2005 Tinker Summer Research Report Bridget Arce Spanish and Portuguese "Troping the Body, Re-Textualizing the Nation"

A statue outside the Archivo General de la Nacion.

In his book Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (1978), Hayden White identified troping as “the soul of discourse”, and hence, the key to history and ideas. If, as propounded by White, tropes are not only figures of speeches but modes of thought and indeed the “soul of discourse”, and if discourse and language are what constitute subjectivity in psychoanalytical terms, then identifying those tropes becomes imperative for a study of the origin and meaning of gender, identity and nation both in literary and non-literary texts. Although there are many forms of tropes, my study will examine the way the body has been troped in both Mexican and Caribbean national literatures, focusing on specific historical figures that have been appropriated by all forms of cultural production in these regions. The body, in all of the figures that I will consider, becomes the site of a powerful tropological discourse, leading to the foundation of my theoretical query: why do bodies constitute the sites of such discursive tension? In a post-Cartesian, post-Enlightenment milieu, how do the material and the intellectual intersect? How do history, memory and art mutually inform and cannibalize each other? Can we theoretically separate the material from the cognitive? What is the process by which historical figures, such as the soldadera, Emiliano Zapata, and the mulata become aesthetic tropes both in popular cultural production as well as what is considered high art? All of the figures that I will look at in this study problematize something deeper in the concept of nationhood and the reigning paradigms of identity. They each inhabit particular liminal spaces that are in conflict, and their bodies become synecdoches of the tensions within those spaces.

The second chapter, which was the subject of my archival research this summer in Mexico City, will continue on the revolutionary theme presented in the first with the figure of Emiliano Zapata, but will focus on the figure of the soldadera. The soldadera represents a form of sexual exuberance due to the fact that these women engaged in free unions, and in turn were imbued with a sense of political agency by taking part in something larger than them: the Revolution. This participation became a means for them to travel as well as have different sexual partners. As their soldiers or “juanes” perished, they were free to pick up and find new mates. These denigrated women were not simply prostitutes, but integral parts of the military units. They worked to feed and nurse the troops, took up arms when their soldiers fell, but more importantly, also bore children, thus providing these men – who were acutely aware of the possibility of death due to the vagaries of war – with a sense of immortality through their progeny. In a revolution where geographical, political and ideological borders were in flux, the soldaderas participated in this fluidity and were granted social, sexual and political agency. Their bodies become synecdoches for the changing geographical landscape that exists as a product of revolution as well as the ever-present dialectic between the Madonna and the whore, re-configuring both the public and private spheres.

Two researchers in the principal section of the Archives where I conducted most of my research.

I will compare the representation of these figures in archetypal revolutionary novels such as Los de abajo and other novels of that genre with the visions projected in the corridos and other form of popular cultural production. Furthermore, I would like to engage eyewitness accounts, testimonios and novelesque testimonios, such as Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, and end with a look at the Mexican golden age cinematic interpretation of the soldadera in the film titled Soldadera. In short, it involves a comparison of high culture (novels), with commercial cultural production (film), as well as eye-witness accounts and popular cultural expression through folklore and specifically, ballads. It is in this capacity that my project requires extensive archival research to investigate not just their literary and filmic representations, but their representations in journals and periodicals of the time. In the Museo General de la Nación, I spent three weeks looking for Broadsides, which were a written form of ballad or appropriation of the corrido by lettered men, or what we call letrados. I also wanted to look through periodicals from all the oppositional revolutionary parties.

What I ended up finding was, although not what I hoped for or expected, very interesting. I spent many weeks in the special collections section of the archives that houses private letters, periodicals, and photographs by people who were active in the incipient stages of the revolution. I found a lot of information not specifically on soldaderas, but on the women from the middle classes who participated in the anti-reelection campaigns, smuggled arms, and founded printing presses that disseminated revolutionary propaganda. I spend much time looking at the personal collection of Carmen Serdán, the first woman to take up arms in the revolutionary movement, her own home being the first battleground again the Porfirian government, and an active supporter and agitor for Francisco I. Madero. I also had the opportunity to visit her home in Puebla , and to look at documents and photographs in the home that became the first battlesite for the Mexican Revolution.

Finally, I found only two broadsides that had been published about women in the revolution, and mostly the female figure was invoked as a sort of muse, rather than as an active participant. I also found a book of ballads of a specifically Marxist bent published by a female author that, although did not speak to or about the soldaderas, did relate to the experience of women as economic victims of hacienda system and political hierarchal oppression. Although these materials do not directly relate to my original intent for the research project, they do inform me of an overwhelming lack of materials about the realistic participation of these women in the revolution. I did, through my work in this archive, get leads to other archives and libraries that may house information more specifically related to what I am looking for.