>> From the library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:23 >> Georgette Dorn: Good afternoon, I'm Georgette Dorn. I'm the Chief of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. And I'm so pleased to see so many people here on such a terrible, rainy and dark day. So, welcome, welcome to Hispanic month. I just wanted to tell you how pleased I am to be talking to people who have never been here before, because I don't know your faces. So, you must be from Georgetown University, I assume? No? Well, it's great to have you. We do have the most wonderful Hispanic collection anywhere in the world. Because we have books not only published in Latin America, but also books about Latin America, published in China, Japan, Germany, all over the world. So, for that reason, our secondary book collection and newspaper collection is, there is no rival in the world. In addition, we have lots of microfilms, newspapers, manuscripts, printed photographs, and we have about 8 million maps and atlases. So, if you can find time, please use our collection. It's a great pleasure now to introduce Christina Arce, who is one of our users of our collections. She's a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, 18 to 19 century, at the University of Miami in Coral Gables. She's a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, PhD and a Masters from Middlebury College, and undergrad degree from Santa Barbara, California. And she's the author of this wonderful book, "Mexico Nobodies." Which is going to be on sale outside. So, with that, Christina Arce. ^M00:01:56 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:02 >> Christina Arce: Wow, I guess I'd like to know where everyone is from. Because if Georgette, Ms. Dorn doesn't know you, I'd like to know where you hailed from on a rainy, miserable day such as today. The university? I feel like maybe there's a class here? Really, just interest. Wow. Well, this is fantastic thank you so much. And I'd like to thank everybody for coming today. This is such a pleasure. And in particular Dr. Anna Dini [assumed spelling] and Katalina Gomez [assumed spelling] for their initiative in organizing today's event. And especially to Georgette Dorn, the Chief of the Hispanic Division for graciously supporting this event as part of Hispanic Heritage Month at the Library of Congress. It's an honor for me to present this book in this prestigious place of learning that's dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. Eight million maps. That's incredible. I'm beholden to my colleagues for engaging with my work. Please have a seat. Have a seat. There's seats. And I think it's especially a apropos, given that my book grapples with the invisiblized histories of women in Mexico. So, I thought I would tell you a little bit about how I began this project many, many years ago. I was a first-year's master student, political science, and I took a course on Mexican history just for fun. As a Mexican-American, I wanted to know a little bit more about Mexican history. And in the textbook, that was assigned to us, there was three-quarters of a page dedicated to the soldadera, the female camp followers of the Mexican Revolution. Intrigued, I searched for more information and when I asked my father who they were. He responded that they were the wives of the soldiers. And soon I realized that this was a euphemistic way to refer to the women who appeared in all the films I had watched with my family on Sunday afternoons on one of the few Spanish channels in Los Angeles at the time. This led me to consider who were these women, these wives. Can you hear me? Okay. And why were they in all the photographs and films of the Mexican Revolution, when not even a page on them was included in an historical primer of over 500 pages. So, in the course of this informal research on these women warriors, I happened upon the only novel dedicated entirely to a female camp follower turned colonel, Le Negra Angustias. And like most Mexicans at the time. I too was unfamiliar with the importance of Afro descendants to Mexican culture. And I found it striking that an award-winning novel could be written about a black female [foreign word], when Afro Mexicans are not considered a relevant part of Mexican culture, if at all. These paradoxes whereby the cultural imaginary is saturated with images of anonymous camp followers in everything from photography, film, art, and popular balladry; including songs as popular as, you perhaps know them, "La Cucarracha" and "La Adelita." Yet, the real women in official history are unknown is what inspired this book. Thus, I explore how individual people come to embody larger conceptual metaphors in Mexican history. Such as how, for example, the soldadera, as an occupation, came to represent the overwhelming cultural panic provoked by women bursting out of the home and into the public sphere. And considered the role that the arts played in understanding these people and their contributions to Mexican culture and history. So, I'm going to start by reflecting on the cover of the book. This photograph is of an Afro Mexican [foreign word]. Originally thought to be a soldadera, from [foreign word]. And it's one of the many portraits attributed to the famous Mexican photographer, Agustine Casasola, throughout the maelstrom of the revolution. Not surprisingly, this portrait was showcased on the flyers for an exhibit titled, "The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present." Which opened at the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago and traveled to San Antonia, Los Angeles, Oakland, Washington DC, among other places, between 2006 and 2011. Taken against an improvised rustic white background, the first thing that arrests the viewer's eye, as with many portraits, is the subject's gaze. This sitter is strong and self-conscious. You'll notice her chin is lifted with her head pointing slightly to the left, yet her gaze looks straightforward. Piercing the congealing materiality of the photograph. Perhaps, looking towards where the photographer, supposedly Casasola, may have been standing. Her gaze is imposing, and yet the language of her body is as impressive as her gaze. Nonetheless, the comfortable positioning of her body contradicts the threat hinted at by the lower hand's proximity to the gun that's holstered in her pants pocket. Oh, excuse me, revealing the multiple codes signified by the term soldadera, which in traditional parlance precludes military agency, but often led directly to it, to call her a soldadera and not a soldier, a soldada, deflects the military nature of her position, and thus, she's technically demoted. So often in the work studied in this book, soldadera, as a word choice, which comes from the word soldada, which actually means soldiers pay, not females, soldiers pay, what they're paid with. Is exchanged for another more dignified one, or in contrast, soldadera is often used an insult. This portrait is staged, but does not follow the tradition typical of military heraldry, such as [foreign word], the three-quarter positioning of the head. But, the metals displayed on her chest, and the strategic position of the gun, indicate that she was a recognized military officer within the revolution army, and not simply a wife, laundress, cook, or prostitute. Certainly, what's intriguing about this portrait for the spectator is the fact that she is both a soldadera and a soldier; male and female, decorative but practical. And as a [foreign word] black and white. When compared to the gallery of photographic images that have been showcased of male soldiers during the revolution, they're rarely Mexican. She is quite comfortable in the traditional male realm of war, yet is not quite ready to give up that [foreign word] of feminine aesthetic. The ribbon adjoining her [foreign word] and her earrings that are long and dangling create a striking counterpoint to the gun she has not removed from her pant pocket. Or maybe that is the point. Perhaps the viewer's being instructed not to conflate the vestiges of female attire with weakness. This woman seems to body the contradictions of the war and the term soldadera in addition to the post-revolutionary ideal of [foreign word]. Considering how Mexican blackness is figured into the marginalized experience of the soldadera, add one more layer to the soldadera's already overblown and yet simplified legacy. The portrait of this real woman now tenuously identified as Coronela Caremn Robles, from [foreign word], from [foreign word] in 1914 has traveled the visual imagery of Afro Mexican scholars. But has only recently, and I mean recently, recuperated a proper name. Alongside this excavated new identity are only brief lines fragmentary and conclusive and sometimes contradictory. Just last week I had an anthropologist who saw the cover my book say, do you know for sure that that's who that is? And I said, no, but that's who they think the is. Inconclusive and contradictory to fill in the gaps of her story. This portrait defies a static iconicity that congeals and decontextualizes. ^M00:10:00 And instead, points to another more powerful knowledge, [foreign word], that has led to multiple identifications and a con commitment slippery truth. Women were in the background, but also took fierce and strategic military rules. This image is testament to this woman's misunderstood history, multiple names and elided blackness and the fraught nature of Mexican womanhood in general. This nobody, like all the other nobodies I discuss in my book is still looking at us and is still claiming her place in the making of one of the most important social revolutions of the 20th century. So, the first part of the book "Entre Adelitas y Cucarachas: The Soldadera as Trope in the Mexican Revolution explores the movement of the soldaderas and their peripatetic migrations outside of the domestic domain and into the public sphere, creating what I call a mobile habitus, or as James Clifford has theorized, a dwelling in travel. Soldaderas were crucial to military success in Mexico. And regardless of whose side they were on or what role they adopted, I contend that the term soldadera etymologically ambiguous, becomes a word to describe what was socially unacceptable. It's a way to debase the real worth of the militarily active female participant of war, and a way to describe women living outside the confines of traditional home. As soldaderas, they cannot expect any remuneration or even recognition. By breaking, from what Diana Taylor calls from traditional notions of female behavior, they created what Diana Taylor calls a performative scenario on top of the train, around the campfire, straggling behind the men. This scenario, which is repeatable prosaic, yet multivalent, would brand their place in the imaginary of Mexicans for generations to come. The revolutionary practices and tactics and divergent occupations of place and space. So, the second chapter explores the representation of these women in literary, visual or cultural production by impacting the prevailing tropes that originate in the [foreign word] the popular ballads called "La Adelita" and "La Cucaracha" and I'm just curious if you guys have heard, we've all heard "La Cucaracha," sure? "La Adelita" is similar, there have been even samba, rockabilly renditions of "La Adelita," so, it's a very important rhythm that operates in international circuits of music. So, this chapter considers how the overwhelming visibility and shocking presence of the soldadera forced popular balladeers to change the conventions naturalize by narrative balladry. So, these [foreign word] are not only recognized nationally but are internationally emblems of Mexican folk music. And they operate as unofficial anthems of the revolution. And come to represent the whole of female participation in the revolution. But what's ironic of course is as ballads, as popular ballads by folklorists, they were not considered real examples of [foreign word], in part because of their of the rhythm and the lack of a narrative story that there were never real stories told about female soldiers, just sort of abstracted ideals of womanhood. So, in chapter 3 of the first half of the book I discuss more ambivalent, even subversive soldadera figures that twist the rigidity of "La Cucaracha" who's the whore, and "La Adelita" sort of the Barbie, the model, the sweetheart. That twists those stereotypes into unheard-of forms that will constitute new, albeit ephemeral, practices of Mexican womanhood. In the second part of the book, so here we see examples of "La Adelita and "La Cucaracha." So, there's three popular ballads there, excuse me. ^M00:13:53 ^M00:13:59 So, the second part of the book, "The Blacks in the Closet," unearths the legacy of the African presence in the Mexican cultural imaginary by focusing on the figure of the mulata and Mexican music in the form of [foreign word] and the provenance of [foreign word]. The mulata like the soldadera, lacks a proper name and a place in society. Identified only through the sexual congress of an anonymous black slave woman and usually a Spanish father. But unlike the muddled masses that define the image of the soldadera, mulatas marked their presence through their emergence of singular exceptional figures that are easily brushed aside by the populous as curious anomalies. So, the fourth chapter critically compares the coastal legend of the mulata, the [foreign word] with a real inquisition case that's housed in the National Archives in Mexico City, of a runaway slave named Antonia Desorta [assumed spelling] from Northern Mexico. And I observe how this colonial legend of the mulata, the [foreign word], which was eventually turned into a one-act opera, reflects a whole mythology regarding black women in Mexico. They associate it with witch craft, magic, unknown origins, or as a topicalized elsewhere that infected the local populous with its hypersexualized presence and then disappeared. So, these disappearing acts will mark the legacy of all blacks in Mexico. There are glimmers, hints, traces, and insinuations. But never claims about their contributions to Mexican history and culture. So, this chapter, in short, examines how blacks were part-in-parcel of the nascent colonial regime and culture, but were overrepresented in the Inquisition archives and in the juridical language of heresy, witchcraft, and sexual dereliction. So, I follow-up my study of the colonial period by examining the figure of the mulata in Mexican films produced at the height of the Mexican golden era cinema. And how they make an incipient attempt to contend with the problem of racism against Blacks in Mexico through the tropes of Manny's tragic mulatas imported from the US by representing blackness as exceptional, or displacing it onto the Caribbean, or abstracting the positions of blacks into Mexico, in Mexico into a universal dilemma of racism as a part of the legacy of slavery. These films reproduce, I argue the very racism that the attempt to rectify. The second part of the book concludes by discussing the audio tropic and sonic landscape of Mexico that is a product of the Afro [foreign word] culture of the Gold Coast. I contend that blackness inserts itself into the fabric of the national narrative through its most popular songs, [foreign word] and "La Bamba". We've all heard "La Bamba," no? So, such songs, and in particular "La Bamba" are startling examples of how Mexico's nobodies are the subjects and originators of a musical tradition that would come to constitute the culture of a globalized Mexicanness. This chapter further discusses the impact of Cuban music on Mexican cultural production and identity by focusing on the exceptional figure, Antonia Lanegra [assumed spelling], who is the matriarchal mulata who was a national icon and performer of [foreign word], the favorite music of the dance halls and brothels, and the Cuban song from the Gulf Coast of Mexico, Veracruz, in particular. And it discusses how she paradoxically constitutes the quintessence of Mexicanness through her status as the model [foreign word], despite her claim to blackness. So, she's as Mexican as they come, despite being black. So, what do I mean by nobodies. What does it allow me to do? And I just want you to notice that in the image there, that's Celia Cruz. So, there was a lot of interaction between Caribbean and Cuba in particular in Veracruz. And so there's this way in which blackness is displaced onto Caribbeanness, but in particular Cubanness. So, what do I mean by nobodies, and what does it allow me to do? So, what this book seeks to discover then, is the way this gendered and rationalized construct is belied, undone through the very art forms that perform this gendering and racializing, and how these pre-existing tropes are intertwined, reproduced, and yet contain gaping fault lines. While womanhood and race are invariably defined in concrete terms, the tremors that unsettle these constructs are manifested by the fascination with which both elites and peasants beheld and represented these extraordinary people. Black, mulatto, white, mestizo, and indigenous women. The cultural text examined in this book ranging from as I mentioned [foreign word] popular ballads, films to opera, witness the complex ways in which traditional womanhood is defined by masculinists gestures and disruptive by rationalizing ones. Indeed, the anxieties regarding a hegemonic notion of race and gender are brought to task with the figure of [foreign word]. Her simultaneous masculine and maternal heroism was an embarrassment to military officials. While the mulata triangulates native blackness with a foreign intrusion and exotic sexuality. Providing a way to negotiate and explain unraveling sexual [inaudible] in the countryside and the corruption of while male desire. I argue that the figures who populate the literary, visual and musical imaginary constitute much more than base entertainment for the masses or curious motif and cultural production by patronizing elites. I argue that they reflect an almost latent communal will to narrate that which the official history often ignores. In the aesthetic, I claim resides something more than artifice possibility. So, I propose nobodies as an alternative to understanding this fundamental historical marginalization. ^M00:20:05 And it's over representation in the arts. As I've claimed, neither gender nor race's critical categories can be engaged independently. Mexican nationalist discourse and art, grapple specifically with the tangled strands of both. In contrast to this nominal abstraction, the body and nobody directly points to the very real and concrete place they have in the background. The spaces they occupy, the contributions they make, and the violence inflicted upon the flesh. Their nobody-ness is clearly a product of their othering, but also the practical and strategic disappearing of them by Mexican natural discourse. Through the denial of a proper name, cucaracha, adelita, as well as the regulation of their bodies. This disappearing, however, happened in different ways. On the one hand, the overrepresentation of the soldadero in the crafting of a post-revolutionary identity, blinds the spectator or reader through excess. While on the other, the absolute elision of blacks from the Mexican historical consciousness, makes the striking figure of the mulata exotic and foreign. So, the promulgation of a vacuous revolutionary rhetoric that serves only the authoritarian elites in the name of murdered peasant icons such as Poncho Villa, and Emiliano Zapata featured in this very famous image, "Villa en la silla presidencial" in the presidential seat, or local movements celebrated on the world stage, that have not, in the case [foreign word], put [foreign word], indigenous law into place nor in the case of [foreign word] today, brought justice to the families of the 43 disappeared students a few years ago, or even allowed Afro Mexicans to be recognized as viable communities, is testament to the reality that Mexico is now more than ever, an authoritarian state and that the road towards democracy is still long. However, as argued by Gareth Williams and myself art registers the profound necessary and inevitable moments that allow us to think and be otherwise. The majestic effect of this one portrait, the once nameless Afro Mexican soldadera staring intently so that I was staring intently into the camera with her gun in her pocket, her military pins, her [foreign word] hat and dangling earrings defies the static, post-revolutionary narrative of abnegated womanhood and melancholic [foreign word]. This woman alone through the multiple ambivalences communicated in the portrait, and its contradictory captions. In all versions that I read, there were probably at least four or five different captions of who this person was. Speaks of all the different ways of being and becoming a post-revolutionary woman in Mexico. The [foreign word], the popular ballad bears witness to this. Heralding war heroes and manly valor, it also did not ignore its women, if only to present them as cockroaches or Barbies; cucaracha and adelitas. So, this permits the disfiguring nature of cultural production to simultaneously reveal other possibilities beyond degenerate cucarachas or beguiling adelitas. To imagine the real people who flitted in the background as playing an integral role in what is today Mexican culture, history and politics. So, before I conclude, I just wanted to mention that the image in the middle is, we've just recently discovered, the same [foreign word] that's been on the cover, is on the cover of my book. It's not positively identified, but Mexican scholar, John Raz [assumed spelling] has been able to make a link between this image, who was also in the archive identified as a soldadera. It's clear she's not a soldadera, she's in the middle, right? But it was identified as soldadera. Now, she's identified as Coronela Caremn Robles. As I was finishing the book, I still had to figure out. I went through all the different copies, and I realized that this was the same person. So, I'd like to conclude with a few words from my conclusion to be otherwise. Okay. From May until August 2015, the Vincent Price Museum in east Los Angeles hosted a suburb exhibition titled "Soldadera" By internationally renowned performance and video artist Nao Bustamante. The multimedia exhibition imagined through what the Chicana artist calls a speculative reenactment. The soldadera's participation in the Mexican revolution. Thoroughly mesmerizing, haunting and dreamlike. At the same time, it's tactile, concrete and physical. The exhibition features several pieces that mix archival footage and photography, such as the images I just showed you, with Bustamante's revisionary and majestic work and material craft blurring the boundaries between archive and invention. And rending at the same time, it weaves these women's stories tightly together through the symbol of a yellow, bullet-hugging Kevlar [inaudible] dress, that's featured in the middle of the image. Filling the exhibition hall, the cinematic installation was a five-minute loop. You see that in the far left corner, was a cinematic loop; five-minute loop of a mostly black and white film projected onto a 16 x 9 screen. The video transposed reenactments of soldaderas wearing Bustamante's yellow Kevlar dresses, onto archival footage, in order to create what Bustamante's rendition of the unfinished chapter dedicated to the Soldadera from the film "Que Viva Mexico" by the Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisentein. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete it because the project ran out of money, and he was forced to leave Mexico before production on this segment could begin. So, the soldadera's important role in the revolution was first visually imagined by an avant-garde Russian filmmaker, only to be completed 86 years later by Chicana performance artists from the San Joaquin Valley. Both outsiders. At the center of the room in this exhibit was a series of yellow dresses, bulky and perceived thoroughly unfit for the battleground of war. The dresses, titled "[Foreign Word] Kevlar" 2945 are crafted as bulletproof gowns that would withstand the piercing gunshots of the Winchester 3030 rifle, the preferred weapon of the revolutionary insurgents. Kevlar design by a female chemist, is a synthetic material woven so tightly that it is five times stronger than steel. However, after a single penetration, it begins to unravel. Body Armor the soldaderas never had, if only the real [inaudible] could have been lined with this stuff. It is a speculative tribute to the thousands of nameless denigrated women who were killed on the battlefield, raped, or maimed and left and recognized. In the words of Hannah Manchel [assumed spelling], and I quote, "Now Bustamante's Kevlar dresses are, in a way, garments protected by unraveling. The dresses perform a kind of vulnerability about thinness and thickness. A kind of vulnerability that cannot go to pieces, when hit by a bullet or when cut by an artist's scissors, the fabric was thin, unravels to protect the body inside." The display includes several of the dresses, but only one lives in a glass box. The one we see here. A sleeping beauty, pierced with the slugs of an original Winchester 3030. The remaining dresses will also eventually be fired on and in this way, it is an ongoing performance that will continue to record and violate the imagined and invented bodies of these invisible women. Phantasmagoric violence that continues to pierce, that withstands time and it's punctuating deformations, ephemeral and yet ineluctably felt. Hidden at the back of the exhibition hall is an understated piece called the "Chac Mool." Perhaps the most complex component of the entire "Soldadera" exhibition. It is a remake of a Mesoamerican statute that features a reclining figure whose head faces forward 90 degrees and whose abdomen usually houses a bowl for sacrificial items. And is often associated with Tlaloc, the Aztec God of rain and fertility. An almost incredible reenactment to see it, the spectator's forced to pierce through the anti-view finder we saw in the previous image, whose circular form remind us of Tlaloc's prominent eyes. In order to observe a small screen that loops 12 minutes of Becerra Lumbreras on her bed, the woman featured on the screen, the oldest person alive at the time. Although Guinness refuses to put her in the record because she lost her birth certificate 40 years prior. And the last surviving soldadera of the Mexican Revolution. At 127 years of age, she reclined on her perch of pillows on a makeshift bed, a living [foreign word], who a month after her encounter with Bustamante was to leave the earth, having outlived all of her children and many of her grandchildren. She finally told her story through the persistent tapping of an unknown rhythm in the video loop. Her communicatory gesture revealing her engagement with the revolution for the first time in public, and for the last time in private, the to team that Bustamante gathered in their quest to meet the last living Soldadera. I want to explain that. She couldn't speak anymore, so she just tapped in the video loop. It took over 100 years, she waited patiently, but her body spoke. And she was heard. A Moises Medina who accompanied Bustamante's crew attest that, and I quote, "Very little was vocalized, but much was said." ^M00:30:00 Becerra Lumbreras was one of the few who fought for her communal land grant, and withstood the chiding of others, as she demanded her revolutionary pension and I quote, "Vocally, insisting that she had bled, fought, and mothered children of the of the revolution." The cleverness of this installation is the paradoxical analogy that Bustamante draws between Lumbreras and the [foreign word]. A Mesoamerican statute whose role is not understood. Who lays in an almost semi-supine position, except that it rest on its forearms, reclined, vulnerable, and yet active. Located outside of the sacred temples, but not part of them. Spread throughout the diverse indigenous world across time and space associated with fertility, but upon whose belly rested the ball for the sacrificial victims, or reverential items, no one knows for sure. An icon that was misnamed by the person who discovered it. Not unlike the soldadera, the name stuck. Jennifer Doyle, the curator of the exhibition explains the work in a quote. "Our intention as artist and curator is to invite the viewer of the exhibition to consider the possibilities of the speculative, even utopian thinking as not a retreat from the here and now. But as a deep engagement of how we might imagine the here and now, differently." The women in my book may have frayed stories, occupy semi-supine positions, hover in the shadows between maternal instinct and macho valor, blackness and whiteness, respectability and audacity. But like Becerra Lumbreras have outlived and questioned their very objection in the art that they've inspired and the stories that are told or tapped with their fingers, and in the case of Becerra Lumbraras, in the very life she refused to leave behind as super centenarian. This Pueblo is not monolithic. Indeed, it's composed of all different kinds of people, lifeways, histories, bodies, and [foreign word]. The practice of daily life, the organic mixture of quotidian ritual, and the praxis of culture, even in the midst of its creation points to the constant revolutions that happen when diverse people come together in the wake of violent events. Whether these events are slavery, invasions, revolts against tyranny, spiritual violence, the unjust appropriation of ancestral land, or gender aggression the practice of living these events, of living rupture and continuity generates a sense of pueblo, even when the pueblo itself is far from homogeneous. Art and popular culture can intervene, although not always evenly, when history leaves off. At least this has been the case with Mexico's nobody's. Thank you so much for listening. ^M00:32:42 [ Applause ] ^M00:32:52 I'm happy to entertain any questions. And again, thank you all for being here, this is the thrill of my life. Ten years of work, yes? May I ask you to identify yourself, so I know who I'm talking to. >> Dene Barr: >> Dene Barr [assumed spelling]. I'm a researcher in the Hispanic Division here at the Library of Congress. I study filmmaking, first of all, at University of Maryland College Park. Eisentein, when I hear Eisentein, I need to know the name of that film, I'd like to see that film. >> Christina Arce: "Que Viva Mexico." It is one of the first films made about the Mexican revolution. He had designed it with a segment of the soldadera in mind. But he got ran out of Mexico because what he was doing. It's sort of like; oh, I'm sorry. It's very sort of revolutionary documentary form. And so, this is one of the most famous pieces. And of course, you know, Mexicans look at it as Mexican art, but it was made by a Russian filmmaker in Russian. So, yeah, it's available on YouTube. You can see it on YouTube but the quality's not good. And because of the visual imagery and the different; yes? May I know who you are? >> Eve Ferguson: My name is Eve Ferguson [assumed spelling], I work in the African Section at the Middle Eastern division her at the library. And so, my question is, like contemporary artists, like Lila Downs is now shining a light on Afro Mexican music. Is there a greater acceptance in Mexican society, the contributions of Afro Mexicans now than previously. >> Christina Arce: That is a spectacular question. And there's a greater awareness, I don't know if there's a greater acceptance. They're still not recognized. There was; among scholars there is. There's a whole field of Afro Mexican studies. And there's Mexican scholars and there are North American scholars who have sort of in tandem engaged in both. Sometimes at odds with each other. But, yes. I mean there's definitely a much broader recognition. Oh, yes, yes, we did have some blacks but they were, you know, at the beginning of the colonial period. So, there's a way in which it's sort of you know it was so long ago. And after [foreign word], there's this lack of recognition for individual populations and communities that in fact still have vibrant Afro Mexican cultures, for example, in the costas. There's a way in which they relegate it to coastal culture, but they were part of the intricate part of the construction of Mexican culture throughout the colonial period, because they weren't just relegated to the coast, they were in fact in the mining centers. That's where the slaves were, they worked in the mines. And so, the particular case that I look at is not the gulf coast of Veracruz, where there is a general acceptance of blackness there, or even the Pacific coast where there were oh, yeah, you know Cimarron Maroon colonies. No, they more than [inaudible] colonies, they were part of the mining communities and so the [foreign word], or the women who made the chocolate were almost always Afro Mexican. There was a link between the two. So, the general population is mixed in terms of how they accept it. Even the scholars will say that chicanos and chicanas in particular over determined the blackness of Mexican culture. Well you know, they exaggerate it. Still to this day. I mean, I go; I've been to two conferences last year, where I presented some material, and as chicana, they looked at me like well, you know, you guys are over exaggerating it. That's part of the North American Academy, and sort of the discourse of identity politic that's permeated Afro diasporic studies. So, it's mixed. Yes? >> John Taupping: Yeah, my name is John Taupping [assumed spelling], I'm a cataloger here at the library. Is there a distinction in Mexican Spanish between la negra and la mulata? There was that famous singer named la Negra, but I think normally you were, typically you referred to Afro Mexican women as mulata, is there a distinction between the two terms? >> Christina Arce: No, that's a great question. Because it has to do with the naming. So, it was very popular among Caribbean musicians in particular to be identified through that sort of nominal blackness. So, for example, her nephew took on el negro too, [foreign word], or something like that. And so, that's a way to over accentuate the blackness, which then appealed to the sort of tropicalizing discourse of oh, you know she is la negra, when in fact she's a mulata. So, yeah, there is. That's the etymological difference. I mean, mulata is part of the racial taxonomies that were part of the colonial period. I mean I'm not sure everyone knows the paintings, the [foreign word] paintings throughout the colonial period. Are we familiar with those? Where all the different racial taxonomies were epitomized through these portraiture, which then became. You know, many of those, there was only five, six, maybe half a dozen that were regularly used, mulata being one of the principal ones. But in terms of performativity to take on el negro or la negra was very common, when in fact they were mulatos. It's also a term of endearment, in the Caribbean [speaking in foreign language], you know, so it's a term of endearment, in addition to being a derogatory term, usually in the diminutive [speaking in foreign language]. But it depends, it really depends on the context. In Brazil, it's the same. It's often used as a term of endearment. >> George Rice: Hi, my name is George Rice, nice to meet you. So, I was born in Mexico City and I just want to verify what my grandfather, you know, he's been telling me this for years. So, one of the questions was why we really never talk about black people in Mexico, he says basically one of the reasons is that you know, they were free. They were not slaves in Mexico. And you know there was never really an issue. So, I just want to verify that. And I had a question on your picture, you mentioned that she had a gun. You know, Mexican culture tends to be [foreign word], so I wonder if that comes from a feminist movement where women were allowed to carry arms. Because I know for a fact in other cultures, women were you know, they're homemakers. They sit at home, take care of the kids. So, I just found that piece fascinating. >> Christina Arce: It is. It's incredible. There's actually a transgender [foreign word], who's also names [foreign word], who only shows to where, she immediately transferred into male garb. Oftentimes when they were colonels, or when they h ad a military rank that was beyond just the common soldier, they would sort of perform that authority through dress, through the vestments. But you'll notice what's interesting about that is that she still wears the earrings. There's this way in which she's still not abandoning her femaleness, you know her femininity in terms of the garb. So, she's using both. So, that sort of gesture is really interesting. ^M00:40:04 You know, so but definitely, during the revolution many soldaderas took up arms. Maybe they performed traditional female roles by bringing the domesticity of the home onto the battlefield. I mean that in itself was incredibly radicalizing to see women and children out on the battlefield hanging clothes, carrying their [foreign word], making beans. But then at the same time when their soldier fell, they would often pick up the rifle and continue fighting for them, or they were looked to as leaders. I mean there's all kinds, there's all; one of the most important novels written by a Mexican, it's a testimonial novel by Elana Pontitosca [assumed spelling] was precisely the interview of a soldadera who followed her father and then and then her husband into the war. And then when both of them fell, the soldiers look to her to lead. So, there's this way in which, there's a fluidity in gender roles that wartime, exigencies of wartime will permit. But what happens after the war? They decided that soldaderas were unacceptable. They made them wives. And that made it very difficult for them to seek their pensions as revolutionary participants. That's what makes the situation of [foreign word] so important is that she actually demanded it, as a veteran of the revolution, as a soldadera. No? So, they took all kinds of different roles. They were often spies, smugglers and strategists. So, they took on different roles. And then some were just simply cooks, and they were able to market themselves as through their culinary expertise, their ability to make a lot out of nothing. Because they handle the soldada, the soldier's money, and were able to purchase provisions. Remember there was no commissary or even infirmary. So, that's what the roles of soldaderas did. With regards to the first comment on blacks in Mexico. Yes, Mexico was I think the second country to abolish slavery. The second president of the Mexican Republic after independence from Spain was an Afro Mexican. I mean people don't know that. They get whitened later on. One of the primary revolutionary leaders was [foreign name] and he was also not from [foreign word]. And during the colony period, I think what your father was eluding to was there was a very prominent working class. Freed, black class. Why? Because slavery lasted a generation or two at most. There was certainly the chattel plantation model, which is what we think of when we think of slavery, these big cotton plantations. In Mexico it would've been sugar, tobacco, [foreign word], and mining, but they were also petaled off slavery, a slave could often acquire the official, you know, of his master and the master often freed him in his own lifetime. And the children were often godchildren. So, there's this patronage, of course, but they were often freed in their lifetime. So, it would last a generation or two at most. And there was an urban class, it was an urban phenomenon. Mexico City had more blacks than it did Spaniards at one point. In part because of slavery. But it's this particularized, sort of localized slavery; fruit sellers, the shoemaker. I mean so they turned into a vibrant class that then became Hispanicized really early on. And so, they mixed in really early on. So, there's an insistence on phenotype. They said, well we don't really have what looks like Brazil or Cuba here in Mexico. Thus, we don't really have an important black population. But it mixed in really early on. And so, the slave trade was abrogated very early on in Mexico as well. And they had rights because of Canon Law. Because of the pope. So, they were able to appeal the rights. I'm not saying that slavery wasn't horrible in Mexico. But what I am saying is that they had a little more liberty to appeal through the church, through the mechanisms of the church to appeal to have regular families and to get Sundays off and stay in the cities. Or, they mixed in with indigenous populations, which is understudied. In part because there was, in colonial Mexico [speaking in foreign language]. Many times blacks would escape to the indigenous communities. And then they were no longer accounted. And the last part about that is that blacks also, there was no census. Because of that sort of viciousness with regards to the caste system. The [foreign word], the second president abrogated, he also eliminated the caste system, so that they would all be Mexicans, but then unfortunately eliminated the record of blacks in Mexico. So thus, the invisibility for 200 years until now. Yes. What's your name? >> Desiree. Hi. Thank you so much for this [inaudible]. Can you give us a sense of what the relationship was between middle and upper class women who kind of busied themselves with like legal equity and feminism, feminist work, and the soldadera. >> Christina Arce: Oh, during the revolutionary period? Oh, that's a great question. Because there's a lot; not a lot, but more written on precisely the upper class women who; I mean the first battle cry of the Mexican revolution, which preceded the Cuban Revolution, preceded the Russian Revolution, was actually at an upper-class woman's house [foreign word] in northern Mexico. So, they had a real important role, in part because they were completely on the outside of Mexican society. So, because of the dictatorship of the paternalistic patriarchal society. So, women in particular upper-class women; so, there has been some scholarship, particularly, Mexican scholars and North American scholars have focused a lot on that relationship. Also, soldaderas were not looked upon, they sort of like presented as this degenerate femininity. So, there was certainly class tensions. One of the most important; so, they would not have taken nicely to being called soldaderas. You know, because it was sort of a pejorative way to call some sort of trashy women who followed the troops right. It was almost like calling them a prostitute, right? Whereas adelita acquired this short of sweetheart intonation. So, definitely, I mean, but one of the most important figures [foreign name] who wrote a book that was not published in her lifetime. She went broke supporting the revolution, she founded the White Cross in Mexico. And was one of the primary advisors to the [foreign word] who became president afterwards regime. She was completely unrecognized up until 20 years ago when [foreign name] recovered her book that was rejected over 20 times by different editorials in Mexico and in the United States. She wrote her book in Spanish and English. And is called [foreign word], the rebel. And so, certainly she talks about, she oftentimes will be disinclined to call the female companion soldaderas. She'll call them, you know, the nurse, or something else. [Foreign name], did the same. She wrote a beautiful set of short stories on the Mexican Revolution and she also, in a such a subsequent revision took the word soldadera out and replace it with woman or muchacha, no? Because I mean in a way to not reduce into that level. So, they were very much, there's a distinction between those class levels, yet women of upper-classes joined the revolutionary forces, were often strategists. [Foreign name] had a female strategist and orator that wrote five books on the Mexican Revolution. None of that is recognized. ^M00:47:55 ^M00:48:01 Thank you so much for coming this has been such an honor for me to be here. Thank you, Georgette [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.