“Los Hombres en la Guerra, la Mujer en la Tierra:” Women’s Insurgencies and Spatial Claims in Revolutionary Mexico

This article studies the roles of women in the Mexican Revolution that canonical histories still struggle to unearth. It proposes an architectural lens to read the traces left in space by women of different socio-economic conditions, traces often overlooked in archival materials and oral histories. Soldaderas, the first group of subjects I study, were working-class and peasant women who followed troops and who brought the home to the space of war in order to care for the daily necessities of cooking, laundry, and healthcare of soldiers from both the federal and rebel armies. Making use of the household objects they carried, these camp followers created temporary homes in the battlefield. The second group I follow were the upper- and middle-class women who carried out their revolutionary efforts via architectures that looked disconnected from armed struggle. Conventionally, male war actors believed such places to only accommodate socially-sanctioned feminine activities, dismissing their inhabitants as passive, neutral, and distanced from the war. Both groups carried out their insurgencies by reclaiming roles and constraints that early twentieth-century patriarchy had imposed on them. I contend that, from their different positions, they appropriated the intersections of war and home spaces to inscribe therein their revolutionary traces.