Women are increasingly recognized as important participants in every aspect of Mexican history, yet they are less often presented as central actors. This session presents the recent work of four scholars who have brought women to the center of key activities.

If sustenance is the foundation of life, without which nothing else happens, then making tortillas was long the most important foundational work in Mexican life. Aurora Gómez Galvarriato explores women’s endless labors bent over metates to make masa and tortillas, just the beginning of their daily efforts to feed families. She then turns to how the twentieth-century invention of molinos de nixtamal liberated them for other household labors—or other roles in society.

Women have been central to market life from pre-Hispanic time to the present, pivotal to gaining supplemental earnings for rural families—and to supplying cities and towns. Rebecca Andrews Barton engages the market women of Xochimilco, the historic center of rich chinampa cultivation by indigenous families. They daily traveled canals to deliver fruits, vegetables, and flowers to Mexico City markets—drawing cash incomes that made them central to family life and community integration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Mexico’s revolutionary conflicts and transformations, women are regularly portrayed as supporting actors—and victims. John Tutino details how in the revolutionary risings across the Bajío that began with the Hidalgo revolt in 1810 and led to the break with Spain in 1821, women made themselves essential sustainers of popular forces. When silver capitalism collapsed as nation making began, they kept leading roles in family production for decades. As the same revolutionary conflicts broke the power of established landed clans, women pressed men aside to combat oligarchic declines. And when mining revived to reach new heights in Guanajuato in the 1840s and 1850s, doña Francisca de Paula Pérez Gálvez led the way.

When migration al norte became a defining aspect of Mexican history and life during the twentieth century, men searching for labor and other work have been presumed leading actors. Larisa Veloz reveals how women were primary planners and participants in early, often-circular migrations before 1930, how they led in negotiating often-forced repatriations during the depression of the 1930s, and how the bi-national treaties of the bracero that began in the 1940s aimed to privilege men’s labor migrations—and women continued to come north, sustaining families and making new communities in undocumented crossings.