Customer Reviews

Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution

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Elena Poniatowska's "Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution" (Cinco Puntos Press, $12.95 paperback) demonstrates the riveting, almost hypnotic power of photographs.

Poniatowska's text (translated from Spanish by David Dorado Romo) is wisely limited to about two dozen pages and acts as a frame for the remarkable black-and-white images of the brave women who fought on either side of the Mexican Revolution.

The term "soldadera" comes from "soldada," or salary. Poniatowska explains that "during all wars and invasions, soldiers used their 'soldada' (a word of Aragonese origin) to hire a female servant. The woman would go to the barracks to charge her salary, i.e., soldada." Thus, the term "soldadera" was coined.

The photographs are culled from the enormous Casasola Collection in the Fototeca Nacional of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. The publisher tells us that the collection is based on the work of Agustín Casasola (1874-1938), one of the first photojournalists in Mexico and founder of the photo agency that carries his name.

It is difficult not to mull over these photographs of Mexican and indigenous women from the early part of the last century as they pose with their pistols, horses, children or husbands. These are women who played different roles, sometimes as brave soldiers, other times as helpmates (or even prostitutes without much choice) to the male warriors.

Poniatowska offers anecdotes to help us know these women, sometimes using their own words. Pancho Villa does not fair well here, nor do other men who took brutal advantage of -- or even murdered -- these women.

"Las Soldaderas" perfectly weds words with photographs as a poignant tribute to the brave women who were active participants in the Mexican Revolution.

[The full review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]

First I heard the songs of the Revolution, La Cucaracha, La Adelita, El Cabayllo Blanco. I heard these songs in Tepostlan, one of the hotbeds of the Revolution, in the summer of 1962.

My husband and I visited one of the satalite towns Gabriel Mariaca, where the people still lived as they had in 1917, still poor, surviving on beans and corn.

My husband was working on Nahuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs. He had a tape recorder and the local singers heard about it. They had never heard themselves sing so they came to our house and asked if he would record them.

How I loved those songs, Folk songs and Rancheras.

When I first saw this book I was transfixed. There they were, the women of the Revolution, dressed as I remembered them with their rebosas and the addition of las canadas terciadas. I felt like crying. What a gift to see them as they were, the women of the songs.

The pages of the book are not even numbered correctly at the beginning of the story . The book is very thin, with only 89 pages (57 pages are of photographs, all of which are easily available on the internet for free, like on Pancho Villa's Photos website of Ojianga). Throughout the book, everything is so contradictory. The author seems confused. No real effort seems to have been put forth to educate the reader.Seems like she gave a bunch of jumbled reviews of different novels she picked up . You can't tell what is true and what is fiction. Can't believe this is supposed to be a book.