MEXICO Benita Galeana Returns

...Popular History Benita was born in 1904 in San Ger6nimo, in the state of Guerrero, to a father whose downward mobility was hastened by bad luck and alcoholic generosity...

...We went on to organize other workplaces, developing workers organizations-all the while in and out of jail...

...Then one day Cuca called us in to talk about a new demand: the vote...

...Meanwhile, she "sows Benitas," meeting with the numerous local groups that make up the national women's coalition, the broadest in Mexico since Benita herself helped organize the United Front for Women's Rights in the 1930s...

...Refugio (Cuca) Garcia rose within the party to become the leader of the women's struggle...

...Those were the first steps we Communist women took, always learning from our own experiences...

...When she turns inside, she recalls, "I'll never forget a perfume I brought back from the Soviet Union: mimosa blossom, it was called...

...In the manuscript she is compiling for her third book, Benita describes her expulsion from the party in 1946, when the Communist leadership made a backroom agreement to support the ruling party's conservative candidate, Miguel Alemin, to succeed President Avila Camacho...

...In hushed voices, moreover, her aging comrades-all retired professionals-remark disparagingly on the numerous affairs Benita purportedly had with party members...

...We named her the Women's General Secretary, opened an office, and our movement began to grow...

...I looked him up and down and even had time to say, 'Our lives are worth nothing.' That's when I realized that we all feel fear, even those who carry the weapons, those who wield power...

...And she writes, probingly, on her old upright...

...I felt honored when the party asked me to sell the Machete (the party newspaper...

...In my years of active struggle, I managed to win sympathy among the people...

...The scenes of childhood violence, her migration to the city and sexual exploitation, are a prelude to a discussion of their own experiences...

...Lately, an unfinished poem to Noriega lies curled there, the last missing piece for what is to be her third book...

...Yet for all the awkwardness of this union, the dream was compelling, and Benita gave herself to the task...

...Now he was in jail, and members of the party had come to her apartment to ask her to speak on his behalf...

...When it was decided to move from the streets into the workplaces, we went to the La Lagunilla garment district...

...Watching the resurgent groups of Mexican women grapple with social issues makes her believe that she-and they-have turned the tables on history: "Miguel Alemin has been dead for 15 years, and everyone's forgotten about him except his son...

...But they never did...

...During the marches of the 1930s, our strength was so great that I felt the party would take power at any moment...

...I could always feel my soul knot up in my throat...

...they just left us standing there talking to the empty street...

...Now, two generations later, she has come to be a symbol not of intrigue and rivalry but of unity...

...Benita stands at her back door, closes her eyes and takes in the clean air...

...Older children come in to whisper in their mother's ear...

...We organized the wives of the miners, the railroad workers, the oil workers...

...I got up very quietly and grabbed one of the knives I used to kill pigs, and, the next time he reached for me, I got him...

...The road of sexual "favors" continued until, at twenty, she made it to her promised city, leaving her daughter with a sister in Acapulco...

...Benita first heard of Mexico City when she was eight, and she decided at once it would be her salvation...

...Through skits, coalition members reenact her life as their own...

...It was a curious encounter...

...the only difference was that she "managed to save herself from anonymity by writing her autobiography...

...We got lazy...

...It was one of those moments that last forever...

...These are the archives of this "mujer del pueblo," practically illiterate and ironically kept on the sidelines of the party she believed in...

...We kept going back until finally we were able to gather a crowd together...

...Benita withdrew from politics for more than four decades...

...Shyness dispelled, the women lean in now, wanting to know about her children, how she combined her family life with her activism...

...When C.rdenas became president, we could finally operate in the open...

...Yet the roots of her limitations are the source of her strength: She is a "mujer del pueblo," a woman with whom an emerging generation of "grassroots feminists" strongly identifies...

...m The new women's movement brings together grassroots activists, union mamhare ond mirfddir.rlnc feminists nf 1al a es NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS A number of feminist scholars and surviving party contemporaries have questioned the choice of Benita Galeana as the namesake of the national women's coalition...

...A week later, she was back in Plaza Hidalgo, not only seeking her comrades' release, but protesting the Japanese invasion of China...

...Dofia Benita's modest house is crowded with decades of memorabilia from a life lived and risked in the expectation of a communist revolution in Mexico...

...None of us served time for that action, probably because they felt so humiliated by an unarmed woman...

...and Mexican women...

...There are tremendous differences between the Benita Galeana of San Ger6nimo, the Benita that wandered from man to man, the Benita of the cabaret, and the Benita Galeana that I am today...

...That was in 1946...

...There were six of us who said we were willing to risk our lives to do it...

...The rest of us rallied outside, making speeches and throwing stones at the building until dark...

...But one day I found out something very important: The other side feels fear, too...

...He took on many of our demands as his own, and a lot of Communists got jobs in the government...

...Who remembers Avila Camacho...

...Vital and self-sufficient at 86, she lives independently on a pension from the postal service job she sought when she "made it to 35 and they hadn't killed me yet...

...When the door opened and Alemdn stepped out, I jumped up and grabbed him...

...Another woman describes the fear she felt at a recent demonstration attacked by police dogs...

...The morning's wash, bright as her flowers, hangs drying in the sudden sun...

...But since her return to public life, she rarely refuses an invitation to speak...

...I never VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 1990) 7A young Benita: one of the first women in the Communist Party dreamed I would grow old in this system," she muses...

...Instructions arrived by boat from Moscow, and stem discipline, centralization and countless purges were the order of the day...

...Though at NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS first she was furious over the trouble they had caused, she finally agreed...

...I have been hungry, have almost lost my sight, have risked my life for the party...

...Ochre shadows of a couple in various poses grace her breakfast room walls, watercolors done by a friend from photos taken during the early years of her marriage to Communist intellectual Mario Gil...

...It's very personal, but at the same time it makes us want to share what little we have, and it teaches us new ways of being men and women together...

...We stood on boxes at the doors of the sweatshops and started our speeches as the women left work: 'You are being exploited, the sweatshops are hell...

...We were afraid...

...When Cuca presented our petition to the Legislature, they laughed at her -'The vote for women...

...All of a sudden the government was giving us maternity hospitals and social security, and no one even recognized that Communists had paved the way...

...Benita marvels at how her passionate faith in the revolution continues to thrive after so many unexpected decades...

...They met while she was writing her autobiography, "exploring my past to recover from so many relationships which had ended in abandonment and failure...

...Elaine Burns is a long-time resident of Mexico City who works with "Mujer a Mujer," an organization that fosters links between U.S...

...Neglected By the Party Benita never held an official position in the party...

...We Communists have come to support you in this decisive battle...

...A matronly woman in a blue apron, her hair greying toward Benita's white, looks around hesitantly and then begins: "When I helped negotiate the credit for our housing, people criticized me for being out there in the middle of all the men...

...She thanks the women for "giving me life, for making my old age beautiful...

...We went to the markets...

...We met with teachers and students...

...They proposed Benita Galeana, one of the first three women to join the Mexican Communist Party in the 1920s...

...Benita recounts how she taught herself to write at the age of 36, without ever having read a book cover to cover...

...He said nothing, just grunted, and then disappeared for 10 days...

...Alemin's Adam's apple jumped under my hand as I held his collar...

...When the 1988 electoral "uprising" opened the door to greater grassroots political action, women from 19 union and neighborhood organizations, leftist political parties and middle-class feminist groups formed a national coalition to demand democracy, lower food prices and an end to violence against women...

...The Communist Party in 1926 was in its eighth fitful year of existence...

...But, we had to make sacrifices so that the Communist Party would not lose touch with the masses...

...An array of poor and working women-garment and domestic workers, residents of the city's slums and members of Christian base communities-pin small black yam braids to their collars, the insignia of the national women's coalition...

...The new coalition needed a name...

...The night before, her compahiero, a taxi driver, had told her that he joined the Communist Party "because in Russia everything belongs to the workers...

...Moreover, she was still alive, and could be coaxed into sharing her experience with the new movement...

...She says those early years taught her to look at the world with a cold eye, to survive...

...We had a number of companieras in prison, and we had exhausted all legal means of obtaining their release...

...Then we had to hold lightning rallies to escape the police...

...After years of struggle -against Nature, against my family, against men, against society and the state-I now feel like my life, my youth, is just beginning...

...I put it on only when I really wanted to caress myself with something special, and it lasted for years...

...Benita was an agitator, they say, not a leader, and she showed no particular interest in women's issues...

...A week ago, she called the funeral parlor to come take the measurements for her coffin, to be black and unadorned...

...Two years later, on May 1, 1926, she found herself standing on a fruit crate in the Plaza Hidalgo, speaking in public for the first time in her life...

...But we have to learn to say 'I want to speak now.' We have to develop our minds...

...When he came back, his hand was still bandaged...

...But I am nothing but a politically backward, rank-and-file member, a nobody in the party...

...In the evenings after work, she would sound out words and then find the letters on the keys of her Olivetti (the only remnant of a ruined relationship), slowly composing the book-entitled simply "Benita''--that would "save her from anonymity...

...It was divine...

...It's dark now...

...Our cell decided to organize an assault on Miguel Alemdn...

...She considers that agreement to have sounded the party's death knell, particularly after dissident Communists were fired on by Alemin's police during the 1952 May Day march...

...Benita was working at the "El Viejo Jalisco" cabaret, a world of "scratched faces, jackknives and drunken brawls," saving money to send for her daughter...

...I always felt fear...

...The government blasted us with water from fire hoses...

...Benita looks up, takes a long draft on her home-rolled filterless, and responds: "Courage is an illusion...

...No sooner did she begin speaking, when the police pulled up to arrest her and the other comrades...

...Long a part of Mexican popular history, Benita Galeana has become an important figure for a new generation of women activists...

...On November 11, 1988, during a solemn and then raucous ceremony, the "Benita Galeana" National Women's Steering Committee was born...

...Our first big marches were for Social Security, work for the unemployed, land and water for the campesinos, and the unionization of government employees...

...Her story-pieced together here from her autobiography, unpublished manuscripts and interviews--offers a vision of the daily, and frequently thankless, commitment that helped give rise to the short-lived flourishing of the mass movements of the 1930s...

...During those three days in jail, she became convinced of the need to "link my own trial of misery and hunger with the workers' cause...

...No questions follow, so she continues: "The struggle brings such tremendous satisfaction that it makes us forget about our husbands and children...

...Often the workers would insult us, though, saying 'Hey, good looking, I'll buy your newspaper if you'll go out with me.' We'd leave on the verge of tears when our class brothers treated us that way...

...Yet Benita is alive and strong, and many other Benitas are being born...

...Their marriage lasted 38 years until his death in 1974...

...We invite you toorganize and struggle against your bosses!' But the women weren't interested...

...But before she could leave town, she was "tricked" into a loveless relationship, outrof which her daughter was born...

...We sent out commissions all over the country and even developed contacts with women in other countries...

...Her mother died young, and she was raised by an elder sister, who kept her out of school and worked and beat her harshly...

...They left me alone with my ignorance...

...But in her 1940 autobiography, the explanation is tinged with bitterness: "I have been jailed 58 times for the struggle...

...Illiterate, but refusing to be trapped into a life of housework, as an adolescent she discerned her only means of getting what she wanted: "I knew that all I had in life was the fact that I was a virgin, and I needed to take care of my only capital to have a chance to be happy...

...Dofia Benita confesses that she has still never read a book cover to cover...

...At that time, the party had very few people, so I soon became involved in everything-rallies, strike support, recruiting factory workers, distributing propaganda, hanging posters...

...A lot of women learned how to struggle during that period...

...As it turned out, all the others backed out and left me hiding there alone in the alley as Alemin's car pulled in...

...The party leadership never attempted to stimulate me to become more aware and capable...

...She says she maintains her faith in the Communist Party (which she suggests may still be alive somewhere), as well as "amor politico"--an attachment to a host of heroes like Fidel Castro, Qaddafi and Noriega...

...The San Ger6nimo of her memory is a lively haunt of local legends fabricated out of the corpses, rapes and stolen gold deposited there with each coming and going of "the Revolution...

...Where did you Communists come up with such a crazy idea?'--and tried to keep her from speaking...

...We forgot how to struggle...

...All the way out I kept saying, 'It's still not too late for us to VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 2 (AUGUST 1990) 9 Women are at the heart of the urban popular movement turn back, you know.' But we kept on going...

...With Gil, she says, she found her hoped-for "love which does not destroy the personality, but ennobles it...

...Her own domestic world was equally violent, but smaller and devoid of magic...

...Finally, one barrio committee suggested the coalition be named after a woman like the thousands who have always formed the invisible backbone of the country's social movements...

...At rallies people would shout: 'Let the compariera with the braids speak!' The people trusted me because I spoke in a way that they understood...

...It was the task we had been entrusted with...

...Sowing Benitas" In their post-earthquake housing project, the Pefia Morelos Neighborhood Union women's group receives Dofia Benita with a basket of fruit...

...She asks the women present to speak first, then she nudges the silence, patiently, but with conviction: "I, too, entered the "I never expected to grow old in this system" movement not knowing how to read or write...

...We agreed, and we were back on the street again, marching with giant banners demanding equal rights for women...

...Her answer is succinct: Her one daughter died at 27...

...Benita, who had spent years in reclusion, suddenly returned to public life, as speaking invitations began to pour in...

...Dofia Benita concludes: "You know, old age is something we never gave a thought to in the struggle, the fact that, after all, we each end up alone...

...Her dark eyes look up from the page and rest on the reader's face in the stillness of scrapbooks and bundles of papers in her study...

...Women for Democratic Unity" wouldn't do, nor would "Las Adelitas," (after the legendary guerrilla of the Mexican Revolution), nor the various phrases in Nahuatl that were also proposed...

...We didn't really know what to do...

...One night I woke up to feel a hand moving over me like it was looking for something...

...I thought it might be one of my little sisters, but when I grabbed it I realized that it was Pedro, my sister's husband...

...Dofia Benita listens intently as this last chapter, censored from all but the first limited edition of her autobiography published fifty years ago, is read to her...

...She claims power and prestige never interested her, that she preferred to be with and among the masses...

...The party could have made better use of me, by orienting me and helping me develop myself...

...Benita, the committee argued, had struggled like the poor women of today's cities...