Seeing Women Photographed in Revolutionary Mexico

Pure beholding, even if it were to penetrate to the innermost core of the Being of something present-at-hand, could never discover anything that is threatening.

—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

In the matter of the visible, everything is a trap.

—Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

The Mexican Revolution is associated with the names of Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata, Álvaro Obregón and Francisco Madero, and Diego Rivera and to a lesser extent Frida Kahlo. This overt domination of male figures is perhaps predictable given the historical context of the revolt and the overwhelmingly patriarchal nature of Mexican society at the time. And yet, some of the most recognizable and reprinted photos of the Mexican Revolution are photos of women. The image of two apprehensive waitresses serving breakfast to Zapatista revolutionary troops at Sanborns in 1914 (Figure 1) is as emblematic of the occupation of the capital by the peasant armies as the iconic photograph Villa and Zapata at the Presidential Chair. Hugo Brehme’s Soldaderas on Top of a Train (Figure 2; Brehme’s original German title reads simply Zapatista Camp on Top of a Train) and the candid figure of an Adelita hanging from a train-coach rival the iconic value of Villa’s gallop in front of the camera or Zapata’s grave gesture while posing with a presidential band crossing his chest, a rifle on his right arm and his left hand resting on the saber’s guard. In Photography and Memory in Mexico, Andrea Noble rejects the vindication of women suggested by the popularity of these images. Visual proof that women were also engaged in the revolution and they too were historical participants is instead evidence of a subtle subalternizing logic made manifest in the words “also” and “too.” Besides, Noble argues, even when women are visible, visibility is often constructed in terms of invisibility.¹ Confronted with this disagreement—to use Jacques Rancière’s apposite word—Noble urges being on guard against the temptation of a merely indexical reading that would preempt and disavow the whole problem of conceiving of women as historical actors in their own right.

Perhaps the lack of representation of women as historical actors is due to women (and of course there are already too many inside this signifier) having been kept in a subaltern, silenced position in an affair that was, after all, marked by the macho bravado of the refrain “If they are going to kill me tomorrow, better that they kill me right away.” Such an assumption cannot withstand even the most modest historical scrutiny. The mobilization of women is perhaps the most salient trait of the transformations brought about by the Mexican Revolution in the sphere of the social.² The array of revolutionary destruction that took place primarily in the countryside uprooted provincial life, sending hundreds of thousands of women from their homes into different urban centers. In these centers they encountered a modernization that was changing the landscape of the feminine in its own way, populating the city with the unheard of figures of the chica moderna, the flapper, and the griseta.³ The photographic record testifies to this movement, and yet the force of the testimony remains suspect.

Against John Mraz, for whom photographs need to be contextualized but not interpreted, Noble calls attention to the fact that the indexical evidence already poses unique “interpretive challenges.”⁴ How far should we go in our vigilant approach to the phenomenality of the image? For Noble, the criticism of evidence and indexicality remains to a large extent inside the sphere of validity of these notions. In this essay, I argue that no criticism of evidence (or derivatively truth) can be obtained without tackling in a radical

Figure 1.

Zapatistas at Sanborns restaurant, December 1914. Photo by Agustín Casasola. Casasola Archive, Mexico.

Figure 2.

Soldaderas on top of a train. Photo by Hugo Brehme.

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