Posed & Candid Photos

Soldadera con carrillera y bandera nacional, Mexico City, c. 1914

Mujer revolucionaria de Michoacán, c. 1915

Zapatista colonel Amparo Salgado, Teloloapan, Guerrero, 1911

Herlinda Gonzalez and other Maderistas, Chihuahua, June 1911

Soldadera embraces her soldier, Mexico City, ca. 1913

A child is handed to women from a train window, ca. 1913

Soldadera kissing soldier, Mexico City, ca. 1913

Soldiers and soldaderas sit together along train tracks

These photos illustrate the major trends I noticed when researching this topic: female soldiers are most often depicted in individual posed photos, while soldaderas are in candid photographs among several other people. The posed photos of female soldiers function similarly to the cropped photos of the soldaderas; they emphasize the deviance of the subject. The uncropped, candid photographs of the soldaderas, however, give the audience a glimpse into the spaces they invaded and created for themselves. These photos show soldaderas both among the soldiers and in their  own homosocial groups and spaces in a way that seem entirely natural to the subjects. These candid photos demonstrate that soldaderas were not a handful of individual women, but rather a large and diverse group that fulfilled a necessary position within the military.