1968

Although we did not meet until 1990, Mary Kay and I were both born as historians of Mexico in the 1968 student movement. Incensed by the police violence unleashed against Vietnam War protesters at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in late August 1968 and inspired by Mexican students braving riot squads and tanks to demand a political dialogue with an authoritarian regime, we were drawn to the struggles of Latin Americans for social justice. Having already changed my major to the History of Latin America, during the summer of 1968, I was studying at the School for Foreign Students at the National University of Mexico, making up the final credits to graduate. So, by chance, I found myself in the eye of the storm and got to see the movement up close and personal (my boyfriend, later husband, briefly was a political prisoner). Mary Kay, having graduated from Cornell, was initiating her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a concentration in Latin American History. She explained, “I read about the Mexican students on the exploding University of Wisconsin campus in the aftermath of the police attack on protestors at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. I did not know the Mexican students or their concrete demands but I knew they were us.”

Understanding that student rebellion, what it represented for Mexico, became her lifelong intellectual quest. It led her to become, first, an historian of Mexican education and, then, of revolution and social justice movements; of peasant struggles; of culture, media, and gender; and lastly of biography. She would bring it all together in her final book, the biography of one of those student rebels. The intensity of her engagement with 1968 was still manifest in an essay she wrote after her retirement, “Mexico 1968.” For her, as for many of us, “the movement detonated a long, uneven, still incomplete democratization of Mexican politics, society, and culture” that we needed to understand. While Luis González de Alba, one of its leaders, lived 1968 as a “festive celebration of new liberties,” Michael Soldatenko interpreted it as a Bakhtinian carnival, a world turned upside down. And so it was on campus: the demonstrations were exuberant and joyously subversive, truly carnival-like, as students demanded “di-á-lo-go” as the police helicopters circled above us. On the streets of Mexico, outside the safety of the campus, I watched from the sidelines as that same raucous energy turned into students’ “fury for liberty, justice, and transparency.” It sparked Mary Kay: “As a historian of Mexican education I wanted to understand the socialization of this generation,” her generation, one that now included many new groups, “women, youth, people of color, gays, urban punks, the heretofore mostly mute and marginalized indigenous people.”Footnote ² As her friend Carlos Monsiváis, eminent cultural critic, noted, 1968 was the “seedbed” of Mexico’s civil society that eventually broke open an authoritarian political regime.

Early Life and Career

Mary Kay Vaughan was born to John T. Vaughan and Janet Heene on 30 August 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up, with her sister Nancy in the wealthy suburb of Shaker Heights. After the death of her mother, she was sent to boarding school. Those were hard years, but she remembered the head mistress fondly, the woman who taught her the adage that she frequently shared not only with her daughter, Alicia, but with her friends—“Life is hard by the yard, but by the inch it’s a cinch”—so very Mary Kay, positive and upbeat. After attending Cornell University, where she graduated in 1964 with a B.A. in History, she completed her graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, obtaining her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1970 and 1973 in Latin American History. In 1974, she joined the History Department of the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle (UIC). While there, she met Chicano artist and activist, José González, whom she married in 1976 (d. 2022). They had one child, Alicia González. After their divorce, she married Dr. Harold Feinberg in 1986 (d. 1996).

At UIC, she served as Director of Latin American and Latino Studies on various occasions and as Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department. She continued the political activism of her graduate school days, especially working with Latinx students and in the Latinx community furthering the fight for social and political justice. Twice during this period, she held a visiting professorship at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Avanzados (Cinestav) in Mexico City and once was a guest professor at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP). In 2000, she moved to the University of Maryland, where together with Barbara Weinstein, she edited of the Hispanic American Historical Review between 2002 and 2007. She participated in the organization of the 2003 and 2006 Congress of Mexican, United States, and Canadian historians, as well as the 2010 meeting of the International Colloquium on the History of Women and Gender held at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. She served as vice president and then president of the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), her term ending in 2011. In 2016, now retired and professor emeritus, the CLAH honored her with its Distinguished Service Award.

Her scholarship and mentoring were inseparable from her commitment to social justice and political activism. According to Marc Zimmerman, at UIC she never failed to speak “up publicly in defense of Latina/o access to higher education and never wavered in her support for the LARES [Latin American Recruitment and Educational Services], sometimes at the expense of how she was viewed by colleagues and campus leaders.” A woman of strong convictions, Mary Kay did not suffer fools and could be quite outspoken in challenging others. She vigorously supported those battles in which she believed, but having lived in Mexico, she did not romanticize popular struggles (or the Mexican Revolution).

Scholarship

As Heather Fowler-Salamini later noted, Mary Kay Vaughan’s “three monographs and multiple co-edited books and articles have been critical in the reshaping of Mexican historiography by introducing a more gendered, culturally diverse, and bottom-up perspective.” Her scholarship was simply pathbreaking, a fact recognized not only by colleagues but also by numerous institutions. She received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (Fulbright), and the Social Science Research Council and grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright Hays Program, and the Illinois Humanities Council. She was, as Peter Guardino declared, “one hell of an historian, someone who took on difficult questions, did terrific research, and wrote with a combination of analytical clarity and empathy for historical subjects, living and dead, that is very uncommon. She was not just a great person to know, she was a true giant.”

Mary Kay initiated her research going right to what she believed to be the source: the role of education in the construction of the Mexican nation-state. Her early articles and her first book laid the foundation for later work and bore the marks of Marxist socioeconomic analysis. Her article “Women, Class, and Education in Mexico, 1880-1928” (1977) begins with the sentence: “One of the major characteristics of capitalist society is the primary role of women as household workers in the daily and generational replacement of labor power for production.”Footnote ³ Although she later toned down this stilted Marxian language, Mary Kay never veered from that essential focus on class analysis and class struggle, as she combined and intersected it with race, ethnicity, and gender. The central concerns of her scholarship were present from the beginning: the state project of modernization, especially education’s role in it, the modernization of patriarchy, women’s roles and agency in this process, the empowerment of popular classes through education, the gendered dynamics of power. Early on she learned to be wary of the Revolution’s demonization of the Porfiriato, which posited a profound, “revolutionary” break from the dictatorship. In State, Education, and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928 (1982), she challenged the dominant historiography as she argued for continuity in educational policies, underlining the important role of Porfirian intellectual Justo Sierra. Beginning with the general, state educational policy, she soon focused more and more on the particular, local history, the grass roots, where change actually takes place.

“Women School Teachers in the Mexican Revolution: The Story of Reyna’s Braids” (1990) demonstrated this growing respect for local history. As she developed a more fluid prose, her gift as a master storyteller emerged. Here, she sympathetically compared the experiences of three young teachers of Puebla in the 1930s, their trials, and tribulations as they arrived in different villages to start their careers. Through the story of each, Mary Kay sought the answers to a series of questions, among them: “Did the revolution make a difference in promoting women’s schooling? […] To what degree were the teachers agents of the state and to what degree did they enjoy some autonomy? In their interaction with campesina women, did the school teachers empower them or seek to control them in the interests of the state?” Women, education, empowerment, gendered power structures, and challenges to gender inequalities continued to be deep concerns that engaged so much of Mary Kay’s future work. As a teacher herself, doing oral history, she wrote in a footnote, “I am deeply indebted to these women who shared their life experiences […] for opening the world of Mexican teachers to me.”Footnote ⁴

I met Mary Kay in 1990 at the panel on rural women held at the VIII Conference of Mexican and North American Historians in San Diego in 1990 that she and Heather Fowler-Salamini organized (I had met Heather previously in Mexico). It was the very first session ever on rural women at this conference. In fact, the organizing committee did not even give us a regular meeting room; we were packed into a bedroom, with people sitting on the floor and even in the hallway. Mainly women, this attendance demonstrated the hunger, the need we felt for the expansion of women’s history. Consequently, along with others, Mary Kay organized the colloquium, “Crossing Borders, Creating Spaces: Mexican and Chicana Women: 1848-1992” at UIC in April 1992. The research presented and the lively discussion that ensued enabled Mary Kay and Heather to edit Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850-1990 (1994).Footnote ⁵

Three years later in 1997, Mary Kay published the brilliant Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940, which earned her the Latin American Studies Association’s coveted Bryce-Woods Prize and the CLAH’s Herbert Eugene Bolton Prize, both awarded to the most outstanding book on Latin American history in 1997. Now immersed in the literature of social history and cultural studies, it confirmed the centrality of cultural politics (not only policy) in nation-state formation as she continued her study of Mexican education into the 1930s. “No marginal frill to the revolution,” she vividly demonstrated, how cultural politics were central to the state’s modernizing project.Footnote ⁶ Comparing the history of two regions in the state of Puebla and two in Sonora, this study revealed how the “real cultural revolution lay not in the state’s project but in the dialogue between state and society,” with the school as the site of “intense, often violent negotiations over power, culture, knowledge, and rights.” In this dialogue, rural communities learned to retain their identity, forcing the state to negotiate and make concessions, while the state disseminated its modernizing values and advanced the formation of an “inclusive, multiethnic, populist nationalism.” As this dialogue produced a “shared language” between teachers as agents of the state and rural folk, it ironically afforded the latter the language, the means, needed to demand redress from that government.Footnote ⁷

In the following years, she collaborated on edited collections that examined fundamental issues in Mexican culture, education, and gender: in 2003 Escuela y Sociedad en el periodo cardenista, edited with Susana Quintanilla; in 2006, The Eagle and the Virgin: Cultural Revolution and National Identity in Mexico, 1920-1940, edited with Stephen E. Lewis; and 2007, Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited with Jocelyn Olcott and Gabriela Cano, all of which, thanks to their cutting edge research, became classics in their fields and excellent texts for the classroom.Footnote ⁸ But whatever the endeavor, editing these collections or organizing conferences, she was always inclusive, bringing together colleagues from both sides of the border.

With the publication of Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation in 2015, Mary Kay came full circle, returning to her initial topic, the rebel generation of the 1960s. Colleagues wondered why she chose a lesser-known artist, but for her Pepe was the perfect vehicle through which to explore the developing subjectivity of a revolutionary generation, “not simply in politics but in self-expression.”Footnote ⁹ What was at stake in this broad social movement was subjectivity, “the cognitive, active, feeling, experiencing self.” Having meticulously examined the development of Mexico’s educational policies and cultural politics, she now opted for a different methodology, biography. Perhaps weary of “dead documents,” mused Mílada Bazant, an historian turns to biography to “capture the soul of her subject,” or in this case of a generation. Might biography now facilitate an understanding of the subjectivity of the “generation that played a critical role in Mexico’s movement toward a more democratic and pluralist politics in public and private life, in art, culture, and affairs of state?” As with local history, biography can reveal what macro history conceals. The irony of the unexpected consequences that she found in Cultural Politics, how the encounter of the state and teachers in the 1930s provided rural people the language with which to challenge the state, emerged again in the 1950s and 1960s. The outcry and condemnation of state repression of students in 1968 would mask “the degree to which the government had made the rebellion possible through its social and cultural policies and its own internal conflicts,” which Portrait of a Young Painter beautifully recounts.Footnote ¹⁰

Twelve years of interviews with Pepe and his family, revisiting films, radio, music, sports, literature, and art of the 1940s–1960s proved to be a delicious voyage of self-discovery for both Mary Kay and Pepe. It inspired her to depict the change in masculine sensibilities by describing the chosen “weapons” of three generation of Zúñiga men: the grandfather’s knife used in street fights; the father’s, a tailor, scissors; and Pepe’s paint brush. But while Pepe’s art was overflowing with eroticism, he expressly forbade her to out him in the biography, which perplexed Mary Kay. Thus, she was constrained from including an important part of his subjectivity. In the end, she recognized that discussing his sexual orientation openly may well have caused the book to be read as a gay biography, when this was just one element of it.

When Mary Kay received the reader’s reports from Duke, she was dismayed over a particularly pointed critique of the introduction. She did not like being criticized (none of us do), but she realized maybe something was missing. After much discussion, it was that critique that encouraged her to identify more clearly as an historian of education (too often considered a lesser branch of history). Education, she explained, needed to be understood more broadly “to include multiple learning sites: the family, schools, neighborhood, church, movies, radio, theater, sports, work, leisure activities, professional, social, and political organizations.”Footnote ¹¹ Her scholarship left no doubt as to the fundamental importance of the history of education, as it also did for gender history.

Mary Kay pondered over how to frame what she wanted to say in her acceptance speech for the CLAH’s Distinguished Service Award in 2016. Now retired and living in Oaxaca, she knew this might be her last chance to speak to a large audience of her peers, and she had a message to share. The result, entitled “Forging a Gender Path in Modern Mexican History,” was pure Mary Kay. She began by sharing her regret over having offended the respected historian, Nettie Lee Benson, with her youthful disdain for mothers as historical actors in an early conference presentation. No longer possible to apologize to Benson, she took advantage of the moment to do a mea culpa before a Latin Americanist audience. She explained, how over the years, she had come to respect the ways in which maternalism empowered women and their vital roles in the modernization of patriarchy. But she reminded us “modern patriarchy is still patriarchy” and herein lay her message: “If we are to study politics, gender has to be at its center as it is the fundamental expression of equality or inequality.”Footnote ¹² She was deeply disappointed that, despite the excellent studies now available on women and gender in Mexico, somehow this research had still failed to penetrate mainstream histories. Generous as always, she proceeded to give credit to a long list of authors and their works, mainly women but also male scholars, recognizing their contributions to the history women and gender in Mexico—perhaps a reading list for those for whom this message was intended.

She condemned history’s erasure of women’s soft power, the work of “thousands of women as teachers, doctors, nurses, nutritionists, lawyers, and social workers,” so “essential” to the modernization of Mexico. “How,” she queried, “are we going to join these masculine and feminine aspects of the state and politics without a gendered analysis?” As an example, she singled out the recent edited collection Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (2014), which had still failed to employ gender analysis, except for one chapter written by María Teresa Fernández Aceves. Mary Kay, then, dissected this chapter, “Advocate or Cacica? Guadalupe Urzúa Flores: Modernizer and Peasant Political Leader in Jalisco,” illustrating how gender analysis provides new, crucial, and indispensable elements to the study of politics. In one instance, it revealed how the obtention of the vote locally enabled women’s agency to advance the modernization of patriarchy, and in another, it explained how a woman such as Guadalupe Urzúa managed to acquire power and pursue her goals without practicing patron client politics or displaying a violent machismo.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, Mary Kay highlighted Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier’s critique of heroic masculine interpretations of the 1968 student movement that sidelined women’s roles. They contended that, in fact, the most creative, egalitarian, and transformative moments of the movement took place when young men and women went out together in brigades to interact with the public (which fortunately some of the male leaders later acknowledged). For Mary Kay, ignoring women’s roles, participation, and contributions was no longer acceptable. Despite the enormous changes in society over the last half century, “the shift toward a more emotionally open and responsible masculinity” and a more “gendered” and egalitarian citizenship, she concluded “that none of us lived the full transformation we imagined for ourselves.”Footnote ¹⁴ There was still so much to accomplish.

Generosity and Mentoring

Mary Kay Vaughan’s generosity was historic on every level: academically, personally, financially, and above all, with her time. She was, perhaps, especially generous to younger women scholars, which is not always the case, given the competitiveness of academia. Susie Porter will not forget that Mary Kay “was the first person who invited me to give a talk at her university. She was the first person to really make me feel like what I had to say was worthwhile. She connected me to all sorts of people. She did it intentionally, to integrate me into the community of scholars.” Mary Kay’s colleague at UIC, Marc Zimmerman appreciated how she shared her contacts in Mexico with him, again, something not all academics would do, “but Mary Kay cared more about the content of research than her own career.” Peter Guardino is forever grateful; as a newly minted Ph.D. desperately seeking employment, Mary Kay offered him his first job in 1992, replacing her at UIC, while she went on a Fulbright in Mexico.

She was, at the same time, the consummate mentor, remembered fondly by so many of her graduate students. At UIC, Margaret Power and María Teresa Fernández Aceves appreciated Mary Kay’s “originality and brilliance in the study of the intricate politics of Mexican education, her organizational acumen—from which all of us in the profession have benefitted--and her mentoring of several cohorts of graduate students.” As she built intellectual communities, inviting them to her house to share ideas, she also taught them how to “build communities among themselves.”

When she moved to the University of Maryland in 2000, together with Barbara Weinstein, she continued to practice a style of mentoring that stressed “collaboration over competition and a sustained consideration of the relationship between history and politics.” So remembered David Sartorius, who considered himself extremely fortunate to have benefitted from her guidance as her official mentee at Maryland. She “periodically lent out her house, her car, her office, and more regularly, her time. She read countless drafts and delivered honest, productive feedback promptly” to students and colleagues alike. He appreciated, as we all did, how she would often take the lead in “forging an intellectual community of Latin Americanists that avoided the caudillismo and imperialism sometimes exhibited by other leading historians.”

Mary Kay was equally committed to her students and colleagues in Mexico, especially at the BUAP and the Cinestav and kept in close contact with them. Her loyalties were never divided; they were one and the same: to nurture the future historians of Mexico. For example, recognizing the brilliance of Mílada Bazant’s biography of Laura Méndez de Cuenca, she not only offered to translate it to English but also used her influence secure its publication. Working on the translation together in Mexico, Mílada was awed by Mary Kay’s “profound academic brilliance” and “limitless generosity.” So was I, as her friendship got me through some tough times. She read and critiqued all the chapters for the Spanish version of my biography of Juana Catarina Romero (2020). And then, when the University of Nebraska Press agreed to publish the English translation, but with the condition that I eliminate over 30,000 words (!), she helped me to reframe it and to get through the agony of cutting it. Devastated that she will never see the final product, I dedicated the book to her.

She was a founding member of the Red de Mujeres y Género (the Network of Women and Gender), which brought together US and Mexican scholars in conferences, and which produced several excellent volumes. In the summer of 2012, Mary Kay convened what became the “grupo de biografía” in her home in Tlalixtac, Oaxaca, in which Mílada Bazant, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Susanna Quintanilla, Lourdes Alvarado, Ana Rosa Suárez Argüello, Daniela Spenser, and yours truly collaborated, reading and critiquing each other’s work over the course of several years in person and on zoom. Wherever Mary Kay went, she created thriving academic communities.

Tlalixtac

Mary Kay’s passionate devotion to Mexico and above all the people of Mexico, the popular classes, and their struggle for social justice motivated her scholarship and social activism. Thus, it should not surprise us that, after her retirement in 2011, she moved to Mexico and rented a house in the town of Tlalixtac, 10 kilometers south of the City of Oaxaca. She grew to love the town, and it loved her back. Over time, everyone knew who she was, and when she walked to the main square people would call out, “Hóla Mary” (pronounced “Ma-ree”). As she became more involved in the social life and politics of Tlalixtac, she organized and sponsored basketball teams, paying for the equipment and the coach out of her pocket, in hopes of directing the youth of Tlalixtac away from drugs. Along with the appreciative parents, she attended all her teams’ games and vociferously encouraged them from the sidelines. As always, she made numerous friends and engaged with the women. Unfortunately, her project to produce a video of the process of women’s tortilla-making in town was cut short by her untimely death.

She bought a large plot of land on the outskirts of Tlalixtac and, with her friends Carlos Schaffer and Pano López, built a beautiful compound with a magnificent cactus garden, swimming pool, and two stunningly modern houses. Airy and full of light, they were filled with Mexican art and culture: Pepe’s paintings, colorful alebrijes (the painted wooden animals carved by Oaxacan villagers), and a spectacular collection of woven rugs from Teotitlan del Valle. Living in Oaxaca, Mary Kay now only wore huipiles, the hand-woven tops made by indigenous ethnicities of Oaxaca. Given her exquisite, good taste, she acquired a beautiful collection from the different regions of the state, which she wore with great pride.

Her sister Nancy and her husband also built a more traditional, adobe-style house next door to her. But over time, the others pulled out, and with her ever-faithful gardener and caretaker, Gil, she turned those houses into AirBNBs. In her eighties, the always energetic Mary Kay loved running these two AirBNBs—meeting people from all over even the Middle East and educating them on Oaxaca, telling them where to go and where to eat. Leave it to Mary Kay to attract interesting and fun-loving guests; however, the last time I visited, in February 2024, managing the AirBNBs was getting to be a bit much, and she no longer felt comfortable driving at night. Nevertheless, she was in good spirits and still planning new projects. Thus, along with everyone else, I was shocked at the news of her death. God knows I hated that cement flooring, on which she fell the night of 1 December 2024.

She would have thought her December 4th funeral, organized by the townspeople, a hoot. From the videos my friends sent me, one sees scores of sad tlalixteños carrying floral offerings and spreading incense and solemnly marching behind the hearse with her casket and the town’s brass band playing funeral dirges in procession to the cemetery where she now rests. She is survived by her daughter, Alicia González; son-in-law, Gerald Saltarelli; step-grandchildren, Jake Saltarelli, Mason Saltarelli, and Tate Saltarelli; and her sister and brother-in-law, Nancy and Doug Millholland. Truly a transnational scholar—brilliant, passionate, intense, deeply intellectual, endlessly curious, incredibly generous, fun-loving, and life-loving—she is greatly missed by her family and thousands of friends, colleagues, and students who were all the richer for knowing and loving her.