Klicktipp: Soldadera. Armed women in the Mexican Revolution (Portal and Podcast-Folge)

Kimbra Shaner (Website) (Web)

The soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution — both female soldiers and camp followers who performed such duties as cooking, cleaning, nursing, spying, smuggling, fighting, and sex work for virtually all army factions involved — challenged and permeated the boundaries or borders of the highly gendered, militarized space of warfare.

In performing their work, the soldaderas created a space of resistance or „heterotopia“ and challenged the ascribed notions of „acceptable“ work and spaces that women could perform and occupy. These acts of resistance, however, were then attacked by the revisionist work of contemporary depictions of soldaderas that sought to portray these women not as a relatively large group that helped revolutionary armies continue to function, but as soldiers’ love interests who were few and far between.

Kimbra Shaner, a student at Butler University, Indianapolis, has published aspects of this history on a website:

  • Background: Who were the Soldaderas? (Link)
  • Soldaderas & Spaces of Resistance (Link)
  • Soldaderas Remembered (Link)

New Books Network (Podcast-Folge) (Web)

Historian Christine Acrehas published „Mexico’s Nobodies. The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women“ (SUNY Press) in 2017. An interview with her from Pamela Fuentes (Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in NYC) is available online now at the New Book Network: