Sara Potter

Title of Research : Transnational Solidarities: Gender, Revolution, and Motherhood In/Between Mexico and the United States, 1920-1970

As expected, The Taller de Gráfica Popular Collection at the CSWR was invaluable to my research on the artistic and political workings and production of the group to better understand the relationships of influence between its members, even more so since some of Catlett’s contributions were among the collections. Catlett moved to Mexico in 1946 on an extension of a Rosenwald Fellowship (a scholarship to support African-American artists in the 1920s-1940s) in order to complete “a series of prints, paintings, and sculpture on the subject of “The Negro Woman” (Herzog 215). She met and married the Mexican artist and fellow TGP member Francisco Mora in 1947 and they had three children in quick succession: 1947, 1949, and 1951. Catlett’s work with the TGP and in Mexico as a whole was always and irrevocably intertwined with her identity as a Black woman artist. The collaborative and socially active nature of the TGP served as a kind of political and aesthetic incubator for Catlett to explore the complex and multifaceted aspects of her identity as a woman, a mother, and an African-American artist during the years before she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a Mexican citizen in 1962. In a feature article with Ebony magazine in 1970, Catlett said that the experience of motherhood had given her work “immeasurably more depth,” and declared that “raising children is the most creative thing I can think of” (101). While she could not officially join any political organization since it was grounds for deportation, the TGP provided her with a way to express her commitment to political activism and to engage with Mexican politics and history. For example, her 1960 print, “Contribución del pueblo a la expropiación petrolera. 18 de marzo de 1938” (The People’s Contribution to Mexican Oil Appropriation. March 18, 1938) depicts large crowds of families, primarily mestizo women and children, lining up to donate funds to help the Mexican government pay its debts to foreign oil companies in Mexico. In the background are oil towers that proudly fly the Mexican flag. The themes of her contributions to the TGP reflected her own personal and political concerns as a mother, a pacifist, and an activist, principally regarding education and infant mortality (see slide 2). The bulk of my time was spent with the Margaret Randall papers in the CSWR, along with the related audiovisual materials that were available at the time of my visit; the breadth and depth of the material in the Margaret Randall Papers was invaluable to my research. The collection offered a compilation of letters, manuscripts, articles, interviews, newspaper clippings, and other personal documents that offered great insight into Randall’s views on art, gender, motherhood, and revolution, and made it clear that she has long considered these subjects as intertwined and interacting ways of being. At the same time, it becomes evident that she constantly evaluates and questions her views on gender, community, social justice, and motherhood. As Randall recalls in a series of interviews recorded in 1996, her conversations with her children have “forced [her] to go back and understand as a woman, as a feminist, a great deal of what I swallowed in a serious of revolutionary movements” (Tape/DVD 3). This constant and merciless questioning and self-examination is characteristic of her essays and poetry throughout her career as Randall reflects upon where good intentions have gone wrong and re-evaluates her own positions on the issues that mean the most to her. Her views do not so much shift as broaden and deepen, however, as she looks back to consider previous blind spots or misconceptions within a larger ideological framework.  Significantly, it was motherhood that brought Randall to Mexico City for the first time. In 1961, she was a young, single mother trying to make ends meet as a writer in New York City. She left for Mexico because, as she later recounted in a 1992 interview, she hoped it would be easier to make a living there (Harris 448). She had been politically active in leftist causes in the U.S. and supported the Cuban Revolution, but, as she later recalled, “I wasn’t organized at that point in my life and I thought of myself primarily as a writer” (ibid.). I found it curious that, as a young woman, Randall had considered writing and activism to be mutually exclusive activities, especially since her written production in later years was an important element of her support of revolutionary causes in Latin America and beyond. Once in Mexico City, Randall quickly met and began to collaborate with an international group of radical poets (nearly all male), including Homero Aridjis (Mexico), Ray Bremser (United States), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), Raquel Jodorowsky (Chile), and Sergio Mondragón (Mexico). She and Mondragón married, had two children, and co-founded and co-edited the bilingual quarterly El corno emplumado/The Plumed Horn along with Harvey Wolin. The bilingual editors’ note of the first issue offers its objective: “now, when the relationships between the Americas have never been worse, we hope EL CORNO EMPLUMADO will be a showcase (outside politics) for the fact that WE ARE ALL BROTHERS” (5, original emphasis).  Randall, for her part, remained interested in poetry and prose with transformative intentions, and her focus on revolution through poetry and the written word came sharply into focus during the journal’s years of publication (1962-1969) and the countercultural and revolutionary movements that were active in Mexico City during the 1960s. Randall and Mondragón clashed frequently over translations and texts, in part because he favored a more polished poetic aesthetic over revolutionary content and in part due to his constant disparagement of her written and spoken Spanish. Intertwined with Randall’s notions of poetry as an element of revolution and social change was a curiously domestic idea of the kinds of lives that poets in the Americas, particularly North America, might begin to choose for themselves in the wake of the legacies of the lost generation of the 1920s and the beatniks of the 1950s. As Randall wrote in an unpublished document entitled “Poesía U.S.A. 1964,” “el poeta de hoy tiene más y más probabilidad de querer una vida distinta, una vida que incluye esposa, niños … y finalmente un fuerte sentido de responsabilidad hacia el mundo en que vive” (the poet of today is more and more likely to want a different life, a life that includes a wife, children…and ultimately a strong sense of responsibility toward the world he lives in) (2). Randall’s vision of a new generation of socially engaged U.S. American poets with spouses and children may have sounded traditional or conservative, and it is in the sense of its sole focus on heteronormative, monogamous relationships. At the same time, the notion of a new generation of poets who are engaged in fatherhood, social responsibility, and community awareness on a local and global scale is a radical one that ran counter to gender norms and expectations for the men in Randall’s own circles, from the Beat Generation to the supporters of the Cuban Revolution. Motherhood or parenthood was not a requirement for anyone, but neither did it prevent one from participating fully in their own creative and political work. Randall herself would not fully articulate or recognize the lack of feminist analysis in this and other revolutions until years later, but her short 1964 essay evidences early thought on the matter that lay beyond gendered expectations for participants in the movements in which she was most active. In later discussions of her work on El corno emplumado, Randall considers her work on the journal as one of her first big poetic, cultural, and literary bridges of outreach and global exchange so that various communities in various countries could learn about each other without the interference of national or nationalist propaganda. The journal enjoyed modest success from its first issue in 1962 until it was forced to shut down in 1969, in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement and massacre in Tlatelolco. Randall herself was forced to go into hiding and then to Cuba. In an interview filmed in Havana, Cuba in July 1996 (Tape/DVD 26), she recounts that she sent her children to Cuba several months ahead of her. Due to “Cuba’s long and extraordinary history of taking care of children from all around the world,” she felt they would be safer there without her, though she also recalls that it took a long time to re-bond with Anna, her youngest, when they were finally reunited. Shortly after arriving, Randall began the year-long series of over a hundred interviews that would result in Mujeres en revolución (Women in Revolution), published in 1972. She never considered revolutionary work and motherhood to be mutually exclusive activities, but in that same July 1996 video, Randall offers an unsparing account of the impact of her participation in revolutionary movements on herself and her children, thinking particularly of their time in Cuba in the 1970s. While the aims and values of the Cuban revolution are still compelling to her, she says in the same July 1996 interview that “I and many other women understand that sometimes we went to lengths that were a bit too extreme in terms of sacrificing our children’s emotional wellbeing and physical wellbeing.” Randall discloses that she and her children have spoken of this often, and she still thinks a great deal about her choices and their impact on her children. Seeking neither to self-exonerate or self-flagellate, Randall approaches motherhood as she does her photography, her poetry, her social activism, and any other project of great importance to her: an ongoing practice that must be carried out as well as possible, and yet one that is not immune from critique in order to do better and more effective work later on.