Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy by Burke Carolyn

Author:Burke, Carolyn [Burke, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1996-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

12

Mexico

(1917–18)

FEW AMERICANS, and fewer modernists, knew much about Mexico in 1917. D. H. Lawrence had not yet celebrated Mexican mornings, artists had not yet colonized the hilltowns, and the myth of Mexico as unspoiled alternative to civilization had not yet taken hold. Those who ventured south of the border before the revolution had gone to make their fortunes or escape trouble. In 1913, when Mabel followed Reed there, he recalled, she had hoped to find in Pancho Villa “a sort of male Gertrude Stein, or a least a Mexican Stieglitz”; to her, all insurgents were part of “the great world-movement.” By the autumn of 1917, few could afford Mabel’s naïveté. In New York it was said that while the great days of the revolution had passed, anti-Americanism was rife, and scattered outlaws still took pot shots at gringos.

Even among Village radicals, few understood the course of the revolution. Thanks to Reed’s reporting, everyone knew of Pancho Villa, whose stronghold in the north included cavalry troops of cowboys, bandits, and cattle rustlers. They had also heard of Villa’s counterpart in the south, Emiliano Zapata, whose peasants, armed with homemade explosives, sought to take back the land from the hacienda owners. Those who followed the news remembered the American invasion of Veracruz in 1914 and Pershing’s failed attempt to chase Villa across the border two years later. What captured the popular imagination, however, was not the changing course of Wilson’s Mexican policy but tales of trains blown up, peasant-soldiers followed by their soldadera sweethearts, and Americans held for ransom by “anarchists” in woven sandals and broad-brimmed sombreros.

By the time the Constitutionalist Party established a coalition excluding the insurgents, most Americans had lost interest in Mexico—except as a haven from military service. Since the spring of 1917, relations with the United States had improved following the election of Carranza, whose insistence on Mexican sovereignty commanded Wilson’s grudging respect. At the same time, Carranza was known to be pro-German. Mexican officials frequented the German Club, German officers advised the Mexican Army, and it was largely because of Carranza’s stubborn anti-Americanism that the Germans had tried earlier that year to enlist Mexico’s allegiance by promising the return of the lost border states. Although Carranza had disavowed this scheme, radicals contemplating trips to Mexico were told that once across the border it was safer to pose as alemán than to identify as American.

Mina’s knowledge of the situation was slight. She was setting off as much to get away from a life that no longer sustained her as to explore new territory. Her visions of spiritual fulfillment had evaporated in the repressive atmosphere that winter, when the celestial city turned cold and gray. Shortly after her thirty-fifth birthday, one of those markers when one decides that some risks are worth taking, she had made up her mind to go.

There was little to do until they reached the border. There, one changed to the Mexican National Railways, whose armored cars and military convoys may not have been reassuring.

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