Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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detailed, extensive Consejo Feminista platform as widely as possible among women’s organizations outside Mexico. She sent copies to Elinor Byrns of the Women’s Peace Society and to the U.S. section of WILPF in late 1919. In addition to wanting to share information about Mexico, the CFM solicited advice and support: “We beg of you to communicate with us directly and to send us all your literature, suggestions, programs of action and any information that may aid us in our new organization, and in return, we shall keep you informed of our progress and development.”74 Torres and her colleagues had put considerable thought and effort into crafting their platform, and they resisted several attempts on the part of U.S. women over the years to alter or narrow their focus. A few representatives from peace organizations wanted the CFM to focus solely on disarmament. Other U.S. women contended that the only way for the CFM to achieve its goal was by focusing on suffrage.
Elena Landázuri attempted to counter these incursions in 1921 in an address to the third international WILPF congress in Vienna, in which she emphasized the unique nature of Mexican problems and the need for Mexican solutions to fix them. Knowing she was the first Mexican woman to address a WILPF congress, Landázuri spent a considerable portion of her time outlining the history of Mexico, especially since the start of the Revolution. She explained that the reign of Porfirio Díaz had been an era of progress and development for some Mexicans, but it had cost the majority of Mexicans their land and freedoms. Some revolutionary leaders had tried to implement socialist policies in order to rectify this situation, with some benefits, but as far as Landázuri could judge, reforms that were “imported” from abroad proved largely inadaptable “to our conditions.” On behalf of her compatriots she argued that “We must seek the possibility of social betterment from our own institutions, in forms that arise from the needs of our organizations.” She was not speaking only of socialism; Landázuri implicitly rejected the wholesale imposition of any foreign ideology or system of government. The solutions to Mexican problems would originate in Mexico. “We are responsible for the current disarray of our country,” she asserted, “but I think we recognize that with shame, which is already the first step toward a better future.”
While Landázuri defended Mexican agency, she did not reject the possibility that international groups could offer assistance. She closed with a message to women and men of all nations. If foreigners wanted to “protect” Mexico, they should “take it seriously” among themselves:
Begin by knowing who we are—read our works, enjoy our art, admire our history, and when you know our soul, you can begin to teach us what we want to know. In a family, you don’t leave the children forgotten in a room and only come to realize their existence when they enter the classroom as half-savages and break all the rules. You educate them, you protect them, you guide them. So it is with nations—the young people have the right to question the thinkers, the idealists. Irrigate our virgin and fertile soil with something of the treasure of your love and your wisdom, and with your already skillful hands help us climb to the top.75
Landázuri thus walked a careful line between asserting Mexican autonomy and accepting guidance from groups such as WILPF. Outsiders could not hope to “fix” Mexico simply by rigidly imposing their plans and ideals. If they truly wanted to be useful, they had to learn how best to be useful in Mexico, to Mexicans. At the same time, however, Landázuri’s family metaphor left intact prevalent assumptions about the inherent superiority of some groups over others—Mexicans were still the “children” in need of education. This tension between asserting autonomy and working alongside organizational leaders was common among women trying to challenge imperialist feminism during the interwar period.76
What both Landázuri and Torres demanded from U.S. women, particularly the peace activists, more than anything else was vocal, active opposition to U.S. military interventions in and U.S. economic exploitation of Mexico. In her initial letter to the Women’s Peace Society, Elena Torres stated that the Consejo Feminista had originally been founded in August 1919 “as a spontaneous unit of protest against the constant incursions of American troops across the Mexican border,” and that they were reaching out to U.S. women’s organizations in large part because they hoped U.S. women would speak out against such incursions: “We are especially anxious to come in contact with the various international women’s organizations, that they may know more of Mexico and her conditions and perhaps throw the weight of their opinion against the possible recurrence of any international misunderstandings.”77 Torres was careful not to paint all U.S. Americans with an imperialist brush. The CFM was eager to work with U.S. women, as long as they understood Torres’s belief that “the ongoing threat for Mexico and for all Latin American countries is the boundless greed of a few U.S. imperialists,” who would not hesitate to provoke a war “in order to control Mexican oil.”78 Elena Landázuri made a similar distinction in her address to the WILPF convention: “I must say that if a group of U.S. capitalists is our greatest enemy, we find among the people of the United States our greatest friends.”79
Torres saved her strongest rhetoric for lashing out against economic exploitation by U.S. businesses. In a statement she sent Elinor Byrns to read on her behalf at a conference in Toronto, Torres contended that discrimination and exploitation were common within U.S. companies based in Mexico. U.S. and Mexican workers in the same jobs were compensated differently, treated differently, and given different benefits. Torres cited the mining and petroleum industries as particularly egregious offenders. Mining companies brought technological advancements to regions such as Guanajuato that should have improved not only production but the quality of life for its workers. Instead they brought only “ruin and misery.” Petroleum workers tended to enjoy higher wages, she conceded, but their earnings were offset by extraordinarily high costs of living and a lack of job security. Mexicans were not opposed to progress in methods and machinery, Torres noted, but she questioned the “superiority” of a group of people who brought “the most frightful misery to thousands of families,” and who were willing to sacrifice “human interests before all others.”80 Torres demanded that the WPS, and any other groups seeking an ally in the CFM, “castigate severely all those North American citizens who foment revolutions in other countries solely for the purpose of securing arms sales and maintaining the lives of their factories.”81
Torres’s and Landázuri’s communications with U.S. women proved that they were more than willing to join internationalist ventures, but they expected to be more than just silent partners. The reactions they received indicated that U.S. women, particularly members of the Women’s Peace Society and the U.S. section of WILPF, took the CFM’s concerns seriously, but that they were unlikely to take meaningful action to address them. The WPS lacked the resources and organizational dedication to send Torres much more than their goodwill. Elinor Byrns read Torres’s invective against the “U.S. imperialists” to other members of the society, who asked her to assure Torres “that we are not all of us here eager for profits from petroleum and that we are very much ashamed of the people who want to throw us into war with Mexico.” But, Byrns noted, “I am afraid that the people who are willing to go to war are now in power.”82 The U.S. section of WILPF passed a resolution in August 1920 favoring “constructive and friendly co-operation with Mexico” and opposing armed intervention, but there is no record that they took any further action.83 Both groups likely felt hamstrung by their previous commitments to their own peace programs, and by their lack of money and influence with policy makers, but the fact remains that they did not prioritize the Mexican women’s demands to the same extent they did their own. U.S. women were drawn to Mexico in part because of contentious U.S.-Mexican relations, but they did not condemn U.S. economic imperialism or exploitative business practices, even when expressly asked to do so by Mexican women.
Both U.S. and Mexican women saw promise and possibility in Jane Addams’s new “human internationalism.” The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Women’s Peace Society saw it as a chance to advance their fight for a permanent peace. The Young Women’s Christian Association was eager to extend its mission for social and economic justice to Mexican women and girls. The Pan American International Women’s Committee believed that promoting Pan Americanism among women would lead to greater hemispheric cooperation and harmony. By 1922 three of the four organizations (all except the WPS) seemed poised to solidify their new