultuous past that made women’s emancipation possible and the projection of a future of self-reliance and possibility. Emilia’s ultimate defiance is the words she states at the end of the novel, “I’m a bigamist,” a privilege very much reserved for men in Mexican society (272). Old stereotypes are now completely turned around, yet even though Lovesick defies the domestication of fearless women, it cannot reveal what might be hiding underneath the reified images of the soldaderas. In this new mirror of Mexico, the soldaderas are still absent, as Mastretta is keenly aware. Different from authors who quickly identify soldaderas, and more particularly Adelitas, with a comfortable representation for rebellious women, Mastretta is far more careful.21 Writing a novel that would reconcile the past with the present is a very comprehensible endeavor in end-of-the-century Mexico. Although the revolutionary Mexico Mastretta describes is certainly historically accurate, this fiction is a foundation for upper-middle-class women in Mexico. Not only was Ángeles Mastretta the first woman to receive the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos prize, but the novel also appeared at a moment when the meaning of the 1910 revolution was, once again, radically changing. Preceding the electoral defeat of the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution by four years, the publication 21. An example of this would be Baltasar Dromundo’s play discussed in Chapter 3, as well as the novel Bigote Prieto by Coro Perales, recently published in Spain. In this text that in many ways (unsuccessfully, I would argue) imitates Lovesick, such issues as subalternity are quickly glossed over. Rather than functioning as a foundational romance, the text is simply a romance novel set in a historically inaccurate revolutionary Mexico.

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of Lovesick certainly speaks to the ways in which political identification with the watershed event has changed its meaning, particularly if Mastretta’s novel is seen in contrast to Poniatowska’s Here’s to You, Jesusa. Poniatowska’s testimonial novel, a text that appeared seventeen years before Lovesick was published, is, needless to say, a radically different project. The notion of a testimonial novel certainly speaks to the fact that with this book, Poniatowska attempts to distance herself from the kind of world and kind of text that Mastretta creates with Lovesick. Both genres, novel and testimonio, of course have a history and are almost by definition unstable categories that in Latin American literary history (and maybe literary history as a whole) have always contaminated one another. Elzbieta Sklodowska considers the recognition of the testimonio as a genre in itself to be one of the most important events in the history of Latin American letters.22 Poniatowska’s novel is a tapestry of the lives of Josefa Bórquez; Jesusa Palancares, a woman who circulates among the dispossessed; and the subaltern in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico. Jesusa’s story succinctly communicates the problems of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, or the struggle for survival. Yet what disavows the kind of urgency John Beverley and others have recognized as a unifying theme in testimonial narratives is Poniatowska’s attempt to disappear behind the subject she attempts to endow with a particular voice. The “testimonial novel,” then, is a “sign of tension between two genres and two narrative agents” and also a “contradiction in terms, a text teetering between immediacy and manipulation.”23 These tensions, however, are not an exclusive phenomenon of the clashes among Jesusa, Josefa, and the author; rather, they are part and parcel of most representations of fearless women. Yet what differentiates a novel like Lovesick from Here’s to You, Jesusa are the opposing ways in 22. In “Spanish American Testimonial Novel: Some Afterthoughts,” Sklodowska argues the following: “I insist on the word ‘recognize,’ because the presence of testimonial qualities has been a time-honored trait of Spanish American writing since its inception, and one could easily make a case for viewing it, along with realism, as a perennial mode of Western letters” (84). John Beverley avers in “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)” that, as any genre, a testimonio has a series of common denominators or characteristics. A brief look at them suggests that Poniatowska’s text does not quite fit the category. “The situation of a narration in testimonio has to involve an urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, and so on, implicated in the act of narration itself,” asserts Beverley (26). He later adds that “the situation of the narrator in testimonio is one that must be representative of a social class or group” (27). 23. Doris Sommer, “Hot Pursuits and Cold Rewards of Mexicanness,” 138, 139.

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which such tensions are handled. As discussed earlier, Mastretta certainly gestures at the absences and at the silences that inscribe the stories of the soldaderas. Yet the author also leaves these silences untouched: she abstains from representation, since the (subaltern) subject’s itinerary, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “has not been left traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual.”24 Needless to say, a postcolonial critic like Spivak would hardly find Mastretta’s abstention satisfactory; that is also why I insist on reading Lovesick and Here’s to You, Jesusa as complementary texts, in light of one another. Both novels disclose the ways in which fearless women appear in memory. I will later propose a similar maneuver for The Trece Rosas and The Sleeping Voice. Poniatowska insists on disclosing a subalternized history of the Mexican Revolution. She therefore takes a literary risk, and consequently receives an aggressive response from her own subject, as critics of her novel point out. In the first half of Here’s to You, Jesusa, the main character lives the archetypal life of the soldadera. From the outset her story unsettles the more acceptable and heroic versions that have become part of the official revolutionary myth: there is hardly any heroism in the revolution, no worthwhile causes to die for. No Adelita, Valentina, or Juana Gallo parade around the troops; nobody is humming corridos, and nobody is photographing women perched on top of trains seemingly going nowhere. The revolutionary landscape is surprisingly empty, and none of the deaths that do take place in the text are imbued with meaning. During the revolution, Jesusa first follows her father, later her husband, into battle. She bears their arms, procures food, yet she also realizes that the revolution makes her own emancipation possible. “The blessed revolution gave me self-confidence,” affirms Jesusa.25 She becomes used to carrying a gun, and she will eventually use it to threaten her own husband when he almost beats her to death. Nevertheless, Jesusa refuses to take her husband’s role and become a revolutionary leader herself after he is killed; she also understands that the promises of a captain who wants to turn her into a revolutionary leader are just as empty and meaningless as the “bilimbiques,” the money printed by the different revolutionary factions that might lose its value in any given moment. The point is that Jesusa knows that assuming this traditionally male role will not result in emancipating possibilities for her. After receiving the offer, Jesusa thinks: “Besides, he had bad 24. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 272. 25. Poniatowska, Here’s to You, Jesusa, 101. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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intentions, because the general was spiteful. He wanted me to stay with the soldiers to harass me because of the things I’d said to him” (130). With no other choice than surviving in this man-made world, Jesusa knows that visibly overstepping the traditional boundaries would create only impossible situations for her. So she leaves the revolutionary armies behind and moves to Mexico City. Jesusa becomes another soldadera who disappears in a revolutionary process that never had any meaning for her. Poniatowska’s novel, however, is far more than just another narrative that challenges the myth of a triumphant revolution. As suggested earlier, the complexity of the text relies on the tensions between Poniatowska’s re-creation of Bórquez’s life (Bórquez did not allow Poniatowska to tape their conversation), her experiences during and beyond the revolution, and Poniatowska’s feminist and even nationalist agenda.26 Whereas Mastretta gazes at the myths of the past and adapts them in order to sketch a blueprint for an idealized present, Poniatowska eagerly listens to a voice speaking directly from the ruins of the past. And the ultimate response she gets may be completely unexpected: telling her story is far from being a liberating or even therapeutic experience for Jesusa. The text ends with the words: “Now fuck off! Go away and let me sleep” (303). In contrast to leftist women in Spain, who even after the advent of democracy were still afraid to tell their stories, Jesusa seems to be anything but afraid. Rendered fearless, she tells a story that like the train, the ultimate war machine of the Mexican Revolution, will never arrive at its expected destination. Compared to most other testimonios of women of the Mexican Revolution, or maybe even of all revolutionary women, Here’s to You, Jesusa is still a privileged text: had Elena Poniatowska not written the story, had she not “embroidered” the text, as Doris Sommer states, Josefa Bórquez would have disappeared behind acceptable myths like most of the other soldaderas. Still, Josefa disappears behind Jesusa. The irreconcilable aspects of Josefa’s life, Jesusa’s story, and Poniatowska’s novel mirror the conflict that permeates most representations of fearless women. But there is more to it. In her reading of the testimonial novel, Jean Franco suggests that Jesusa already resides in an ambiguous space between life and death, past and present. At the end of the novel, Jesusa declares to her interlocutor that she does not want to be buried; instead, her body is to be dumped outside the city and eaten by birds. Franco establishes a connection to the figure of Antigone, 26. In Plotting Women, Franco defines the novel as a “complex interaction between narrator and listener which ends by affirming the disparity of their projects” (182).

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reinforcing the idea that Jesusa (and women like Jesusa) has always been outside and beyond any national community. Even before her death, Jesusa is already a remainder of a revolutionary process.27 Whereas Emilia serves as a reminder of the Mexican Revolution, turning the struggle into a potential affirmation of a feminist consciousness, Jesusa is a remainder of a process that never included her. Yet both characters represent only apparent polarities that at the end turn out to be two sides of the same coin. The subsequent analysis of two Spanish novels that have similar, yet not equivalent, functions in the rewriting of a national and gendered memory reinforces even more the notion that fearless women are always both a reminder and a remainder of the revolutionary process in the early twentieth century.

The Trece Rosas Revisited When it seemed that the death story of the Trece Rosas was going to remain confined to historiographies and collections of testimonies that center on women’s experiences during the civil war, two novels appeared, radically changing the role that these figures would play in Spanish literary history. Although these novels share many of their sources, both rely on very different strategies in their respective interactions with the specters of the past.28 Jesús Ferrero, author of The Trece Rosas, and Dulce Chacón, author of The Sleeping Voice, may not be as famous as Mastretta and Poniatowska are in Mexico and beyond its borders, yet both are prolific writers: the actual texts are the authors’ third and fourth novels, respectively. Whereas all four novelists engage with the literary and the historical, this is to say, all four texts write against a strongly gendered forgetting of these struggles, Ferrero and Mastretta consciously ground their texts in literary sources. Here’s to You, Jesusa and The Sleeping Voice are instead concerned with revealing untold, if not silenced, stories that up until that point have been only at the margins of most literary endeavors. It is not my intention to establish which of these four novels is the most historically accurate text, or aver that the relation between the historical and the literary 27. “Jesusa’s true community,” notes Franco, “is with the unburied dead, not with the unhallowed living. She does not need a Creon to expel her, but goes of her own accord in order to renew her ties with nature and break with the false community of the city” (ibid., 181). 28. An even more recent text can be added here: in 2004, Carlos Fonseca published Trece rosas rojas: La historia más conmovedora de la guerra civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy). As the title suggests, the text is not a novel, but a historical exploration into the Francoist repression in the early postwar years.

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is one of exclusivity: it should be more than clear at this point that any attempt to engage with fearless women will gesture at the intersections among history, memory, and literature. Moreover, suggesting that the literary discourse does not intersect with testimonial narrative, or that the latter simply represents “the real thing,” to use John Beverley’s phrase, would be naive. The critique of the genre of the testimonio has debated the ways in which fiction and history, the individual and the communal, intersect in this genre. It is a complex and rich debate, and reproducing it would move beyond the framework of my analysis. The point I would like to emphasize is that testimonio critique greatly enriches an analysis of novels like Here’s to You, Jesusa and The Sleeping Voice—which does not make these novels testimonios.29 Different from Poniatowska, who focuses her novel on one woman, the “sleeping voice” in Chacón’s text is in a sense collective. The novel narrates the plight of imprisoned women and their family members from the early postwar years to the end of the dictatorship in Spain. Her characters represent an amalgam of the memories of different subjects Chacón interviewed. Needless to say, these interviews and testimonies produce radically different texts. Poniatowska consciously wants to disappear behind Jesusa, and her book in itself is a testimony of this same desire. In The Sleeping Voice, the relation between the author and the subjects whose stories she decides to narrate is far more harmonious. Yet it is also important to notice here that unlike Jesusa, Chacón’s subjects do not talk back to her, do not insult her, and certainly do not seem to prefer sleep to talking with the author. Jesús Ferrero now establishes an even greater distance, as the Trece Rosas this author imagines certainly bear witness to the events of August 5, 1939, but they also speak to (and with) a long list of literary citations that in different ways address the relationship among youth, gender, and death. Ferrero then focuses on literary history in order to build a bridge between present and past; the novel’s coherence, in a way, is a result of not jumping off this bridge. The most important yet also polemic aspect of Ferrero’s text is that the novel shows that the death story of the Trece Rosas always has literary implica29. Beverley argues in “Margin at the Center” that “unlike the novel, testimonio promises by definition to be primarily concerned with sincerity than with literariness” (26). He later adds that “what is important about testimonio is that it produces if not the real then certainly a sensation of experiencing the real and that this has determinate effects on the reader that are different from those produced by even the most realist or ‘documentary’ fiction” (34). Both texts therefore situate themselves at the crossroads between these different genres and ways of reading them, revealing once again that not only these two but as a matter of fact all four novels are unmistakably aware of the limits of their respective projects.

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tions. The threat of forgetting is what made such a story possible in the first place; moreover, the name Trece Rosas emerges, as I argued in Chapter 5, out of literary traditions. Ferrero’s text is cluttered with unmarked citations of major literary works as well as references to testimonials and articles that directly refer to the Trece Rosas and the plights of other imprisoned women in postwar Spain. Possibly emulating Juan Goytisolo in Count Julian, Ferrero ends his novel with acknowledgments that list the voices echoed in his novel. The list ranges from Jacobo García Blanco-Cicerón, author of “The Death of the Trece Rosas,” a text that also served as a source for Chapter 5, to Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, author of Broken Silence, the book that contains Julia Conesa’s last letters written from prison, as well as Cervantes, Euripides, Carolina Coronado, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire.30 In The Sleeping Voice, Dulce Chacón also ends her text with a list of sources that helped her write the novel. Yet Chacón’s list greatly differs from Ferrero’s: she first cites Pepita, who also becomes the main character in her novel. Her subsequent list includes a few references to authors and their works, among them again Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, Tomasa Cuevas, Mary Nash, and Paul Preston, but also names of women who had been in prison, sometimes authors of testimonies, sometimes women who are still afraid: “And a woman who wants neither her own nor her town’s name mentioned, and who asked me to close the window before starting to speak in a soft voice” (Y una mujer que no quiere que se mencione su nombre ni el de su pueblo, y que me pidió que cerrara la ventana antes de comenzar a hablar en voz baja) or “a woman from Gijón, who begged me to tell the truth” (una mujer de Gijón que me rogó que contara la verdad).31 Even though the sources differ, both novels are tapestries in which the authors use available scraps of information to construct their stories. Many of the details surrounding the deaths of the thirteen minors appear in both novels, among them Joaquinita’s belt, a chain made of black heads that the woman, in the night that preceded her death, unmade and then handed to different women. Ferrero describes the scene in the following terms. Joaquina smiled and took of her belt with the twenty-eight heads. “Do you see these heads?” she said, showing the black belt as though it were a trophy. “I’m going to replicate myself in every black head. A piece of me in 30. For a complete list, see Ferrero, Las Trece Rosas, 233. 31. Chacón, La voz dormida, 385, 387. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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Although the belt and the little heads appear in different testimonies that narrate the death story of the Trece Rosas, the communion with the black holy wafer certainly is the author’s own comment on the religious authorities that in many ways were accomplices to the minors’ deaths. There are other instances when the novel directly refers to the available information on the Trece Rosas as it appears in the different testimonies. These moments range from the comparison between the minors looking like schoolgirls doing their homework to the fact that one of the women, Avelina, was almost executed by her own father, the death of the young activist Pionero, and the contrast between Martina’s pale face and her freckles. Julia Conesa’s last letters to her mother appear in The Sleeping Voice. Chacón explains in her acknowledgments that Fernanda Romeu Alfaro made Julia Conesa’s letters available to her (386); her descriptions of the minors also reflect what comes across in the different testimonies that narrate the deaths of the Trece Rosas. And Tomasa remembers Julita Conesa, always cheerful, Blanquita Brissac, playing the harmonium in the chapel of Ventas, and Martina Barroso’s freckles. And she caresses in her pocket the little black head that she holds on to since the night of August 4 of nineteen thirty-nine. It belonged to Joaquinita’s belt. (Y Tomasa recuerda a Julita Conesa, alegre como un cascabel, a Blanquita Brissac tocando el armonio en la capilla de Ventas, y las pecas de Martina Barroso. Y acaricia en su bolsillo la cabecita negra que guarda desde la noche del cuatro de agosto de mil novecientos treinta y nueve. Pertenecía al cinturón de Joaquina.) (192)

Other references in Chacón’s novel include details such as the description of the dark cape the prison guard was wearing or Victoria’s lamentation for her 32. Ferrero, Las Trece Rosas, 160. Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

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mother who had already lost two sons. And, finally, Julia Conesa’s actual letter, followed by the words: “No, Julia Conesa’s name will not be erased from history” (No, el nombre de Julia Conesa no se borrará en la historia). The last paragraph of the chapter consists only of the word “No” (199). To return to Ferrero’s text, here the author’s choices undoubtedly make the novel highly controversial, as the cultural and historic specificity of the moment of the minors’ deaths appears derailed. Similar to Mastretta’s mirror for Mexican upper-middle-class women, Ferrero’s text also goes only where it can: more than the reconstruction of the death story of the minors, Ferrero is concerned with an exploration into the clash between youth and death, and the role that literature plays in such a discussion. One could even say that his depiction of the story of the Trece Rosas at the end is a rhetorical strategy in order to address a more abstract or, if we want, philosophical question. This becomes particularly evident in the women’s words, as they are awaiting death in a separate room in prison. Antigone appears again, but contrary to Here’s to You, Jesusa, here the author directly refers to Euripides’ heroine in the title of one of the last chapters of the novel. The reference to both the tragedy and the heroine is part of the diegesis of the text. Victoria, one of the condemned minors, reads a paragraph from the play in a book she had been hiding under her cot. She repeats the lines three times in a row. Look at me, people from my own ground, as I cross the last path and gaze for the last time at the blond sun. Hades, who welcomes all of us, takes me alive to the river Acheron, without having had a wedding, without the sound of the bridal chant at my wedding. I will marry in hell. (Vedme, gentes de mi mismo suelo, atravesar el último sendero y mirar por última vez el rubio sol. Hades, que a todos acoge, me lleva viva hasta las orillas del Aqueronte, sin participar de casamientos, sin que hayan entonado el canto nupcial en mis bodas. Me casaré en el infierno.) (160)

The—again unmarked—citation speaks to the ways in which women become “excess,” affirming a community that, as Diana Taylor would argue, also excludes them. Their deaths are the consequence of an exemplary execution: their youth was sacrificed in order for a new community, more favorable to the present regime, to come into being. I would therefore argue that in Ferrero’s text, the almost obsessive, if not pedantic, references to canonical literature highlight the symbolic roles that were forced upon the thirteen minors who with their deaths will forever be the Trece Rosas.

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The space that these subjects inhabit, the location between life and death, between past and present, is, at least in Ferrero’s narrative of this death story, profoundly literary. It is also, as the concluding chapter of the novel suggests, a spectral location. The women reappear in Madrid, a city that almost forty years after witnessing the minors’ deaths is barely emerging from the Francoist dictatorship. Benjamín, one of the narrators and Avelina’s fiancé in the beginning of the text, is strolling around the city, observing a group of young women next to telephone booths. The women are the same age Avelina was at the time she was executed. He then walks into a tavern and observes two lively and smiling young women: “They looked like Joaquina and her sisters on the day they were arrested” (Parecían Joaquina y sus hermanas el día en que las detuvieron, 230). These spectral appearances, an event condemned to repeat itself over and over again, as director Guillermo del Toro would have it, allude to the trauma of the minors’ deaths. Benjamín turns around and seems to recognize Carmen, as she walks out of a pharmacy. Then he imagined that all the girls that were surrounding him vanished, as though swept away by radiation, and he got on a bus, which left him in Blanca and Julia’s neighborhood, very close to San Andrés street. He was in front of the building where Blanca used to live when he saw a girl, with a round face like Julia’s, who smiled at him before vanishing among the people. The train was late, and the station was filling with travelers. It was then that he thought that two of the thirteen were circulating around him again. They remained among the people, dressed like the other girls under the lights that were hanging from the black sky. (Entonces imaginó que todas aquellas chicas que le rodeaban desaparecían como barridas por una radiación y se subió a un autobús que lo dejó en el barrio de Blanca y Julia, muy cerca de la calle San Andrés. Se hallaba frente al inmueble en el que había vivido Blanca cuando vio a una muchacha de cara tan lunar como la de Julia que le sonreía antes de desaparecer entre la gente. El tren tardaba en llegar y el andén empezó a llenarse de viajeros. Fue entonces cuando creyó que dos de las trece volvían a pulular a su alrededor. Permanecían entre la gente, vestidas como las otras chicas, bajo las luces que pendían del cielo negro.) (230)

Little by little, Benjamín encounters the thirteen women who have not aged, who rather than being erased from history have become ghostly presences that circulate in the same city that saw their deaths. More than altering the past, the

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present becomes different ways of experiencing the alterations of the past. To use Jo Labanyi’s phrase, here the ghosts have been granted a proper welcome: the years will go by, but the specters of the Trece Rosas will remain. The end of the novel is therefore set in a city populated by the ghosts of the past, subjects trapped in an ambiguous space between life and death, the space of trauma. It is also the same location from which Dulce Chacón’s “sleeping voices” speak. The aforementioned fact that one of the women she interviewed spoke only after ensuring that her window was closed certainly proves that their suffering, and their fear, still inform the ways in which their stories appear articulated. Hortensia, one of the characters in Chacón’s novel, finds herself in this very space at the outset of the text, as the novel begins with the line “The woman who was going to die was called Hortensia” (La mujer que iba a morir se llamaba Hortensia, 13). We will quickly learn that Hortensia has been imprisoned and is about to receive the death penalty: this young leftist political activist who joined the guerrillas after the defeat of the republic will be executed shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Tensi. Chacón’s acknowledgments at the end of the novel explain that both Hortensia and her sister Pepita are based on real-life characters: “I owe a great part of this novel to a woman from Córdoba with very blue eyes. To Pepita, who is still very beautiful” (Gran parte de esta novela se la debo a una cordobesa de ojos azulísimos. A Pepita, que sigue siendo hermosísima, 383). In the novel, Chacón fuses oral histories, testimonies, and personal interviews. Unlike Poniatowska, the author does not express any tensions between herself and the subjects whose stories she tells; instead, she reinforces the idea that the women’s and men’s stories that form her novel have been given to her: “My gratitude to all the people who have given me the gift of their story” (Mi gratitud a todas las personas que me han regalado su historia, 381). Chacón’s words also imply that the novel does not center on the relationship between a particular gendered, subaltern subject and the author who wants to piece together her story, but rather focuses on a collectivity where different and for the most part untold stories intersect. These testimonies also include photographs from the civil war, as we see with a description of Hortensia’s picture, a known image of a miliciana.33 This same image also adorns the cover of the novel and shows an anonymous woman, dressed in the blue overalls of the militia woman (fig. 11). In the novel, Chacón openly refers to this image and identifies the woman with her 33. Fondo fotográfico “Archivo Rojo,” photo no. 55566, Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Archivo General de la Administración, Madrid.

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"To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this work."

Figure 11. A young miliciana with a child. In Dulce Chacón’s Voz dormida she becomes Hortensia. (Reprinted by permission of the Archivo General de la Administración, Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, Madrid)

character Hortensia. She describes how Felipe, Hortensia’s husband, scrutinizes the image. Tensi, with her miliciana’s uniform, with her gun in the bandoliers and the fivepointed red star sewn on one side, smiles for him, with a child that is not hers in her arms. It was a warm July day, she was wearing the earrings that he had bought for her in Azuaga and she had put up her hair, hiding her braids. (Tensi, con su uniforme de miliciana, con su fusil en bandolera y la estrella roja de cinco puntas cosida en el costado, sonríe para él, con un niño que no es suyo en los brazos. Era un día caluroso de Julio, ella se había puesto los pendientes que él le había comprado en Azuaga y se había recogido el pelo ocultando sus trenzas.) (75)

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This photograph is more than just an emblematic representation of a miliciana.34 Similarly, yet not equivalent to the women who wrote the poems on the deaths of the Trece Rosas, Chacón also reaches for available images and narratives in order to plot a story: as in the earlier cases, this gesture will not exorcise the ghost of the past. Instead, to use Labanyi’s terms, The Sleeping Voice suggests ways of living with these ghosts, particularly by revealing how the process of mourning has been interrupted for all the “sleeping voices” she unleashes with her text. One of the consequences of the interruption of mourning is also fearlessness. The women in the novel have all suffered the loss of their loved ones, of their way of life before and even during the war, their freedom, even their fear. Following Sigmund Freud, mourning, rather than being a state of mind, is an actual task. Mourning, contends Freud in his seminal essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” “is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” Freud further describes the work of mourning in the following terms: “Reality-testing has shown that the loved object no longer exists, and it proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object.” I do not mean to imply that the women in the novel consequently suffer from melancholia. This affliction, as Freud explains, is a radically different condition, which borrows some of its features from mourning, but is far more complex than an interrupted mourning process: “The melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking in mourning—an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale. In mourning it is world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”35 Melancholia would not adequately describe the situations in which the women Chacón describes in the novel find themselves. Rather, the Francoist repression has made the work of mourning a difficult and sometimes impossible task; a lost fear is one of the consequences of the interruption of the mourning process. This becomes prevalent in the actions of Doña Celia, one of Chacón’s characters, and the ways in which her actions affect Tensi, who represents younger generations of Spanish women who were born after the war. Doña Celia, the owner of the boardinghouse where Pepita resides, also lost a daughter to Franco’s 34. In “Voices of the Vanquished: Leftist Women in the Spanish Civil War,” Gina Herrmann comments on the picture: “The woman is also holding a child, a significant gesture, proving that the iconographic portrayal of the woman/mother/revolutionary corresponds to a certain emotive and readily tellable myth of female heroism” (23). 35. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243, 244, 246.

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executioners. With the help of one of her boarders, she manages to sneak into the cemetery where the executions take place during the darkest years of the repressions. After the death of her own daughter, Doña Celia performs the same ritual countless times: she cleans the executed women’s faces, then cuts a small piece of their clothing that she will later hand to the victims’ families. This is precisely what happens after Hortensia’s execution. And they say, and it is true, that a woman went up to the fallen and kneeled down next to Hortensia. She had scissors in her hands. She cut a scrap of the dress she had worn to die. And she closed her eyes. And washed her face. (Y dicen, y es cierto, que una mujer se acercó a los caídos y se arrodilló junto a Hortensia. Llevaba unas tijeras en la mano. Le cortó un trocito de tela del vestido que se había puesto para morir. Y le cerró los ojos. Y le lavó la cara.) (220)

With this gesture, Doña Celia initiates a mourning process for those who in the official discourse of the Francoist regime do not deserve a eulogy or a dirge, those whose deaths should also be deaths in history and memory. As the novel reaches its end, Hortensia’s daughter, who has grown up under the careful and sometimes fearful care of Pepita, also chooses a life of leftist political activism, emulating her dead mother. Yet when Pepita is about to hand her niece the scrap of her mother’s dress, something that might bring the mourning process full circle, she hesitates for a moment. Behind Tensi, Doña Celia looks at Pepita and says no with her head. She begs with a gesture that she not give the daughter the scrap of her mother’s dress. For a while now Doña Celia has stopped going to the cemetery with her niece Isabel, and a pair of scissors. For a while now the relatives have been allowed to bury their dead. But Doña Celia has not forgotten the pain that disfigured their faces when she handed them scraps of clothing. Pepita had not thought about it enough. She does not want to see that pain in Tensi’s eyes. (A espaldas de Tensi, doña Celia mira a Pepita y niega con la cabeza. Suplica con un gesto que no le entregue a la hija el trozo del vestido de su madre. Hace

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tiempo que doña Celia ha dejado de ir al cementerio con su sobrina Isabel, y con unas tijeras. Hace tiempo que los familiares tienen permiso para enterrar a sus muertos. Pero doña Celia no ha olvidado el dolor que desfiguraba los rostros cuando ella entregaba los trocitos de tela. Pepita no lo ha pensado bien. Ella no quiere ver ese dolor en el rostro de Tensi.) (358)

After catching a glimpse of Doña Celia’s expression, Pepita decides to keep the scrap, telling her niece, “It is just a keepsake” (Es sólo un recuerdo, 359). This keepsake, both reminder and remainder, is undoubtedly part of what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory,” the memory of children of survivors.36 When Pepita chooses to keep the piece of the dress her sister wore when she was executed, she yearns to erase the “post” from Tensi’s memory, thereby erasing both pain and fearlessness. Yet she knows that this can be done only up to a certain point. Tensi has already grown up, shaped by the memory of fearlessness. Losing fear was also the price Doña Celia had to pay with her clandestine excursions to the cemetery. But she is no longer afraid. She lost her fear, like she lost her tears. And with fear and tears she lost the first furies, the irate feeling she had to suffocate, hiding in a pantheon of the Cemetery of the East, when she heard the guns firing and the coups de grâce. All she felt then was a bitter rage, which she swallowed with despair when she drew near the corpses, with a pair of scissors in hand. (Pero ya no tiene miedo. Lo perdió, al igual que las lágrimas. Y con el miedo y las lágrimas perdió las primeras furias, la cólera iracunda que debía sofocar, escondida en un panteón del cementerio del Este, cuando escuchaba las descargas de los fusiles y los tiros de gracia. Ya sólo sentía una rabia amarga, que tragaba con desolación mientras se acercaba a los cadáveres con unas tijeras en la mano.) (96)

Tensi represents the hope that new generations will literally carry on the torch of political activism. However, it is clear that a lost fear cannot be restored, that it will continue to hurt like the haunting pain of a phantom limb. Like the other three novels, The Sleeping Voice, which may be the most ambitious and complex text, is aware of its own limits. Weaved together from fragments, 36. “Postmemory,” remarks Hirsch, “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generations shaped by traumatic events and experiences” (Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, 22).

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this novel is also a fragment in this reconstruction of a death story: the novel cannot be the ultimate text that finally recovers the history of the Trece Rosas and places their deaths in the annals of history and memory in Spain. Rather, it represents the reflections that arise out of their death story. Moreover, the fact that these novels appeared within the past five years is no coincidence: the debate visà-vis the memory of the civil war (and the ghosts of the civil war) may be in a healthier state than it has ever been. The success of novels like Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis, Manuel Rivas’s Carpenter’s Pencil, and the respective film versions of these novels certainly reveals a renewed interest not only in this period but also in the ways in which the civil war has been assimilated and studied. The same can be said about the large number of new historical texts devoted to different areas of the conflict. Moreover, the crucial importance that the memory debate has in the academic context certainly has helped to define a cultural and historical moment in which questioning the memory of the past has maybe become the key question of the present. To remember, then, is a ghostly verb, and any process to restore subjects into a memory, marked by forgetting, needs to be aware of these ghosts. The historical processes that all four novels narrate are marked by silences, and merely filling them would not be a productive endeavor. Thus, in very different ways, all four novels reveal that any told story, any told death story, gestures at the shadows of those that remain untold. In my own attempts to research the death story of the Trece Rosas, different witnesses and even experts in this matter repeatedly asked me why I was so interested in these minors, when so many others were killed, including the sixty men who were also executed on August 5, 1939, or others who were not executed but who died of starvation, disease, and sadness in the prisons that were not always physical. The preceding pages have attempted to answer this question.

8 W h o W i l l Ta l k a b o u t U s W h e n We A r e D e a d ?

I begin these concluding remarks by addressing the title: clearly, the memory of fearless women is what is at stake here. Yet the title is also a reference to a recent Spanish film, which shockingly foreshadows what seems to be a self-defeating answer: Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (Nobody Will Talk about Us When We Are Dead), directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes. In the film, much like in this book, the undeniable presence of a crucial figure of historical and symbolic importance lurks in the background and looks over the shoulders of the audience and protagonists: Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionaria. None of the preceding chapters focuses specifically either on Ibárruri’s own writing or on the countless texts written about La Pasionaria. However, the presence of the most renowned Republican, most famous Communist leader, and symbol of motherhood and resistance worldwide haunts these pages, the same way in which she haunts Yanes’s film.1 Nadie pays justice to La Pasionaria’s memory not by retelling her story or even through flashbacks or original footage. Instead of locating and isolating Ibárruri solely in the past, Yanes’s work reveals the contemporary significance of her struggles as well as the meanings attached to Pasionaria. In the film, her iconic presence serves to weave together the story of two different women, Julia (played by Pilar Bardem) and her daughter-in-law Gloria (played by Victoria Abril). 1. For a recent analysis of La Pasionaria’s pervasive presence, see Gina Herrmann, “The Hermetic Goddess: Dolores Ibárruri as Text.” La Pasionaria has also become a traveling icon: she appears mentioned as a “current poster” that denies “the effect of the eternal she” in “Breast-Giver,” a short story by Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi (226). Algerian writer Assia Djebar was saluted as the “Pasionaria of modern-day Algeria” in Il Messaggero in 1988 (Clarissa Zimra, afterword to Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 164).

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A picture of La Pasionaria adorns Julia’s living room, embodying her memories: Julia used to be a Communist activist and was imprisoned and tortured after the civil war. Both La Pasionaria’s undeniable presence in any reference to leftist women’s struggles (as well as leftist struggles as a whole) and Julia’s memories interrupt and change Gloria’s present troubles and tribulations that coincidentally take her from corruption-ridden Mexico City back to the also corruption-ridden Madrid of the mid-nineties. In the beginning of the film, bullfighter Juan, Gloria’s husband and Julia’s son, is gored by a bull and so severely injured that he becomes a human vegetable, in need of constant care. Unable to face this predicament, and following an outdated imperative that bears colonial connotations, Gloria leaves for the New World, “to make a fortune.” Once in Mexico, the lure of an easy fortune rapidly lets Gloria sink into an abject lifestyle of alcoholism and eventually prostitution. She flees back to Madrid and returns to Julia’s home, where her husband’s broken body still agonizes between life and death. Yet with Julia’s help and under La Pasionaria’s watchful eyes, Gloria learns that her sole way out of poverty will be through hard work—even when this implies taking a traditional male employment, such as hauling beer cases—and fighting for a better education. Following Julia’s model, and after a series of dramatic setbacks, Gloria finally learns to battle for her own “good fight.” Unlike film critic Marsha Kinder, who argues that Nadie condemns “the libertarian ethos of Socialist Spain and [recuperates] certain values from its conservative past,” I would argue that Nadie explores the relationship between leftist women’s struggles during the civil war, memory and forgetting, and the new generations.2 Gloria’s redemption at the end of the film is a result of an intimate link with the lessons of her mother-in-law’s past, without ignoring the complex problems and ordeals Gloria has to confront in a corrupt and globalized world. In a crucial scene of the film, Gloria lovingly combs Julia’s hair, as Pasionaria’s image overlooks the entire scene. Throughout the film, we learn that Julia had been imprisoned after the war and is still suffering the physical, political, and psychological consequences of her confinement, almost sixty years later.3 Gloria finally dares to ask Julia about her traumatic past: “Is it true they beat you up when they arrested you?” Julia then narrates brief glimpses of her past in Franco’s 2. Kinder, “Refiguring Socialist Spain: An Introduction,” 18. 3. Julia still endures pain in her knees, a consequence of the severe beatings she received in prison. Also, she was never allowed to practice her profession as a schoolteacher after she was released. In her old days, she still earns a precarious wage by teaching children in the afternoon out of her own home.

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prisons. She had been interrogated, had been beaten repeatedly, and her hair was chopped off. But, as Julia proudly tells Gloria, as much as they tortured her, she did not give the police the information they were demanding from her. Right before this very conversation, Julia had asked Gloria to prepare a special meal for two friends she had invited to dinner. “A dinner for rojas, we were in prison together,” Julia explains to Gloria. Gloria’s final change occurs as she prepares this dinner party. She is terribly hungover, yet when a young neighbor stops by in order to borrow Gloria’s husband’s capote de paseo, the mantle he used to wear when entering the arena, her entire attitude initiates a slow transformation, regaining, as Kinder notes, “a dignity we have previously not seen.”4 Kinder also addresses the Christian dimensions of this ritual. After the neighbor leaves with the cape, Gloria “baptizes” herself by holding her head under the faucet of the kitchen sink. Then the camera focuses on the fish Gloria is about to prepare for Julia and her old comrades. Kinder considers this scene to be a reaffirmation of Christian or even “essentially Spanish” values that stand against the efforts for “europeanization” of Felipe González’s socialist government. Yet Kinder does not address here the relationship between Gloria’s rebirth and regeneration and Julia and her fellow rojas, the women nobody will talk about after they die. Thus, Gloria ultimately finds redemption not in Christian values, but rather in those associated with Julia’s political affiliations: faith in hard work and education. Even though there are no flashbacks, the connection between Julia’s past and Gloria’s present is highlighted throughout the film. At the end, Julia decides to kill herself and her ailing son, Gloria’s husband. She bids farewell to Gloria, who still does not know of her mother-in-law’s decision and is about to leave for her new job. Then Julia whispers, more to herself than to Gloria: “Remember me.” Gloria should not only remember the woman who loved her, who sacrificed herself for her sake, but also let her memories of resistance be part of her life, her present actions. Gloria jumps onto a bus, not hearing Julia’s last words, only to find at her return that both Julia and Juan are dead. In a letter that a tearful Gloria reads after the police had already found the dead bodies, Julia had written: “Do not let anyone enslave your spirit. Remember us.” Julia writes the male form “acuérdate de nosotros” in her letter, referring to herself and her son; “nosotras” in the title of the movie stands for Julia and her comrades, the women nobody will talk about once they have died. The film certainly emphasizes the connections between past and present 4. Ibid., 20.

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struggles, and Julia as well as the image of La Pasionaria embody specific role models for women like Gloria. However, the title of the film, Nobody Will Talk about Us When We Are Dead, connotes the radical, even deadly interruptions that have marked women’s stories from the Spanish Civil War. Nadie certainly underscores the importance of knowing and writing women’s struggles, or war stories. Contrary to Miriam Cooke, who addresses experiences of war “at the time that war is happening,” the national conflicts referred to throughout these pages, technically speaking, have been over for more than six decades.5 Yet the film suggests that women’s struggles do not come to a close with a cease-fire, a declaration of defeat or victory, an amnesty, or even a belated homage. It is, of course, impossible to change history and its writing, and existing and available writings from and about women in revolutions and wars should not be taken for granted as a transparent representation of women’s experiences in these conflicts. Instead, such writings reveal the discursive construction of women’s experiences in revolutions and wars. Such narratives always have to struggle against forgetting and silencing or, more concretely, discursive practices that make it very difficult, yet not futile, to vindicate these women’s stories today. Rather than making claims about the historical location of women’s participation in revolutions and wars, the point here would be to consider the location of representations of women’s participation and the symbolic value(s) that these representations accrue. Yanes’s film is so relevant in this sense because it suggests an answer to my earlier question. Gloria represents continuity and interruption; at the same time, she learns from Julia and even from La Pasionaria. Yet Gloria is not a reincarnation of Julia’s struggles, as they are always marked by forgetting and silence, by a violence that lies at the origin of her story. For Gloria, Julia’s story is also a remainder from the past as well as a reminder of the radical interruption that marked women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War. In 1994, an article in Diario 16 described the commemoration of the Trece Rosas on August 5 of that same year. Silvia Escobar, who participated in the act, is to have said: “If they were young today, the ‘Trece Rosas’ would state that the First World has to take care of the Third, and they would talk about freedom and justice, ideals that are just as important today as they were in 1939.”6 Yet the comment is paradoxical: if the minors were still alive, they would never have become the Trece Rosas, their death story would not exist, and neither would this commemorative act. More recently, an article in the Mexican daily Reforma 5. Cooke, Women and the War Story, 41. 6. Lira, “En memoria.”

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still used the term Adelitas to define women in politics today. In the already mentioned article “From Adelitas to Bureaucrats: The Evolution of the Revolutionaries,” Yascara López claims that “the Adelitas have not died, they have just changed their image. They no longer carry the gun, the children, the food, now they lead zapatista movements and are the leaders of cultural scientific groups in the country.” Yet, the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution did die: countless soldaderas, their struggles and stories, vanished in the magma of postrevolutionary state and canon formation in Mexico, while only a romantic and idealized image survived. These comments certainly do not mean to discourage either contemporary references to or the vindication of the Trece Rosas or the soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution. Such an endeavor would undeniably defeat the purpose of this book, as well as Mastretta’s, Poniatowska’s, Chacón’s, and Ferrero’s novels. The point again is the articulation of a hospitable memory. The importance of engaging with both the epistemic and the physical violence that is undoubtedly part of any reference to fearless women should not be taken lightly. The problem is that a seamless grafting of figures from the past to struggles of the present conceals that inscription of silence and forgetting that has marked women’s struggles in revolutions and wars. In the discussion of the writings of Nellie Campobello and María Teresa León, I highlighted the threads of epistemic, physical, and cyclical violence that run across both authors’ texts and challenge most critics’ unawareness of the ways in which these different levels of violence overlap in both texts. Moreover, I addressed how the authors’ trajectories as well as the circulation of their work mirror the discursive and political structures that also allow for the disappearance of fearless women. If the nation is an imagined political community that can be constituted only in remembering to forget, a remainder that is also a reminder will always linger: in the space between two days that mark a revolution on a calendar, inscribed on the broken porcelain head of a doll, in the thunder and bones of revolution, or buried underneath an anthill. Sometimes violent, sometimes violated, these bodies always carry the mark of an erasure. To take advantage of a phrase that Diana Taylor has used to discuss constructions and perceptions of gender during the “dirty war” in Argentina, these are “disappearing acts.”7 Bearing this in mind, I will briefly return to two disappearing acts, the forgetting of the Trece Rosas and Nellie Campobello’s kidnapping, as 7. Taylor explains in Disappearing Acts that this expression not only speaks to the “military junta’s blatant uses of theatricality to terrorize its population” but in the Argentinean case also signals “the interconnectedness among the various disappearances taking place simultaneously.” In the context

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both mirror Taylor’s argument. The deaths of the thirteen minors turned them into scapegoats for a crime they did not commit, yet their own writing into history—Julia Conesa’s letters, as well as the poems and testimonies written on their deaths—exist only as a consequence of that very first inscription, the violence that lies at the origin of the death story. Engaging with the multilayered violence of revolution and war is so crucial because disregarding the moment when physical violence and epistemic violence dramatically overlap erases the complexities of women’s participation in revolutionary struggles. Nellie Campobello knew this, at least this is what comes across in her novel Cartucho. Young Nellie not only entangles a traumatic past and an uncertain present in her memories of revolution but also allows the reader to gaze at a landscape that is filled with the ghosts of young cartuchos, women and children who haunt the memory of the revolution in Mexico. As she carves these stories with her yearned-for arrowheads into the Mexican landscape, Campobello leaves behind a perpetual trace of violence. Yet the arrowheads could hardly save Campobello from the unsettling disappearing act that ended the life of the only female writer in the genre of the novel of the Mexican Revolution. She was kidnapped for reasons other than her writing, reasons that nevertheless cannot be dissociated from her work as a (dis)obedient writer, choreographer, and teacher. Thus, her kidnapping also speaks to what Taylor calls “the interconnectedness among the various disappearances taking place simultaneously.”8 The homage she would eventually receive at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City or the ceremonious return of the author’s remains to her native state of Durango bears witness to this disappearance. Fearless women are not only the terrible women of epics. Their presence in literature and other forms of cultural production is also a remainder and a constant reminder of the ways in which certain narratives of women’s participation in national conflicts have always strengthened or affirmed those communities that at the same time concealed women’s relationship with the multilayered violence of revolutions and wars. It is my hope that this book is a part of a successful process of unconcealment, a process that decades after the last bullets were fired, the last bombs dropped, is far from coming to an end. of the dirty war in Argentina—which undoubtedly differs dramatically from Spain and Mexico— Taylor asserts: “Just as human beings disappeared, so did civil society. Discursive absences led to empty streets and to missing people, just as missing people and empty streets led to more discursive absences. . . . Terror systems transform human bodies in surfaces, available for public inscription” (x). 8. Ibid.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abril, Victoria, 251 Accommodation, vs. resistance, 168; in Adelita myth, 103–4, 116; in Trece Rosas myth, 117, 142 Adelita, La: accommodation vs. resistance in myths of, 103–4; Camila in The Underdogs compared to, 112–13; changed image of, 101–2, 255; in corridos, 44–45; counternarrative of, 201; death stories of, 11–12, 98, 100–101, 106–7, 113–14, 116; idealization of Mexican Revolution, 110–11, 113; meanings of symbol of, 91, 97, 226; missing elements of myths of, 106, 110; photo of, 45, 46, 96; sacrifice of, in affirming community, 227–28; search for authenticity of, 93, 95; in Soldadera, 106–14; as symbol and myth, 13–14, 92–97, 112–13; uses of character, 44, 91, 96–98, 112–13 “Adelita, La” (corrido), 76, 111–14. See also Adelita, La Agency, 17; links to emancipation and violence, 136, 162, 172, 185, 194, 205, 219; in losing vs. killing fear, 25; lost in lack of recognition for women writers, 188–89, 196n14; political, 2, 41–42, 60; relation to participation in violence, 15–16, 171; and representations of women in literature, 79, 131; in woman’s right to choose death, 104–5, 115; women’s lost or lacking, 82, 131 Aguilar Camín, Héctor, 92 Alberti, Rafael, 71, 77, 189; León and, 188, 190–93; León’s work mingled with, 191n7, 196n14 Alcalde, Carmen, 42n19 Alliance of Anti-fascist Intellectuals, 77 Alted, Alicia, 70n13 Anarchists, 61; images of women and men fighting together, 52–54; in León’s stories, 202, 205; Mujeres Libres (Free Women) as, 5, 37; support for women’s emancipation, 39

Anderson, Benedict, 227 Aranda, Vicente, 126 Archetypes, of women, 75, 92. See also Icons/symbols; Myths Archivo de la Palabra (Archive of the Word), 35–36 Arendt, Hannah: on violence, 181–82, 219; on war, 60–61, 211–12 Argentina, 193, 255n7 Arrizón, Alicia: on Adelita, 91, 98; on Niggli’s work, 106n30, 113 Arteche, Cristobal, 52, 54 Artists and intellectuals, 79; limited membership in, 67, 71; popular culture and, 64–65, 77; relation to the people, 70–71, 73; roles of, 66–67, 70, 87 Autobiographies: Cartucho as Campobello’s, 19n25, 177; León’s, 188–89, 191n7, 193 Auxilio Social (Social Aid), 41, 42n19 Avanzando (journal), 131 Ayuda (journal), 193 Azuela, Mariano, 32, 83, 108n33, 112–13, 177 Azurbide, Germán Lizt, 178 “Ballad for Lina Odena” (Romance a Lina Odena) (Sastre), 123, 125 “Ballad of the Life, Passion and Death of the Laundress from Guadalmedina” (Romance de las vida, pasión y muerte de la lavandera de Guadalmedina) (Sánchez Saornil), 132–35 Bardem, Pilar, 251 Beauty of Bad Love, The (La bella del mal amor) (León), 193 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane, 104n25 Belmont, Cristina, 163 Belza, Julio, 127–28 Bergamín, José, 77 Beverley, John, 64, 197n16, 236, 240n29 Bhaduri, Bhuvaneswari, 114–16, 128 Borges, Jorge Luis, 223–24, 228

271

272

Index

Bórquez, Josefa, 236, 238 Braidotti, Rosi, 108 Broken Silence (El silencio roto) (Romeu Alfaro), 143–44, 241–42 “Brothers, to the Front” (poster), 52 Brownmiller, Susan, 125–26 Bueno, Pilar, 145–46 Cabezali, Elena, 207 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 24, 66 Campoamor, Clara, 36 Campobello, Gloria, 166 Campobello, Nellie, 4, 33; burial of, 163, 226n5; death of, 7; disappearance of, 163–64, 167, 185, 191n7, 226; as exception among women writers, 68, 83; kidnapping of, 163–64, 226, 256; lack of recognition for, 176–77, 188; language and writing style of, 162, 175, 177, 180–82, 194–95; life story of, 166, 177, 183; motivation for writing, 165, 170, 178; on novels of Mexican Revolution canon, 176; reasons for revisions of Cartucho, 169–71; recognition for, 66, 166, 226, 256; on violence, 17–19, 193, 256; works by, 167. See also Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico; My Mother’s Hands “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 60–61, 114 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 24, 31 Carpenter’s Pencil, The (Rivas), 3, 250 Carranza, Venustiano, 34, 92 Cartucho: Tales of the Struggle in Northern Mexico (Campobello), 33; as autobiographical, 19n25, 177; criticisms of, 162, 176; editions of, 166–69, 182n30; “For a Kiss” vignette in, 184–85; “From a Window” vignette in, 179–80; “General Rueda” vignette in, 172–75; “General Sobarzo’s Guts” vignette in, 180–81; goals of, 178; “Grime” vignette in, 182–85; León’s stories compared to, 194–95; reasons for revisions of, 169–71; violence in, 15–16, 19, 161–63, 167–68, 175–76, 256; writing of, 166, 179 Caruth, Cathy, 18, 178, 182–83 Casasola, Gustavo, 76 Casasola Archive, photos of, 96 Castro, Carmen, 153 Castro Leal, Antonio, 166–67 Celia en la revolución (Celia in the Revolution) (Fortún), 180

Ceniceros, Nacha: in Cartucho, 162–64, 167–72 Cercas, Javier, 250 Cernuda, Flor, 140 Cervantes, the Soldier Who Taught Us to Speak (Cervantes, El soldado que nos enseñó a hablar) (León), 193 Chacel, Rosa, 72, 78 Chacón, Dulce, 20, 245, 249–50. See also Sleeping Voice, The Chicanas: Adelita image and, 97 Chicote, María Teresa, 207 Civil Law Code of 1889 (Spain), 38 Class, 31; and availability of choices, 79–80, 172, 234–35; gender roles and, 187–88; inequalities, 164, 197–200; influence of Mexican Revolution on, 32, 105–6; and opportunities to write, 5–6, 79–80, 164; popular culture and, 64–65, 73, 77, 79–81, 105–6; of women in Spanish Civil War, 197 Clausewitz, Carl von, 211–12 Clean Game (Juego limpio) (León), 191n7, 193 Clothing: of milicianas, 50, 52; of soldaderas, 45, 100 CNT-AIT-FAI: posters for, 52–54 Comaposada, Mercedes, 37–38 Committee for the Protection and Defense of the National Artistic Treasure, 192 Common language, 8, 10 Communist Party (PCE), 37, 121; León and, 192–93, 203–5; Republicans and, 61; Trece Rosas and, 142, 146; on women’s roles, 39 “Como mueren las estrellas” (How the Stars Die) (González), 137–38 Conde, Carmen, 72, 78 Conesa, Julia, 146, 155–57, 241–43 Contra viento y marea (Against All Odds) (León), 193 Cooke, Miriam: on mythic wartime roles, 101; on war stories, 5, 31, 214 Corporeality: and disowning of injury, 129; women’s, 6–7, 81–82 “Corrido de la muerte de Emiliano Zapata” (Corrido of Emiliano Zapata’s Death), 75–76 Corridos (popular ballads), 32, 108; La Adelita in, 44–45, 92–95; Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” and, 98–103; history of, 74–76; romances compared to, 78 Counternarratives: of Adelita, 201; dominant

Index narrative vs., 103, 107, 114, 116, 177; by subalterns, 198–99; Trece Rosas in, 11–12; vs. discursive conventions, 198, 201; women’s, 82, 134 Courage, 123; in stories of Trece Rosas, 143–44. See also Fear; Fearless women Crisis of virility, in Mexican literature, 83–84 Cristero revolt, 24 Critique of Postcolonial Reason, A (Spivak), 9–10, 114 Critique of Violence (Hanssen), 211 “Cucaracha, La” (corrido), 108 Cuesta, María del Carmen, 147–48 Cuevas, Matilde, 207 Cuevas, Tomasa, 147–48, 241 Cultural productions: after Mexican Revolution, 67–69, 73; authors vs. subjects in, 73, 79; canonization vs. disappearance of, 68, 73–75, 81, 83–84; ghosts in, 231; goals of, 70–71, 80, 81n30; limited access to means for, 5–6, 71; mainstream vs. alternative, 59, 63–64; meaning of Adelita’s presence in, 226; popular, 64–65, 73, 77, 79–81, 105–6; revolution narratives as, 59, 63–64, 81, 83; in Spain, 69–71; women’s participation in producing, 68, 71–72. See also Corridos; Mexican Revolution canon; Novels; Romances; Spanish Civil War canon Death: children witnessing, 179–81; ensuring place in history by, 118–19, 122–23, 130, 155–57, 254; heroic, 12, 120, 126, 136; in León’s stories, 203–4, 214, 218; life’s relation to, 229, 244–45; in Nadie film, 253; representations of, in affirming community, 227–28; in The Sleeping Voice, 245–49; soldaderas’ acceptance of, 108, 110; women choosing, 104, 115–16, 123–24, 126–28; and youth, 240, 243 Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), 233 Death stories, 11; of Adelita, 12–14, 98, 100–101, 106–7, 113–14, 116; of Encarnación Jiménez, 128–36; of Lina Odena, 121–28; purposes of, 13; of rojas and milicianas, 118–19; The Sleeping Voice as, 249–50; testimonies about Trece Rosas as, 142–55; of Trece Rosas, 12, 14, 119, 136, 156–57, 240–43, 256; turning to life stories, 132–33, 135–36; war story vs., 12–13 De Beer, Gabriela, 176–77 De Burgos, Carmen, 72 De la Torre, Matilde, 54–56

273

Del Toro, Guillermo, 229 Democracy: in goals of Spanish Civil War, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 6–7, 16 Devil’s Backbone, The (El espinazo del diablo) (del Toro), 229 Díaz, Porfirio, 24, 33–34, 66 Di Febo, Giuliana, 152–53 Dimitrov, Giorgi, 64 Discursive conventions: as obstacles for women writers, 254; preexisting and challenges to preexisting, 15, 119–20, 137, 156; preexisting as inadequate for violence, 140, 184; vs. counternarrative methods, 198, 201; women’s participation in war fit into existing, 3, 7–8, 10, 14, 140 Domenchina, José, 166 Domestication, women’s, 108n33, 165n6; discourses of, 1–2; in Francisco Villa y la “Adelita,” 98–99, 101; in Mexican cultural productions, 76, 92; of Nacha Ceniceros, in Cartucho, 169, 171; in Spanish cultural productions, 71, 120n4, 133n21. See also Emancipation, vs. domestication Domestic sphere: not safe in revolution, 172–73, 180, 214; peace within, 212; women in, 136, 170. See also Public vs. private spheres; “Repose of the warrior” Doña Jimena Díaz de Vivar (León), 193 Doncella guerrera (warrior maiden), 25–26, 28–29 Dónde está Nellie? (group), 163 Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador (León), 193 Dromundo, Baltasar, 98–103, 227 Education, 38, 135; through culture, 70, 73; women’s lack of, 133, 205, 208 El Salvador: Adelita myth in, 91 Emancipation, vs. domestication, 26, 83, 101; competing discourses of, 39–42, 59, 120, 168–69, 172; in literature on Spanish Civil War, 41–42, 78–79, 86–87, 119–20; in revolution, 30; symbols and icons of, 43–44 Emancipation, women’s: decreased after revolutions, 58, 67; discourses of, 1; links to violence and agency, 136, 162, 172, 185, 194, 205, 219; during Mexican Revolution, 92, 167–68, 237; Mexican women working toward, 33–34; participation in violence and, 15–16; in representations of women, 59, 71, 233; in Spain, 38–39, 71, 134;

274

Index

through participation in Spanish Civil War, 25–26, 36–38; women not understanding politics of, 206–7 Emotion, 1–2, 28. See also Fear Enloe, Cynthia, 5, 58, 102n21, 126n10 Equality. See Emancipation Erice, Víctor, 231 Escobar, Silvia, 254 Escuela Nacional de Danza (National School of Dance), 164, 166 Espina, Concha, 86 Esquerra Valenciana: posters for, 52 Estébanez Gil, Juan Carlos, 196, 208 Experience: definition of, 3, 86; female, 29, 198 Faber, Sebastiaan, 32n4 Fables of Bitter Times (Fábulas del tiempo amargo) (León), 191n7, 193 “Faithless Wife, The” (García Lorca), 215 Falange Española, 23 Family, as rival to state power, 187 Fascism: Nationalists and, 23 Fear: in death stories of Trece Rosas, 143, 147–48, 154; killing, 26–27, 126, 181; losing vs. killing, 25–26, 179–80, 186–87; loss of, 1–2, 6, 224, 247–49; loss or presence of, 25, 27; reclaiming, 28, 249 Fearless John (“Juan sin Miedo”) (folktale), 1–2, 26, 223–24 Fearless women: domestication of, 171; León on, 186, 223–24; remembering and forgetting, 27–28, 192, 226–27, 256; representations of, 20, 29, 186, 196, 238, 256; status of, 197, 224–25, 232; telling own stories, 238; Trece Rosas as, 143. See also Milicianas; Soldaderas Femininity, 118n2; Adelita as symbol for, 91, 97; in León’s stories, 216–17; in poems about Trece Rosas, 138; in revisions of Cartucho, 171 Feminism: Mexican and Chicana vs. EuroAmerican, 97; political awareness vs., 37–38 Ferrero, Jesús, 20, 239–41 Flesler, Daniela, 124n8 Fonseca, Carlos, 239n28 Formica, Mercedes, 86 Fornet, Jorge, 83–84, 176, 181 Fortún, Elena, 180 Foucault, Michel, 211–12 Francisco Villa y la “Adelita” (Dromundo), 235n21; death of Adelita in, 98, 100–101;

goals of, 102–3; hero cult around Pancho Villa in, 98–102; missing elements of, 106, 110 Franco, Francisco, 23; repression by, 136, 151, 239n28, 247–48; resistance to, 14, 142–44, 149–52, 155; Trece Rosas and, 142, 152–53; women’s status under, 38, 41–42 Franco, Jean, 67–68, 238, 239n27; on emancipation vs. domestication, 165n6, 172; on “repose of the warrior,” 17, 187 Freud, Sigmund, 247 Fuentes, Carlos, 233 Fuentes, Claudio (or Claudio Niño Cienfuentes), 163 Fuero del Trabajo (1938, Spain), 38 “Funes, His Memory” (Borges), 223–24, 227–28 Gabaldón, Isaac, 136, 151 Gallo, Juana, 95 García, Antoñita, 143–44 García, Consuelo, 148–50 García, Tomasa, 5, 95 García Blanco-Cicerón, Jacobo, 117 García Canclini, Nestor, 75 García Lorca, Federico, 33, 69, 139n27, 215 Garro, Elena, 33, 232 Gender: crisis of virility and, 83; discursive construction of, 64, 86; in memory and forgetting, 228, 239 Gender differences, 16, 191n9; threat of rape and, 126–27; in writing about revolution, 83–86 Gender identities, 118n2 Gender norms: struggle against, 34 Gender relations: changes in, 235; violence in, 212, 215–16 Gender roles: among Nationalists, 41–42; changes in, 7–8, 44, 76, 233; effects of Spanish Civil War on, 38–39, 73; milicianas changing, 50, 51; not challenged, 118, 126–27, 129–30, 133, 219; reinstatement of, 38, 118, 172n14; rejection of, 206–8; of Republicans, 39–40, 71; during revolution, 1–2, 203; separation of, 187–88; transgressions of, 136, 167–68; in war stories, 10, 87; writing about violence transgressing, 165, 168, 179. See also Emancipation, vs. domestication Gender transformations, vs. representations of, 10–11 Gendered subject, 8–10

Index “General Rueda” (Campobello), 172–75 Gilbert, Sandra, 191 González, Rafaela, 137–38 González, Virtudes, 147 Gordon, Avery, 231 Gorki, Maxim, 188 Graham, Helen, 36, 41 Gramsci, Antonio, 9 Graphic History of the Mexican Revolution (Casasola), 96 Greene, Patricia, 52, 120n4, 130n17 Gubar, Susan, 191 Guerrillas del Teatro, 72, 192 Guha, Ranajit, 8, 64 Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s Great Love (El gran amor de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer) (León), 193 Guzmán, Martín Luis, 66, 166–67 Halbwachs, Maurice, 225 Hanssen, Beatrice, 181–82, 211 Hartsock, Nancy, 126 Here’s to You, Jesusa (Poniatowska), 20, 240; Lovesick compared to, 236–37, 239; soldaderas in, 237–39 Hernández, Miguel, 119 Hero cult, 12, 14; around Pancho Villa, 98–102 Heroines: deaths of, 127; Encarnación Jiménez as, 129; Lina Odena as, 122, 127–28; Republican, 118–19 Heroism, 107, 137; in corridos, 74–76; death not granting women, 12, 126; death not required for, 171; in death stories, 136, 144; in León’s stories, 202, 204; in Mexican Revolution, 177, 237; in Spanish Civil War, 78, 137 Herrera, Petra, 75 Herrera-Sobek, María, 94, 95n10; on portrayals of women, 75–76, 92–93 Herrmann, Gina, 247n34 Higonnet, Margaret R., 168n9 Hirsch, Marianne, 249 Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana (Casasola), 76 Historia y Vida (journal), 127–28 History: memory’s relation to, 224–25; not finite, 226; orality vs. literacy of, 225, 228 History Has the Word (La historia tiene la palabra) (León), 193 Hobsbawm, Eric, 99 Hora de España (journal), 72, 78 Huerta, Victoriano, 96

275

Ibárruri, Dolores (La Pasionaria), 36–37, 58, 123, 251n1; in Nadie film, 251–52, 254; on Trece Rosas, 145–46, 154 Icaza, Carmen de, 86 Icons/symbols: Adelita as, 13–14, 44–45, 92–95; in affirming community, 227–28; gendered imagery and, 59; milicianas as, 46, 52–57; in poems of Encarnación Jiménez, 130–32, 134–35; Trece Rosas as, 137–39, 243; vs. underlying meaning, 119, 135; women as, 27–29, 75, 251n1; women associated with nature, 120–21; women in revolutions as, 31, 43, 119; women’s roles translated into, 3, 10. See also Myths Immortality and regeneration: in myth of Trece Rosas, 137–39, 141–42; of Nacha Ceniceros, in Cartucho, 169; from women’s heroic deaths, 120–22 Imperial discourse, patriarchy vs., 104, 115–16 Imperialism, 69 Indigenous Rhythms and Dances (Ritmos y danzas indígenas) (Campobello), 167 “Infancia quemada” (Burnt Childhood) (León), 193, 198 Intelligentsia, leftist, 32. See also Artists and intellectuals In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution (Aguilar Camín and Meyer), 92 Jameson, Fredric, 63–64 Jelinek, Elfriede, 212, 215 Jiménez, Encarnación, 4–5; death story of, 118–19, 128–36; as symbol, 134–35 “Juan sin Miedo” (Fearless John) (folktale), 1–2, 26, 223–24 Juventud Socialista Unificada (JSU) (United Socialist Youth): in death stories of Trece Rosas, 143, 145–48; Lina Odena in, 121; Trece Rosas in, 11–12, 136–37 Kahlo, Frida, 68 Kent, Victoria, 36 Kenwood, Alun, 120 “Killing Priests, Nuns, Women, and Children” (Franco), 17, 187 Kinder, Marsha, 252–53 Labanyi, Jo, 6–7, 41–42, 70, 73; on ghosts, 230, 231n14; on propaganda, 70n13, 71n16 Labor/Anarchist Federation of Iberia (CNT/FAI), 39

276

Index

Lafuente, Aida, 119 Lau, Ana, 34 Left: gender roles within, 203, 206–8; women of, 43, 56. See also Republicans León, María Teresa, 6; Alberti and, 188, 190–93; background of, 192–93, 197–99; blending political consciousness and writing, 72, 77, 198–200; characters of, 186, 188, 192, 195–96; confinement of, 191n7, 192–93; death of, 7; exile of, 189–90; on fearless women, 19–20, 25–28, 223–25; identification with fighting women, 28, 189–90; influence of Mexican Revolution on, 24, 33; lack of recognition for, 188, 191n7, 219; on loss of fear, 2, 27–28; reasons for writing, 71, 197–98; on “repose of the warrior,” 17, 186–87; short stories of, 15, 19–20, 186; style and language of, 194–96, 211, 216; on violence, 17–19; work mingled with Alberti’s, 191n7, 196n14; works of, 24, 193. See also Tales from Contemporary Spain Lettered City, The (Rama), 66 Ley de Bases (1938, Spain), 38 Leys, Ruth, 174n16 Libertad en el tejado, La (Freedom on the Roof ) (León), 193 Libertarias (film) (Aranda), 126 Life stories: death stories turning to, 132–33, 135–36; death stories vs., 12–13 “Light for the Peaches and the Girls” (Luz para los duraznos y las muchachas) (León), 15–16, 193, 210–19, 212n29 López, Anita, 147–48, 152 López, Yascara, 97, 255 Lovesick (Mastretta), 20, 232; goals of, 233–34; Here’s to You, Jesusa compared to, 236–37, 239 Luna, Rafaela: in Cartucho, 167–68, 171–72 MacKinnon, Catherine A., 174n17 Madero, Francisco I., 24 Magdaleno, Mauricio, 66 Mangini, Shirley, 37 Mano en el Cajón, La (journal), 191n7 Marco, Joaquín: on León’s stories, 193, 196, 212n29; “A Red Star” and, 196n14, 204 María y Campos, Armando de, 93n5 Marriage, 38, 208–9, 212 Marsé, Juan, 231 Marxism: influence of, 32

Masculinity: relation of to war and violence, 5, 174 Massacre in Mexico (Poniatowska), 96–97 Mastretta, Ángeles, 20, 232, 237; Rómulo Gallegos prize for, 232, 235. See also Lovesick Matthews, Irene, 177; on Cartucho, 171–72; on gender roles, 167, 169 Me, by Francisca (Yo, por Francisca) (Campobello), 167 Memory: constructed and collective, 225–26; of fearless women, 19–20, 27–28, 226–27; and forgetting, 227, 239; in “Funes, His Memory,” 223–24; history’s relation to, 224–25; as limited, 229; official, 227–28; of pain and loss, 2–3; popular, 226n4; and postmemory, 249; restoring subjects to, 250; of Spanish Civil War, 250 Memory of Melancholy (Memoria de la Melancholía) (León), 188–89, 191n7, 193 Menesteos, Seaman of April (Menesteos, marinero de abril) (León), 193 Mexican Revolution: gender roles in, 33–34, 92, 167–68, 237; ghosts of, 230–31; goals of, 61; history of, 24, 230–31; influence of, 24, 105–6; institutionalization of, 61, 66; lack of heroism in, 237; meaning of, 66, 110–11, 113, 227, 235–36; relation to Spanish Civil War, 29–33; representations of, 177, 226; roles of artists and intellectuals in, 66; witnesses to, 234; women writers on, 3–4, 92, 232; women’s participation in, 31, 35, 75–76, 91, 164, 170–71, 223, 228; women’s roles in, 4–5, 67–68, 76, 96, 110, 239. See also Adelita, La Mexican Revolution canon, 3–4, 65; Campobello and, 166, 176–77, 185; disappearance vs. inclusion in, 73–75; dominant vs. counternarratives of, 114, 116, 170–71, 177; novels of, 66, 81, 83–84, 105, 162n2, 176–77, 185; postwar revolutionary culture, 66–69, 73–75, 105; subaltern in, 230–31; testimonios in, 236–38, 240. See also Corridos Mexican Silhouettes (Niggli), 105 Mexico, 24; acceptance of death in, 229–30; culture of, 32–33, 73; women’s status in, 33–34 Mexico City: massacre in, 96–97 Meyer, Doris, 177 Meyer, Lorenzo, 92 Milicianas (Spanish militia women), 2; and

Index changing gender roles, 50, 51; death stories of, 118–19; León’s self-description as, 189–90; meaning of, 127, 141; number of, 39; removed from front, 34–35, 39–40, 126; representations of, 40, 54–57, 119, 120; sexuality of, 39, 56–57; in The Sleeping Voice, 245–46; used as icons or symbols, 43–44, 46, 52–56; as writers, 77, 84–85 “Militias Need You, The” (poster), 52, 53 Modotti, Tina, 68 Molina, Silvia, 232 Möller Soller, María-Lourdes, 84 Mono Azul, El (journal), 72, 77; León’s work in, 192–93, 197 Monsiváis, Carlos, 97–98, 105 Montero, Rosa, 154–56 Montseny, Federica, 36, 72, 209 Mora, Rosario Sánchez, 4 Moreiras, Alberto, 9 Moreno, Agripina, 145–46 Most Beautiful Eyes in the World, The (Los ojos más bellos del mundo) (León), 193 Mourning: fearlessness and, 247–49 Mraz, John, 96 Mujeres Libres (Free Women), 5, 37–40, 132 Mujeres Libres (journal), 78 “Mujer que perdió el miedo, La” (León), 2, 29 Muralist movement, 105 My Books (Mis libros) (Campobello), 164, 166–67 My Mother’s Hands (Campobello), 33, 176; publication of, 166–67 “Myth as Suppression” (Cabezali, Cuevas, Chicote), 207 Myths, 65; Adelita as, 76, 93, 96–97, 106, 110, 112–13; of motherhood, 207–10; from Spanish Civil War, 119, 141; Trece Rosas as, 117–18, 141–42, 149–50, 154. See also “Repose of the warrior” “Nacha Ceniceros” (Campobello), 168–72 Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto (Nobody Will Talk about Us When We Are Dead) (Yanes), 20, 251–54 Narrative fiction. See Novels Nash, Mary, 37–38, 59, 118, 241; on milicianas, 39, 52 National Institute of Historical Research of

277

the Revolution (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Históricas de la Revolución), 75 Nationalism, Mexican, 67, 172 Nationalists, 14, 36; cultural productions of, 69–71, 78, 141; execution of Encarnación Jiménez by, 128–29, 131; North Africans with, 124–26; Odena’s death and, 127–28; relation to fascism, 23; representations of women by, 54–56, 78, 119–20; victory of, 38; women in, 41, 86. See also Franco, Francisco; Spanish Civil War Nature, 202; domestication of, 169; land vs. river symbols of, 132; women associated with, 120–21, 137–40, 169n11 Nelken, Margarita, 36, 72 Nicaragua: Adelita as symbol in, 91 Niggli, Josephina, 5–6, 27, 105–6; on Adelita, 11–13, 227. See also Soldadera Nora, Pierre, 225 North Africans: racism against, 124–26 Notes on Pancho Villa’s Military Life (Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Pancho Villa) (Campobello), 167 Not So Quiet (Smith), 27 Novel of the Mexican Revolution, The (Castro Leal), 166–67 Novels, 238n26; effects of revolution on, 80–81; first wave, 80–81, 86; foundational, 233–35; of Mexican Revolution, 66, 83–84, 105, 162n2, 176–77, 185; of revolutions, 79, 82–86; of Spanish Civil War, 79, 84–87; testimonios compared to, 236–37, 240. See also specific authors and titles Nuestro Cine (journal), 193 Nueva Cultura (journal), 193 Obregón, Álvaro, 34, 66, 92 “October Liberation” (Liberación de octubre) (León), 193, 205–10 Octubre (journal), 192–93 Odena, Lina: death story of, 118–19, 121–28; defending against rape, 122, 124–27; efforts to undermine heroism of, 127–28 Officers, women, 4. See also Ceniceros, Nacha On Revolution (Arendt), 60–61, 181 “Onward Freedom Fighters” (poster), 52–54, 55 Orozco, José Clemente, 33, 166 Ortega, Ángeles, 138–39 Our Daily Home (Nuestro hogar de cada día) (León), 193

278

Index

Pain: memory of, 2–3, 65 Paredes, Félix, 129 Parle, Dennis, 175–76 Parliament (Spain), 36–37 Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, 24 Partido Obrero Unificado Marxista, 61 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI): defeat of, 235–36; and success of revolution, 61, 65 Passerini, Luisa, 141 Patriarchy: hero cult and, 12; imperial discourse vs., 104, 115–16; and separation of gender roles, 187; in Spain, 38, 141; suttee reaffirming, 114–15. See also Gender roles Paz, Octavio, 33, 229–30 Peace, 211–13, 218–19 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo), 230 Penal Code (Spain), 38 People, the: artists’ and intellectuals’ relation to, 70–71, 73; interpretations of, 64–65; representations of, 69–70 Perales, Coro, 235n21 Pérez, Janet, 84–86, 133n21 Perspectival subalternity, 8–9 Phantom Lady, The (La dama duende) (León), 193 Phantom limb, 65; fearless women as pain of, 232; inability to cure, 6–9, 249 Picasso, Pablo, 69 Pla y Bertrán, José, 122–24 Plotting Women (Franco), 67, 165n6, 172n14, 238n26 Poch y Gascón, Amparo, 37–38 Poetry, 120n4; about Encarnación Jiménez and Lina Odena, 118–19, 122, 134–35; about Trece Rosas, 117, 119, 137–41, 146; elegiac, 120–21; Niggli’s, 105; Republican, 77, 120, 130; Sánchez Saornil’s ignored, 132, 135; vs. other narrative forms, 140–41; women’s focus on antiheroic, 133 Poetry of the Popular Army (Romancero del Ejército Popular), 72 Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (Poesía de la Guerra Civil Española) (Salaün), 77 Political consciousness, 31; of soldaderas vs. soldiers, 26–27; vs. feminism, 37–38 Politics, 73, 206, 211, 227; model of revolutionary, 79; women’s participation in, 33–34, 36–37, 42, 72, 97 Poniatowska, Elena, 20, 93n5, 96–97, 164, 232, 245. See also Here’s to You, Jesusa Popular Front (Spain), 23, 205

Portelli, Alessandro, 142n31 Posters: representations of women in, 120, 120n4, 141; use of religious symbols, 130 Power: relation of to politics and violence, 211–12 Preston, Paul, 241 Primo de Rivera, José, 23, 41–42 Primo de Rivera, Pilar, 41–42 Prison and Death in Postwar Spain (Prisión y muerte en la España de la postguerra) (Sabín), 151–52 Prison of Women (Cuevas), 147–48, 148n35 Propaganda, 136, 165; first-wave novels as, 80, 81n30 Prostitution: for Mexico army, 96; milicianas and, 39, 56–57 Public sphere: milicianas claiming place in, 190 Public vs. private spheres: boundary as gendered, 1–2; boundary disturbed, 33–34, 44, 83, 205, 207; boundary maintained, 40, 168, 189, 205; relation to discourses of emancipation vs. domestication, 17, 86, 172; violence in, 17, 162, 194, 211. See also Domestic sphere Race: in Cartucho, 184; discrimination against Moors in Spain and, 124–26 Rama, Angel, 66 Ramos Escandón, Carmen, 34 Ramos Gascón, Antonio, 78 Rape and sexual assault, 17; Lina Odena defending against, 122, 124–27; of Nellie’s mother, in Cartucho, 173–75; threat of, 126–27, 184–85; in wartime, 126n10, 174n18 Real, Soledad, 149–50 Red Moon (Luna roja) (Espina), 86 “Red Star, A” (Una estrella roja) (León), 193, 196n14, 202 Reforms, in Mexico, 24 Religion: links with violence and sexuality, 215–16; Nationalists and, 38, 41, 69; symbols in cultural productions, 69, 129–30, 138; women’s oppression by, 187, 209 Renan, Ernest, 227 “Repose of the warrior”: disavowing, 186–88; León on, 17, 187–88, 206–7; as myth, 214, 218; woman’s rejection of, 206–7 Representations: of fearless women, 20, 29, 186, 196, 238, 256; gender identities through, 118n2; of Mexican Revolution, 177; of milicianas, 54–57, 119, 141; of the

Index people, 69–70; in posters vs. poems, 120n4; revolution as crisis in, 60–62; of sacrifice and death, 227–28; of soldaderas, 44–45; of subalterns, 60–61, 237; transitions in Adelita’s, 101–2, 255; of violence, 19, 181–82; vs. violence preceding, 15–16; of women, 29, 59–60, 67–68, 170; of women, in Mexican Revolution, 67–68, 74–76, 92–93; of women, in Spanish Civil War, 73, 78–79, 119–20 Republicans (Spanish), 127; cultural productions of, 69–71; divisions within, 36, 61; effects of defeat of, 118; emancipation vs. domestication in discourses of, 119–20; gender roles among, 130, 141, 207–8; milicianas and, 34–35, 56, 190; myth of motherhood among, 207–10; representations of women by, 52–56, 119–20; rojas (women of ), 118–19; use of myths by, 52–56, 141; values of, 36, 70, 141; vs. Nationalists, 23–24; on women’s heroism, 137. See also Milicianas; Spanish Civil War Resistance: in death stories of Trece Rosas, 142–44, 149–52; to Franco’s regime, 14, 142–44, 149–52, 155; narratives of, 12–13; to state violence, 187–88. See also Accommodation, vs. resistance Resistance and Women’s Movement in Spain (Resistencia y movimiento de mujeres en España) (di Febo), 152–53 Retaguardia (Rear Guard) (Espina), 86 Revenge: inability to exact, in Cartucho, 173–75; soldaderas’ desire for, 107, 109–10 Revolution: as crisis in representation, 60–62; effects of, 58, 60–62, 80, 201–2; effects on gender roles, 58, 207–8, 219; gender roles during, 1–3, 30; goals of, 36, 61–62; literature of, 62–64, 80–86; multileveled violence of, 4, 7, 172; participants in, 59, 62–63, 66–67; rapes during, 125–26; relation to war, 24; representations of women in, 29, 65; Sánchez Saornil’s call for, 133–34; women writing about, 83–86, 168; women’s participation in, 58, 83–84, 91. See also Mexican Revolution; Spanish Civil War Revueltas, Silvestre, 33 Reynolds, Sian, 58 Rivas, Manuel, 3, 250 Rivas Mercado, Antonieta, 68 Rodoreda, Mercè, 72 Roig, Montserrat, 191 Rojas, Pedro, 135–36

279

Rojas González, Francisco, 108n33 Rojas (women of the Republican Left), 118–20, 141, 190 Romancero del Ejército Popular (Romas Gascón), 78 Romancero de Mujeres Libres (Sánchez Saornil), 78 Romancero general de la Guerra Civil Española, 129, 131–32 Romances (romanceros) (Spanish ballads), 74–75, 77, 122, 193; purposes of, 78, 233–34 Romeu Alfaro, Fernanda, 143–44, 154–55, 241–42 Romo, Marta, 95 Rosa-Fría, Moon Skater (Rosa-Fría, patindora de la luna) (León), 193 “Rosario, Dinamitera” (Hernández), 119 Ruddick, Sara, 126n12, 174n18 Rueda, General: in Cartucho, 173–75 Rulfo, Juan, 230 Russian Revolution, 32, 70 Rutherford, John, 81 Sabín, José Manuel, 151–52 Sacrifice, 136, 243; in affirming community, 227–28; in death stories, 13–14, 138; in León’s stories, 203–5; in myth of Trece Rosas, 141–42, 144, 146, 154; in Nadie film, 253 Salas, Elizabeth, 44, 75, 98 Salaün, Serge, 77 Samuel, Raphael, 226n4 Sánchez, Rufino, 131, 132 Sánchez Mora, Rosario (La Dinamitera), 56–57, 119 Sánchez Saornil, Lucía, 37–38, 72, 78; on Jiménez’s death, 132–35; wartime poetry ignored, 132, 135 Sandino, César Augusto, 91 Sastre, Eugenio, 123, 125 Scarry, Elaine, 17, 129 Scott, Joan, 3, 29 Scripts, León’s radio and movie, 193 Sección Femenina de Falange (Women’s Section of Falange), 41–43 Second Republic (Spain), 38, 52. See also Republicans (Spanish) Sexual violence. See Rape Sexuality: Adelita’s, 101–2; in León’s stories, 208–9, 215–16; links with violence and

280

Index

religion, 215–17; of milicianas, 56–57; in Soldadera, 108–9 Shetty, Sandhya, 104n25 Short stories: León’s, 193, 210, 211. See also Novels Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 236 Skocpol, Theda, 61 Sleeping Voice, The (Voz dormida) (Chacón), 20, 117, 239, 242–43; author/subject relations in, 240, 245; as fragments, 249–50; Hortensia in, 245–46, 246; mourning in, 247–49; sources for, 241 Smith, Helen Zenna, 27 Socialist Party of Spain (PSOE), 39 Socialist realism, 194–96, 211 Soldadas, vs. soldaderas, 35 Soldaderas (Mexican revolutionaries), 46–50; Adelita as archetype for, 92–97; in cultural productions, 75–76; dominant vs. counternarratives of, 103, 107, 114; as fearless women, 2, 25–27, 223; in Here’s to You, Jesusa, 237–38; in Lovesick, 234–35; number of, 4; presence and absence in histories, 35–36, 95, 98, 235, 237–38; removed from army, 34, 92; representations of, 35–36, 92–93, 237–38; roles and tasks of, 26, 34, 44–45, 96–98, 237; soldadas vs., 35; used as icons or symbols, 43–45; violence and, 107–10; weapons of, 44–46; writers vs., 84–85, 164 Soldadera (Niggli), 91, 103, 115, 169n11; as Adelita’s death story, 11, 98; critiques of, 113; performances of, 106; summary of, 106–14 Soldaderas in the Mexican Military (Salas), 75 Soldiers of Salamis (Cercas), 250 Soledad Real’s Prisons (Las cárceles de Soledad Real) (García), 148–50 Solidarity, among women, 28–29 Sommer, Doris, 233 Sonríe China (China Smiles) (León), 193 Soviet Union, 194–95 Spain, 33; women in politics in, 36–37 Spain, Let This Cup Pass from Me (España, aparta de mí este cáliz) (Vallejo), 135–36 Spanish Civil War: beginning of, 23; effects of, 38–39, 134, 201–2; effects of women’s participation in, 25–26, 37–38; goals of, 36, 39, 61; León’s stories before, 193, 210; memory of, 154–57, 227–28, 231, 250; Mexican Revolution and, 29–33; milicianas removed from front in, 34–35, 39, 126;

representations of women in, 73, 78–79; repression following, 14, 136; symbols in, 70, 132, 141; as war story, 70, 84; women’s participation in, 2, 4–6, 31, 36–37, 39, 84, 137, 154–57, 228. See also Nationalists; Republicans Spanish Civil War canon, 69; novels of, 79, 84–87; representations of women in, 78–79, 118–19; romanceros in, 74–75, 77–78, 122, 193, 233–34; women writers of, 3–4, 57, 71–72, 78, 86, 254; women’s absence from, 219; on women’s participation, 84 Spirit of the Beehive, The (El espíritu de la colmena) (Erice), 231 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 8, 65; on Bhaduri, 114–16, 128; criticism of Gramsci, 9–10; on representations, 60–62, 237; on the subaltern, 64n8, 114, 237; on suttee, 104–5 State institutions: after revolutions, 58, 61; in formation of memory and history, 225; Mexican, 61, 66, 74–75 Strike at the Harbor (Huelga en el Puerto) (León), 193 Subaltern subjects, 134; counternarratives by, 198–99; definitions of, 197n16; fearless women as, 36, 197; as gendered, 8–10; lack of voice of, 8–9, 99n18, 114; León’s characters as, 186, 188, 195–96; in Mexican literary history, 230–31; perspectival, 8–10; representations of, 10, 237; war narratives of, 5–6 Suttee (self-immolation of widows), 104–5, 114–16 Tales for Dreaming (Cuentos para soñar) (León), 193 Tales from Contemporary Spain (Cuentos de la España actual) (León), 15, 24, 33, 188, 193, 211, 219. See also León, María Teresa Taylor, Diana, 227, 255–56 Temporality, 26–28 Teresa’s Pilgrimages (Las peregrinaciones de Teresa) (León), 193 Testimonios, 236–38, 240 Tétrault, Mary Anne, 58 Theater, 105–6 Theweleit, Klaus, 108n33 “They Executed the ‘Thirteen Roses’ of Freedom” (Fusilaron “Trece Rosas” de la libertad), (Cernuda), 140

Index Thomas, Gareth, 80–81, 86 “To Lina Odena, Dead between Gaudix and Granada” (A Lina Odena, muerta entre Guadix y Granada) (Pla y Bertrán), 122– 24 “To Spanish Women” (A las mujeres españolas) (León), 25–26, 29, 196–97 Torres Nebrera, Gregorio, 196n14, 198n17, 204–5 Transcendence, in myth of Trece Rosas, 138–39, 141–42 Trauma, 17–18, 178, 182–83 Trece Rosas, 256; charges against, 136–37; commemoration of, 156, 157; death stories of, 11–12, 14, 142–44, 154–57, 240–43; deaths of, 136, 142–55, 254; as ghosts, 244–45; narratives about, 117, 239; poems about, 119, 137–41; symbols associated with, 137–40; trial of, 151–52; uses of myth of, 14, 141–42, 149–50, 154 “Trece Rosas,” 7 “‘Trece Rosas, Las’” (Montero), 154–56 Trece Rosas, The (Ferrero), 20, 239–42, 244–45 Tuñón Pablos, Julia, 95n10 Ugarte, Michael, 86 Uncitti, María Paz, 42n19 Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Caruth), 18 Underdogs, The (Azuela), 32, 83, 108n33, 112–13, 177 United Front: in León’s stories, 204–5 “Valentina, La” (corrido), 76 Valle Espinosa, Eduardo, 96–97 Vallejo, César, 135–36 Varela, Lorenzo, 123 Victims: innocence of Trece Rosas, 142, 149, 154; women as, 76, 82, 120n4, 126n12, 129–31 Villa, Josefa Amalia, 152–54 Villa, Pancho (Francisco): Campobello’s defense of, 165, 170–71; in Cartucho, 169, 171; hero cult around, 98–102; widows of, 35–36 Violence: acceptance as normal, 180–81; in Cartucho, 167–68; children witnessing, in Cartucho, 163, 173–74, 179–81; cyclical nature of, 18–19, 175; deferment of, 164, 175, 180, 183; effects of participation in, 15–16, 27–28; epistemic, 162, 164, 188–89; forgotten, 227; in gender

281 relations, 212, 215; impossibility of language for, 18, 181–82, 192–93; in León’s stories, 192–93, 193, 205; levels of, 175, 211, 219, 255; links to emancipation and agency, 136, 162, 171–72, 185, 194, 205, 219; links with religion and sexuality, 215–17; as means to an end, 202–3, 218–19; needing space away from, 17, 19–20; in public vs. private domains, 16–17, 172–73, 194; relation to war and masculinity, 174; soldaderas’, 107–10; traces of, 163–64, 172, 256; trauma of, 18, 182–83; types of, 19, 161–63; vs. representations of, 15–16, 19; women trying to alleviate, 129–30; women writing about, 16, 17–18, 81–82, 165, 168, 179; women’s, 168, 169n11

War: children as witnesses to, 163, 173–74, 179–81; children in, 4; lack of clear boundaries of, 24; León’s later stories rejecting, 193, 212n29; range of women’s experiences in, 5–6; rapes in, 125–26, 126n10; reclaiming fear after, 28; relation to peace, 211, 218–19; relation to violence and masculinity, 5, 174; representations of women in, 29; revolution’s relation to, 24; taking sons from mothers, 217–18; women’s participation in, 7–9; women’s writing about, 168n9. See also Mexican Revolution; Revolution; Spanish Civil War War story, 85; antiwar stories and, 214; death stories vs., 12–13; different versions of, 3–4, 6, 135; elements of, 12; gender roles in, 82, 87; Spanish Civil War as, 70, 84; spectral corporeality in, 81–82; women’s vs. men’s, 3–4, 254 Weapons, women’s: León’s, 189, 192; of soldaderas, 44–46, 108n33, 237 Weissberg, Liliane, 225n2 Witnesses: to war, 82; children as, 163, 173–74, 179–81; to Mexican Revolution, 234; to Spanish Civil War, 85 “Woman Who Lost Fear, The” (León), 25, 196, 223–24 Women and the War Story (Cooke), 5, 31 Women writers: challenging boundary between public vs. private, 33, 83; counternarratives by, 82, 133–34; emancipation vs. domestication images of, 59, 78, 120; marginalization of, 67–68, 165–66, 188–89, 191; Mexican, 33; on Mexican

282

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Revolution, 3–4, 164, 176, 185, 232; numbers, in Mexico vs. Spain, 71–72; publication of books by, 148n35, 155; on Spanish Civil War, 3–4, 57, 71–72, 78, 86, 254; transformations in, 24–25; vs. fighters, 5–6, 84–85; on war, 81–84, 254; writing about violence as transgression for, 165, 168, 179. See also specific authors and titles

Yanes, Agustín Díaz, 20, 251–54 You Will Die Far Away (Morirás lejos) (León), 15, 186, 193–94 Zambrano, María, 72 Zapata, Emiliano, 75–76 Zhdanov, Andrey, 195