This roundtable (Session I) celebrates the contributions of Dr. Mary Kay Vaughan. Dr. Vaughan specialized in the cultural, gender, and educational history of modern Mexico. Her book, Cultural Politics in Revolution (Arizona, 1997) received the Herbert Eugene Bolton Prize (CLAH) and the Bryce Wood Award for best book LASA). She was also the author of The State, Education and Social Class in Mexico, 1880-1928 (DeKalb, 1982) and Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City´s Rebel Generation (Duke, 2014). Vaughan co-edited three volumes on culture, gender, and women in modern Mexico (published in English and Spanish). She served as editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review and as president of the Conference on Latin American History. She was a mentor to a wide range of students across national boundaries. At the time of her passing, Dr. Vaughan was emerita professor of history at the University of Maryland.

The roundtable will be of interest to historians of gender, biography, and state formation. Three panelists will speak to Vaughan’s contributions to the history of post-revolutionary Mexico, gender, and new biography. First, Vaughan was at the forefront of an important shift in Mexican historiography that highlighted how everyday people participated, from the ground up, to the construction of a new Mexican state during the revolutionary period. To understand these interactions and the dialogue between state agents and local communities, Vaughan conducted case studies that dissect how these exchanges and negotiations took place among peasants, women, teachers, priests, and state officials. This analysis stands as one of her most significant contributions.

The second panelist will highlight Vaughan’s contributions to the study of women and gender. In her acceptance speech for the CLAH Distinguished Service Award (2016) Vaughan made an impassioned call that we continue to attend to the ways the history of women and gender transform accepted paradigms of Mexican historical narratives. Her commitment to the power of women and gender studies dates back to the 1970s and continued to inform her research on Mexican educational policy, class relations, and agrarian politics (1982, 1997). In Women of the Mexican Countryside (with Heather Fowler-Salamini, Arizona 1994) opened the space for conversations about the role of women in rural communities. The edited volume Sex in Revolution (with Jocelyn Olcott and Gabriela Cano, Duke, 2006) showcased the momentum she had been instrumental in building in Mexican history of women and gender. Her most recent book, Pepe Zuñiga (2014), charted shifting conceptions of masculinity.

Third, Vaughan made key contributions to demonstrating the value of biography in writing Mexican history. Vaughan, as so often with her publications in other historical fields, was at the cutting edge of the rebirth of biography in Mexico, influenced by new methodologies offered by gender studies and what in the US and Europe has been called the biographical turn or the “new biography.” Her path breaking and compassionate biography of the Oaxacan painter Pepe Zúñiga (Duke 2014) follows the post WWII transformation of Mexican masculinity through the development of Pepe’s subjectivity.