The Internationalist Perspective of Hermila Galindo in La Doctrina Carranza

Hermila Galindo has been identified as "the most prominent feminist of the Mexican Revolution", among those who have studied her trajectory and legacy of struggle for women's political and social rights in the first decades of the 20th century in Mexico. She was Venustiano Carranza´s private secretary from the time he triumphantly entered as Commander of the Constitutionalist Army to Mexico City in August 1914, after having defeated the spurious General Victoriano Huerta. (Valles, 2017, pp. 57-58). This position allowed her to raise the banner of the feminist struggle in the midst of the convulsive times of change that revolutionary Mexico was experiencing.

Galindo was founder and director of the magazine La Mujer Moderna from 1915 to 1919, where she published regularly; this was the medium through which she developed her activism, by procuring a space for expression by women who wished to address issues of their interest. She wrote the inaugural speech of the First Feminist Congress in Mexico, held in Yucatan in 1916, entitled "La Mujer en el Porvenir", in which she advocated for the political participation of women and their right to vote, and disseminated the precepts of the constitutionalist faction of the Mexican Revolution. A year later, in March, she ran as a candidate for federal deputy for the fifth electoral district of Mexico City, becoming the first woman to run for a popularly elected position in that category (Valles, 2017, pp. 59-67).

In this short blog I intend to underline the transcendence of the internationalist view of a woman, such as Galindo, in the elaboration of a text that explains one of the main doctrines considered to be the backbone of the principles of Mexico's foreign policy and its doctrinal corpus, which is still in force in its application. Carranza enunciated the postulates that would later be considered a doctrine on September 1, 1918 in his second report as Constitutional President of the Mexican Republic. There are four guidelines that mark the actions of our country in international politics, which consist of: a) the juridical equality of States; b) the universal principle of non-intervention; c) the equality of nationals and foreigners before the nation in which they find themselves; and d) the uniformity and equality of national legislation without establishing distinctions in their application, except in what refers to sovereignty (Comisión, 1960, p. 421).

In 1919, Galindo wrote her book entitled La Doctrina Carranza y el acercamiento indolatino, an undoubtedly revolutionary undertaking since, until then, it had been only men who wrote analyses of foreign policy and international relations of Mexico. In addition, she was appointed to a diplomatic post by agreement of the President of the Republic, as Cultural Commissioner in Spain and South America (Valles, 2015, p. 164), at a time when women were not admitted to the Mexican Foreign Service.

Galindo, explains that the objective of her work is to analyze the performance in international politics of Carranza, in the crucial moment for the history of mankind that the First World War represented. It is possible to observe that Galindo places Carranza practically at the level of illustrious Latin American thinkers, who were revolutionary men of their time, not only in armed struggle, but also in the order of the ideas they developed through which the notion of a united Latin America was forged (Galindo 1919 pp. 7-9).

The main proposal Galindo puts forward in her writing is to show the genesis and conformation of the Carranza Doctrine as a body of ideas that had to be considered not only as the dictate of a revolutionary leader who was fighting inside Mexico but also given its proper place as a State doctrine in international politics. The author argues this to be so because Carranza expressed his doctrinal principles as Constitutional President of the Republic. It is for that reason, she explained, that all Mexicans had to adopt it as such and those who succeeded him in office would be required to do the same (Galindo 1919 pp. 144-145).

And it is here where Galindo went a step further, establishing that Carranza's principles should be considered a continental doctrine in Latin America and proposing to promote it both internally and externally. The opportunity that Galindo saw was to emulate the Carranza Doctrine as a kind of barrier against the interventionist international policy promoted by the United States in the region, formulated in the Monroe Doctrine (Galindo 1919 pp. 124). This situation did not go unnoticed by Galindo (1919) when she stated that "the failure of the Wilsonian ideals has already disenchanted us and stripped us of the few illusions that the weak countries in this part of the world harbored regarding a radical change of procedures in the future actions of the State Department in Washington" (p. 127).

Another part that should be highlighted in her writings is the richness of the sources from which she draws. It is particularly worth mentioning the foreign authors she refers to. First of all, we have Norman Angell, a prominent English writer, whom she identifies as a pacifist, a theoretical current that at the beginning of the 20th century was being debated in the early days of International Relations as a scientific-academic discipline. Galindo accurately cites one of his works entitled The Great Illusion, published in 1910 (Villanueva, 2019, pp. 204).

It was precisely in this historical period that a discussion was taking place in the Anglo-Saxon sphere on issues related to war and peace, as well as on the processes of colonization by the imperialist powers. At the same time, the currents of classical realism and idealism were beginning to take shape as part of the theoretical positions that would eventually shape the epistemic approaches of International Relations as a discipline. That debate led by Angell along with Henry Brailsford, I. Kairski, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, Harold Laski and Leonard Woolf, among others, has been extensively studied by Ricardo Villanueva (2019), who has emphasized the fiction of pointing out the year 1919 as the historical moment in which the discipline of International Relations was founded (Villanueva, 2016; along with other authors: Lozano, Sarquís, Villanueva, and Jorge; 2019).

Suffice it to mention here that, in the emblematic year of 1919 for the career of International Relations, a woman was in Mexico who not only consulted foreign authors and was up-to-date on the currents of thought in the field, but crystallized this in a work of her authorship published in that same year. In this way, Galindo placed herself within the debate of ideas on the international reality that was taking place in the Anglo-Saxon world. Thus, she manages to articulate internationalist thought with which she contributed to the discussion from a country that, at that time, did not orbit the central sphere of the disciplinary construction of International Relations. Furthermore, part of the argument she put forward supported the international projection of the Carranza Doctrine, and the simultaneity with which both historical events took place is significant.

In regard to the central theses that Norman Angell developed in his writings, Galindo not only expounds on them in her book but also questions them and structures counterarguments to refute them. One of them is the English author's assertion that the conquest and possession of colonies for the great imperial powers was no longer a profitable business. Galindo resorts to another of the foreign authors she cites to refute this idea. Manabendra Nath Roy (1918) was an Indian nationalist born in 1887 in West Bengal, who lived in Mexico and participated in the founding of the Mexican Communist Party in 1919 (Goebel, 2013, p. 1459). His work entitled La India, su pasado, su presente y su porvenir is referred to by Galindo (1919) not only as a reference text, but also as the argumentative basis of chapter VII called "English Rule within India" (p. 63-70).

Through the exposition of various statistics that she arranges in graphs, the author also shows the process of resource extraction in what was once the jewel of the British Crown, until the first decades of the 20th century (Galindo, 1919, pp.67-68). This was in order to argue to the British writer that the cost of maintaining the colonies was low compared to the lucrative profits that the United Kingdom obtained from them. Thus, she explains how the colonization of India by Great Britain unfolded and shows out the fallacious, supposedly civilizing effect of the great powers over these conquered territories.

In conclusion, it is of utmost importance to highlight that it was a Mexican woman who was at the forefront of international politics and world conflicts that were in vogue in the second decade of the twentieth century… and above all, laudable for having kept herself up-to-date and informed of the works being written in other latitudes of the world and for having shown the impetus to dialogue and debate the ideas and arguments put forward by foreign authors of the stature of Norman Angell and Manabendra Nath Roy.

Dra. Indra Labardini Fragoso is full-time professor-researcher in the Chair of Diplomatic History and coordinator of the Master in International Relations: Environment at the Isidro Fabela Institute of International Studies of the Universidad del Mar, campus Huatulco, Oaxaca.

References

Comisión Nacional para la Celebración del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamación de la Independencia Nacional y del Cincuentenario de la Revolución Mexicana. (1960). Labor Internacional de la Revolución Constitucionalista de México. México: Ediciones de la Comisión Nacional para la Celebración del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamación de la Independencia Nacional y del Cincuentenario de la Revolución Mexicana. Retrieved September 01, 2020 from: https://constitucion1917.gob.mx/es/Constitucion1917/Labor_internacional…

Galindo, H. (1919). La doctrina Carranza y el acercamiento indo-latino. México. Retrieved October 30, 2020 from: https://ia801806.us.archive.org/5/items/ladoctrinacarran00gali/ladoctri…

Goebel, M. (2013). Una biografía entre espacios: M. N. Roy. Del nacionalismo indio al comunismo mexicano. Historia Mexicana, 62(4), pp. 1459-1495. Retrieved October 30, 2020 from https://historiamexicana.colmex.mx/index.php/RHM/article/view/126

Roy, M. N. (1918), La India, su pasado, su presente y su porvenir. México.

Valles Ruiz, R. M. (2015). Hermila Galindo. Sol de libertad. México: Gernika -Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (ICSHu). Retrieved October 30, 2020 from: https://www.uaeh.edu.mx/investigacion/productos/4961/

Valles Ruíz, R. M. (2017). Hermila Galindo: Ideas de vanguardia; acciones que abrieron brecha. En: Patricia Galeana (et. al.), Mujeres y Constitución: de Hermila Galindo a Griselda Álvarez, Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México, Gobierno del Estado de México, Ciudad de México, 2017. pp. 51-80. Chapter retrieved October 30, 2020 from: https://archivos.juridicas.unam.mx/www/bjv/libros/12/5908/5.pdf Complete book available at: https://www.inehrm.gob.mx/es/inehrm/LLC_2017_MujeresConst_Hermila_Grise…

Villanueva Lira, J. R. (2019). El primer gran debate en Relaciones Internacionales: ¿Mito disciplinario? In Lozano Vázquez, A., Sarquís Ramírez, D. J., Villanueva Lira, J. R. y Jorge, D. (Coords.) ¿Cien años de relaciones internacionales?: disciplinariedad y revisionismo. México: Siglo XXI Editores: Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Internacionales.

Villanueva, R. (2016). 1919: ¿La fundación de la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales?, Revista Relaciones Internacionales, UNAM, no. 125, pp. 11-34.