Women, Labor and Music: A Social History of Women Musicians in Mexico City (1920-1980)

Abstract

Local and global events such as the Mexican Revolution, feminist movements, and the rise of capitalism entailed institutional, familial, and gender role reassessments from the late 19th to the 21st centuries. Worldwide, feminist movements opened the door to debating new education purposes for women and, consequently, their incorporation into the job market in various fields. Different organizations responded to the question of what proper occupations for females were from moral, social, religious, physical, and psychological approaches if they incorporated into the job market and simultaneously would be in charge of the household. Whereas professions such as law and medicine were socially considered masculine, the arts were widely accepted as a proper activity for women, including for the Mexican government in the 1910s. Many women decided to follow the music path as a financial activity in this context, becoming partially or totally financially autonomous without disrupting social expectations of femininity, as law and medicine careers did. Nevertheless, feminists, such as Hermila Galindo, believed that art-like professions were “the cruelest executioners for women” since they reproduced past and constrained notions of women’s abilities in the professional and education fields. This dissertation analyzes some of the spaces where women participated actively since the 19th century under these tensions, including music recordings, teaching, entrepreneurship, and community orchestras, all economic, social, and cultural spaces overseen by traditional historiography of Mexico’s 20th century. The conclusions drawn from this research are relevant not only to the field of music but also to non-music scenes, providing a comprehensive understanding of how feminine and masculine notions were crafted, contested, resisted, and experienced in Mexico’s 20th century. The Mexican state faced the paradox of maintaining traditional gender roles and seeming like a modern society, especially to the U.S. The Mexican modern woman was educated but still in charge of the domestic realm. Female musicians navigated in those paradoxes but also created specific strategies to do it successfully, one of those embracing modernity by performing Western classical European music, aligning with the Mexican state discourses of cultural progress and nationalism, and reproducing the binary understanding of Mexican musical identity as a place that oscillated between tradition and cultural evolution. Although music was sanctioned and socially viewed as a feminine activity, the histories of women prove a more nuanced approach to how, why, and when a feminine profession, such as music, defeminized females when they deployed outstanding capacities. For example, female virtuosi’s personal lives were negatively impacted when they pursued a public career, traveled around the world to tour and study, and became entrepreneurs and breadwinners. Who were those female musicians who crossed the limits of the musical masculine dominion, but most importantly, how and why did they manage to do it? The question of how certain women, and no others, could navigate a male-dominated world is approached throughout the study of a set of sources that, first, report, in general, the experiences of middle and lower-class female musicians and second, enlighten in particular, the biographies of two female virtuoso, pianist Esperanza Cruz de Vasconcelos and violinist Celia Treviño Carranza. Each set of sources informs how social conditions, such as economic, political, and financial access, made it possible for virtuoso females to surpass some patriarchal structures, thereby significantly impacting societal norms and expectations. This dissertation utilizes gender, women’s history, and critical archival theory that understand archives as sites of power, and a diversity of sources provides a comprehensive, diachrony, and synchronic approach. The sources comprise private collections, periodicals, magazines, music recordings, novels, songs, poems, and current debates among female activist musicians and collectives on social media.