CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/15/2024

Vintage girl power in ‘Las Mexicanas’

Featured spreads are from new release Las Mexicanas, RM’s small but mighty paperback album of found photographs of Mexican women in positions of power, play and perhaps even seduction from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s. How we love it! Essayist Brenda Navarro writes, “What is Mexico without the women who have been born in this land? What would be of this country without many of them, who have birthed the Manichaean concept of a nation that has been obliged to live beneath the heavens, in which every person seems to be destined to be a soldier? As Agota Kristof wrote in her novel, The Notebook (1987), women are the ones who carry the weight of wars: ‘Have we seen nothing? Idiot! We women have all the work and all the worries: children to feed, wounded to tend… You men, once the war is over, are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That’s why you invented war. It’s your war. You wanted it, so get on with it—heroes my ass!’”