Becoming a Soldadera

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Soldadera kissing soldier, Mexico City, ca. 1913

Another primary difference between soldaderas and female soldiers outside of class was how they came to be involved in the army; all female soldiers fought voluntarily, but not all soldaderas chose to be a camp follower. Some soldaderas followed their husbands into the war, such as the wives of men drafted into the Federal army. Some soldaderas followed their men into the army even if they would rather have remained at home, such as the woman who told sociologist John Reed the following story:  “I remember well when Filadelfo called to me one morning… ‘Come! We are going out to fight because the good Pancho Madero has been murdered this day!’ We had only been loving each other eight months, too, and the first baby was not born…and I said, ‘Why must I come?’ and he answered: ‘Shall I starve then? Who shall make my tortillas for me but my woman?’ It took us three months to get north, and I was sick and the baby was born in a desert just like this place, and died there because we could not get water.”[1]

Some women saw camp following as an employment opportunity; a woman attached to a soldier could reliable count on a meal and a place to stay. An American soldier in the 1916-1917 Pershing Expedition, George S. Patton, Jr., encountered one such woman who offered to live with him in exchange for meals.[2]

Women who entered the work involuntarily, however—through rape, abduction, or abandonement—had little choice but to continue living as a soldadera even when their soldiers died or left them behind. When the Federal army fled Paredón, Coahuila in 1914 and abandoned a large group of soldaderas, all three hundred women entered into contracts with the Villista soldiers who followed.[3] A woman who had been uprooted from her town in order to follow the army could neither travel back to her town alone nor easily find work and start a new life in the town where she was abandoned or widowed. Further, being a soldadera for any amount of time for any reason affixed women with an inescapable stigma. Residents of towns voraciously scavenged by soldaderas felt no sympathy for the women who raided their homes and businesses, and many Mexicans viewed soldaderas as promiscuous women who became camp followers solely to perform sex work; even the girls and women raped and abducted likely could not reclaim their moral reputation.[4]

We can attempt to understand the emotional experiences of by using the experiences described by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands as a lens. Although Anzaldúa was a modern thinker, her experience as a queer mestizaje woman who attempted to straddle the border of what can seem like dualistic identities also speaks to the experiences of soldaderas who were both intimately connected to their national identity as a consequence of their presence in the war but simultaneously rejected the people of their nation. Anzaldúa writes: “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back. Not me sold out my people but they me. So yes, though ‘home’ permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.”[5] Soldaderas, too, were sold out by their people who viewed them as unacceptably promiscuous. For this reason, many soldaderas immigrated to the United States after the war, forced to carry their identities as Mexican or indigenous women on their backs but unable to return home.[6]

 

Click through the timelines below to see examples of how individual women became soldaderas or female soldiers.



[1] Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 39.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 40.

[4] Ibid, 44.

[5] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera, (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 21. 

[6] Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, 1995, "Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution," The Americas 51 (04): 553.

Guadalupe Vélez

Biographical information found in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History by Elizabeth Salas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 72, 75, 80. 

María Villasana López

Biographical information found in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History by Elizabeth Salas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 70, 72, 76, 78, 80.

 

 Angela Jiménez 

Biographical information found in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History by Elizabeth Salas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 81.

 

Becoming a Soldadera