Jocelyn OLCOTT

The Revolutions Revolutionary: Concha Michel and Mexicos politics of motherhood

The Mexican folksinger and erstwhile Communist Concha Michel offers an ideal subject for what scholars have dubbed “new biography,” which explores both the interplay between structures and cultures and how individuals developed as fragmented subjects, often seeking to impose narrative coherence on their own lives. Michel, like many subjects of new biography, was an exceptional figure whose life story illuminates the worlds of actors less likely (either by temperament or by status) to make their way into the archives. Her life story, which spans from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the last decade of the twentieth, provides a vehicle for investigating Mexico’s widespread ambivalence about the commodification of both subsistence labour and popular culture that came with its modernisation efforts. We can observe the ways that shifts in prevailing political-economic thought — from late-nineteenth century liberalism to post-revolutionary populist nationalism to mid-century modernisation to post-1968 Marxist dependency theory and back to late-twentieth-century neoliberalism — rested upon assumptions about the unpaid and undervalued labours of social and cultural reproduction. In the Mexican context, these debates inevitably became imbricate with understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje. Michel’s late-life celebrity, particularly among “new-wave” feminists of the 1970s and ‘80s, allows for an investigation into the appeal of maternalist feminism, not as a more traditional variant of its liberal and radical counterparts but rather as a far-reaching refusal of neoliberalism that poses a more thoroughgoing critique than, for example, those based in Marxist thought. Michel’s life story, although riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies as any life is, provides a narrative vehicle to explore these questions on a human scale.