Rethinking Transnationalism and Histories of Women, Race, and Sexuality In and Between Latin America and the United States, 1870–1970

Border crossings, racial tensions, and debates over sexuality are ever-present in today’s news, and provide the themes around which this issue’s articles converge. Several articles examine these themes around pan-American contacts between 1870 and 1970, notably in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and the Texas-Mexican border area of the United States. From different national sites, they record important patterns of U.S.-Latin American contacts, exchanges, and tensions over education and health and welfare policies, as well as domestic patterns of living. In addition, this issue addresses race and sexuality in the lives of African American women in the 1940s and at the onset of the reproductive rights struggle in the early 1970s prior to Roe v. Wade (1973). Equally important, our authors utilize innovative methods such as as pushing the borders between history and fiction in the writing of biography and uncovering normally hidden perspectives in a set of student-authored “sex-autobiographies.” Many of the challenging insights in this issue reflect the authors’ creative use of transnational methods and other border crossings. Four complementary book review essays assess new scholarship on gender, sexuality, citizenship, and “soft” diplomacy.

We open with Mílada Bazant’s creative reconstruction of the life, work, and cross-border travels of a pioneer feminist. Inspired by Mexican historian Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Bazant’s “A Feisty Woman in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Laura Méndez de Cuenca (1853–1928)” blends a daily life history with a chronological narrative. It utilizes “a bit of fiction when needed to fill in the gaps in the historical record.” More specifically, Bazant constructs the life story of her protagonist by employing “truth” alongside her sense of the “believable,” informed by a rich array of primary sources that document the “routine, the repetitive and the spontaneous in daily life.” The story of Méndez de Cuenca would be important simply because, as Bazant asserts, “only a few feminist biographies of Mexican women exist.” But Méndez was also a prominent literary and public figure of her day—a poet, teacher, writer, editor, and educational innovator whose commitment to gender equality was inspired partly by the social, secular, and liberal reforms that were opening new opportunities for women in Mexico. She was also motivated by more personal experiences with love, marriage, children, widowhood, work, and travels abroad. After the death of her husband in 1891, Méndez moved to San Francisco “without knowing English and without work.” There she became more involved with feminist causes and dedicated to achieving women’s “right to a true life, one of study and one of work.” By the early twentieth century, she had returned to Mexico and become a well-known education expert but continued to travel to the United States to study pedagogy as part of the Mexican government’s effort at major educational reforms. This article tells an important story about transnational inspirations for reform and feminist activism; it also demonstrates creative strategies for reconstructing the biographies of women whose lives have been insufficiently documented.

An explicit commitment to pan-American cooperation and exchange was central to club politics in Dina Berger’s “Raising Pan Americans: Early Women Activists of Hemispheric Cooperation, 1916–1944.” For Berger, pan-Americanism is less a methodology for tracing influences across national borders than a description of “soft diplomacy,” a gendered complement to U.S. foreign policy efforts to strengthen democracy in and commercial and political ties with Latin American countries. Berger examines the Pan American Round Table (PART), founded in Texas in 1916, the first women’s group committed to creating a pan-American consciousness and “promoting the larger cause of hemispheric cooperation.” These objectives were central to U.S. diplomacy in the 1930s and throughout the Cold War. Inspired by the widespread civic activism of John Barrett and his slogan, “liking comes from knowing,” PART also reflected the local geography of the Texas-Mexican border. Its founder, Florence Griswold, had been deeply moved by the plight of Mexican refugees fleeing revolutionary violence in 1916...