“So I have told you the history of
my whole life. Judge me as you will.
There are tremendous differences be-
tween 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. 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.”
Dofia Benita listens intently as this
last chapter, censored from all but the
first limited edition of her autobiogra-
phy published fifty years ago, is read to
her. 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.
Long a part of Mexican popular
history, Benita Galeana has become an
important figure for a new generation
of women activists. When the 1988
electoral “uprising” opened the door
to greater grassroots political action,
women from 19 union and neighbor-
hood 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.
Elaine Burns is a long-time resident
of Mexico City who works with “Mujer
a Mujer,” an organization that fosters
links between U.S. and Mexican women.
The new coalition needed a name.
“Women for Democratic Unity”
wouldn’t do, nor would “Las Adeli-
tas,” (after the legendary guerrilla of
the Mexican Revolution), nor the vari-
ous phrases in Nahuatl that were also
proposed. Finally, one barrio commit-
tee suggested the coalition be named
after a woman like the thousands who
have always formed the invisible back-
bone of the country’s social movements.
They proposed Benita Galeana, one of
the first three women to join the Mexi-
can Communist Party in the 1920s.
Benita, the committee argued, had
struggled like the poor women of to-
day’s cities; the only difference was
that she “managed to save herself from
anonymity by writing her autobiogra-
phy.” Moreover, she was still alive,
and could be coaxed into sharing her
experience with the new movement.
On November 11, 1988, during a
solemn and then raucous ceremony, the
“Benita Galeana” National Women’s
Steering Committee was born. Benita,
who had spent years in reclusion, sud-
denly returned to public life, as speak-
ing invitations began to pour in.
Dofia Benita’s modest house is
crowded with decades of memorabilia
from a life lived and risked in the expec-
tation of a communist revolution in
Mexico. These are the archives of this
“mujer del pueblo,” practically illiter-
ate and ironically kept on the sidelines
of the party she believed in. “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 sys-
tem,” she muses. Vital and self-suffi-
cient 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.” A week
ago, she called the funeral parlor to
come take the measurements for her
coffin, to be black and unadorned.
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. And she writes, probingly, on
her old upright. Lately, an unfinished
poem to Noriega lies curled there, the
last missing piece for what is to be her
third book.
Benita recounts how she taught
herself to write at the age of 36, without
ever having read a book cover to cover.
In the evenings after work, she would
sound out words and then find the let-
ters 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.”
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. The San Ger6nimo of her
memory is a lively haunt of local leg-
ends fabricated out of the corpses, rapes
and stolen gold deposited there with
each coming and going of “the Revolu-
tion.”
Her own domestic world was equally
violent, but smaller and devoid of magic.
Her mother died young, and she was
raised by an elder sister, who kept her
out of school and worked and beat her
harshly. She says those early years
taught her to look at the world with a
cold eye, to survive.
“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. 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. He said nothing, just
grunted, and then disappeared for 10
days. When he came back, his hand was
still bandaged.”
Benita first heard of Mexico City
when she was eight, and she decided at
once it would be her salvation. Illiter-
ate, 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.”
But before she could leave town,
she was “tricked” into a loveless rela-
tionship, outrof which her daughter was
born. The road of sexual “favors”
continued until, at twenty, she made it
to her promised city, leaving her daugh-
ter with a sister in Acapulco.
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. 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.”
Now he was in jail, and members of the
party had come to her apartment to ask
her to speak on his behalf. Though at
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
first she was furious over the trouble
they had caused, she finally agreed. No
sooner did she begin speaking, when
the police pulled up to arrest her and the
other comrades.
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.” A week later, she
was back in Plaza Hidalgo, not only
seeking her comrades’ release, but
protesting the Japanese invasion of
China.
It was a curious encounter. Benita
was working at the “El Viejo Jalisco”
cabaret, a world of “scratched faces,
jackknives and drunken brawls,” sav-
ing money to send for her daughter.
The Communist Party in 1926 was in
its eighth fitful year of existence. In-
structions arrived by boat from
Moscow, and stem discipline, centrali-
zation and countless purges were the
order of the day.
Yet for all the awkwardness of this
union, the dream was compelling, and
Benita gave herself to the task. Her
story-pieced together here from her
autobiography, unpublished manu-
scripts 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.
“I felt honored when the party asked
me to sell the Machete (the party news-
paper). 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. But, we had to make sacri-
fices so that the Communist Party would
not lose touch with the masses. It was
the task we had been entrusted with.
“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.
“When it was decided to move from
the streets into the workplaces, we went
to the La Lagunilla garment district.
We didn’t really know what to do. 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
Communists have come to support you
in this decisive battle. We invite you toorganize and struggle against your
bosses!’ But the women weren’t inter-
ested; they just left us standing there
talking to the empty street.
“We kept going back until finally
we were able to gather a crowd to-
gether. Then we had to hold lightning
rallies to escape the police. Those were
the first steps we Communist women
took, always learning from our own
experiences. We went on to organize
other workplaces, developing workers
organizations-all the while in and out
of jail.
“Refugio (Cuca) Garcia rose within
the party to become the leader of the
women’s struggle. We named her the
Women’s General Secretary, opened
an office, and our movement began to
grow. Our first big marches were for
Social Security, work for the unem-
ployed, land and water for the campesi-
nos, and the unionization of govern-
ment employees. We met with teachers
and students. We went to the markets.
We organized the wives of the miners,
the railroad workers, the oil workers.
We sent out commissions all over the
country and even developed contacts
with women in other countries.
“Then one day Cuca called us in to
talk about a new demand: the vote. We
agreed, and we were back on the street
again, marching with giant banners
demanding equal rights for women. The
government blasted us with water from
fire hoses.
“When Cuca presented our petition
to the Legislature, they laughed at her
-‘The vote for women? Where did
you Communists come up with such a
crazy idea?’–and tried to keep her
from speaking. The rest of us rallied
outside, making speeches and throwing
stones at the building until dark. A lot of
women learned how to struggle during
that period.
“During the marches of the 1930s,
our strength was so great that I felt the
party would take power at any moment.
When C.rdenas became president, we
could finally operate in the open. He
took on many of our demands as his
own, and a lot of Communists got jobs
in the government. 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. We got lazy. We
forgot how to struggle.”
Neglected By the Party
Benita never held an official posi-
tion in the party. She claims power and
prestige never interested her, that she
preferred to be with and among the
masses. But in her 1940 autobiography,
the explanation is tinged with bitter-
ness: “I have been jailed 58 times for
the struggle. I have been hungry, have
almost lost my sight, have risked my
life for the party. But I am nothing but
a politically backward, rank-and-file
member, a nobody in the party. The
party leadership never attempted to
stimulate me to become more aware
and capable. They left me alone with
my ignorance.
“In my years of active struggle, I
managed to win sympathy among the
people. 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.
The party could have made better use of
me, by orienting me and helping me
develop myself. But they never did.”
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 back-
room agreement to support the ruling
party’s conservative candidate, Miguel
Alemin, to succeed President Avila
Camacho. She considers that agree-
ment to have sounded the party’s death
knell, particularly after dissident Com-
munists were fired on by Alemin’s
police during the 1952 May Day march.
Benita withdrew from politics for
more than four decades. Now, two
generations later, she has come to be a
symbol not of intrigue and rivalry but of
unity. An array of poor and working
women-garment and domestic work-
ers, residents of the city’s slums and
members of Christian base communi-
ties-pin small black yam braids to
their collars, the insignia of the national
women’s coalition.
“Sowing Benitas”
In their post-earthquake housing
project, the Pefia Morelos Neighbor-
hood 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. But we have to learn to say ‘I
want to speak now.’ We have to de-
velop our minds.”
A matronly woman in a blue apron,
her hair greying toward Benita’s white,
looks around hesitantly and then be-
gins: “When I helped negotiate the
credit for our housing, people criticized
me for being out there in the middle of
all the men….”
Another woman describes the fear
she felt at a recent demonstration at-
tacked by police dogs. Benita looks up,
takes a long draft on her home-rolled
filterless, and responds: “Courage is an
illusion. I always felt fear. I could al-
ways feel my soul knot up in my throat.
But one day I found out something very
important: The other side feels fear,
too.
“That was in 1946. We had a num-
ber of companieras in prison, and we
had exhausted all legal means of ob-
taining their release. Our cell decided to
organize an assault on Miguel Alemdn.
There were six of us who said we were
willing to risk our lives to do it. We
were afraid. 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.
“As it turned out, all the others
backed out and left me hiding there
alone in the alley as Alemin’s car pulled
in. When the door opened and Alemdn
stepped out, I jumped up and grabbed
him. It was one of those moments that
last forever. Alemin’s Adam’s apple
jumped under my hand as I held his
collar. 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. None of us served time for that
action, probably because they felt so
humiliated by an unarmed woman.”
Shyness dispelled, the women lean
in now, wanting to know about her
children, how she combined her family
life with her activism. Her answer is
succinct: Her one daughter died at 27.
No questions follow, so she continues:
“The struggle brings such tremendous
satisfaction that it makes us forget about
our husbands and children. 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.”
It’s dark now. Older children come
in to whisper in their mother’s ear.
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.” She
thanks the women for “giving me life,
for making my old age beautiful.”
The morning’s wash, bright as her
flowers, hangs drying in the sudden
sun. Benita stands at her back door,
closes her eyes and takes in the clean
air. When she turns inside, she recalls,
“I’ll never forget a perfume I brought
back from the Soviet Union: mimosa
blossom, it was called. It was divine. I
put it on only when I really wanted to
caress myself with something special,
and it lasted for years.”
Ochre shadows of a couple in vari-
ous poses grace her breakfast room
walls, watercolors done by a friend
from photos taken during the early years
of her marriage to Communist intellec-
tual Mario Gil. They met while she was
writing her autobiography, “exploring
my past to recover from so many rela-
tionships which had ended in abandon-
ment and failure.” With Gil, she says,
she found her hoped-for “love which
does not destroy the personality, but
ennobles it.” Their marriage lasted 38
years until his death in 1974.
Benita marvels at how her passion-
ate faith in the revolution continues to
thrive after so many unexpected dec-
ades. She says she maintains her faith in
the Communist Party (which she sug-
gests may still be alive somewhere), as
well as “amor politico”–an attach-
ment to a host of heroes like Fidel
Castro, Qaddafi and Noriega.
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 Gal-
eana as the namesake of the national
women’s coalition. Benita was an agi-
tator, they say, not a leader, and she
showed no particular interest in
women’s issues. In hushed voices,
moreover, her aging comrades-all re-
tired professionals-remark disparag-
ingly on the numerous affairs Benita
purportedly had with party members.
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 iden-
tifies. Through skits, coalition mem-
bers reenact her life as their own. The
scenes of childhood violence, her mi-
gration to the city and sexual exploita-
tion, are a prelude to a discussion of
their own experiences.
Dofia Benita confesses that she has
still never read a book cover to cover.
But since her return to public life, she
rarely refuses an invitation to speak.
Watching the resurgent groups of
Mexican women grapple with social
issues makes her believe that she-and
they-have turned the tables on his-
tory: “Miguel Alemin has been dead
for 15 years, and everyone’s forgotten
about him except his son. Who remem-
bers Avila Camacho? Yet Benita is
alive and strong, and many other Beni-
tas are being born.”
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