Revolutionary Women, Football-Playing Women, and Lola la trailera: Some Political Uses of Mexican Imagery, 1920–70

This paper explores the long-term history of a Mexican visual image: the physically powerful urban single woman.  Beginning in the 1920s, when high-art and commercial media were filled with depictions of white elite women engaging in sports and other vigorous physical activities, these images evolved into the 1970s film and television comic figure of the tough working-class mestiza doing a man's physical labor, most famously in the movies about Lola la trailera.  This stereotype changed over time in response to changes in the realities of Mexican life, but throughout this period it also offered Mexican women an alternative to the realities they faced, and thus became a site of political tension and political opportunity in struggles around gender ideology.