Personal Occupations: Women's Responses to U.S. Military Occupations in Latin America

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P E R S O N A L O C C U P A T I O N S :W O M E N ’ s R E S P O N S E S T O U . S .

M I L I T A R Y O C C U P A T I O N S I N

L A T I N A M E R I C AA L A N M C P H E R S O N

INTRODUCTION

“The women in my country have allowed themselves to be more imbued with thefatal consequences of the morbid and corrupt relations with the Yankee than themen,” an anonymous Dominican author (most likely a man) claimed in 1921, inthe midst of the occupation of his country by U.S. marines.1 One might attributethe comment to a nationalist looking for someone to blame. Or perhaps to a manwhose woman chose to love a marine instead of him. But, absent the vitriol, wasit wrong? Did women under occupation have a different relationship with forcesof occupation than did men?

The three longest Latin American occupations in U.S. history, those of Nica-ragua (1912–1933), Haiti (1915–1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), are all well documented and may be good places to attempt to answerthose questions. These were all hierarchical societies where class, race, and genderdifferences were discernible and meaningful. At the same time all three underwentsimilar processes of having their governments and, to a varying degree, otherinstitutions taken over, or at least indirectly controlled, by the same foreign power.They therefore present the opportunity to analyze both differences and especiallysimilarities in the ways women responded to occupation and how these responseswere different from men’s. To attempt these tasks, one must focus not only onwomen who openly opposed or supported occupation but on the vast majority ofwomen who, ignored by outside observers, nevertheless struggled to adjust to

Alan McPherson is ConocoPhillips Chair in Latin American Studies and Associate Professor ofInternational and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Yankee No!Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations and Intimate Ties, Bitter Struggles: TheUnited States and Latin America since 1945. He would like to thank Roxanna Dunbar-Ortiz andMarysa Navarro for reading versions of this article.

1. “Woman,” El Dogal, 27 August 1921, as reproduced in Carl Kelsey, “The American Inter-vention in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science 100, March 1922, 109–202: 187.

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

foreigners wielding guns. Their voices are hard to hear, but they do exist, scatteredin the three languages, five countries, and dozens of archives in which the researchfor this article took place.

A study of women during these occupations does, as the Dominican writersuggested above, uncover a different response from that of men, but rather thanmore “morbid and corrupt,” I suggest that it was more personal and ambiva-lent. Women responded to these occupations in ways that reflected genderedaims, a consciousness of women’s needs and grievances as distinct and worthpursuing. Those aims were less formally political than those of men but stillpolitical in the sense of fighting against power structures that harmed women.Latin American women’s activities under U.S. occupations indicated what mightbe intuitive but rarely highlighted in the scholarship of gender and internationalrelations: that women respond to occupations as women first and as nationalistssecond.

VICTIMS AND SYMBOLS

Historians have barely scratched the surface of women’s resistance to U.S. occu-pations in Latin America, a neglect that allowed misconceptions born in theoccupation era to survive. This is understandable since U.S. government and otherarchives concerned with occupations do not have collections or even boxesdevoted to issues concerning women. At most, a scholar might find a folder onprostitution as a concern of marines, but often even that is subsumed under“public health”concerns. Because of this “invisibility”of women, only a fewscholarly articles have discussed them under any of these three occupations, andonly peripherally.2 Major books on the occupations devoted attention to womenbut tended to provide anecdotes rather than comprehensive analysis. More com-monly, given that the bulk of the evidence about these occupations comes fromNavy and State Department archives, historians focusing on gender have empha-sized not women’s agency but rather imperial agency, the sexist imperial “gaze”of Yankee occupiers. Mary Renda’s brilliant Taking Haiti, for instance, applies acultural studies lens to masculinity and paternalism within U.S. imperialism rather

2. April Mayes devotes the most pages to the occupation; see April Mayes, “Why DominicanFeminism Moved to the Right: Class, Colour and Women’s Activism in the DominicanRepublic, 1880s–1940s,” Gender & History 2, 2008, 349–71. Carolle Charles gives only acursory view; see Carolle Charles, “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duva-lierist State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism (1980–1990),” Femi-nist Studies 1, 1995, 135–64: 135.

5 6 9P E R S O N A L O C C U P A T I O N S

than to the consciousness of women.3 As a result, Renda’s work unwittinglyrelegates women to the role of recipients of the occupations, as objects ofprimitivist desire, victims of rape and sexual harassment, or characters in pulpfiction.

Delving into the agency of women fills a gap in the history of the occupationsand of women in Latin America. Looking at women’s responses across threeoccupations also allows for comparisons and contrasts that will be of interest toscholars of Latin America and of empire generally. These comparisons add textureto the rich feminist work already done exploring cross-national genderings ofcolonization, whether overtly military or not.4 Doing all of the above, finally,responds to current trends in the history of U.S. relations with the world byexploring the intersections of military strategy, feminist consciousness, masculin-ity, nationalism, imperialism, and race.

These case studies also complicate the broadest theoretical question of theimpact of occupations on women’s political power. Most who have studied thisquestion wrestled with the dilemma between feminism and nationalism. Thereigning interpretation says that occupations, like other forms of imperialism asdiscussed by Cynthia Enloe, have pressured feminists to abandon or suspend theirfight in favor of more immediate struggles of national liberation led almostexclusively by men.5 In the last few decades the occupation of the Palestinianterritories and Iraq have underlined the dilemma.6 On Iraq, Nadje Al-Ali and

3. Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation & the Culture of U.S. Imperialism 1915–1940, Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2001. See also Bruce Calder, The Impact ofIntervention: The Dominican Republic during the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924, Austin,TX: U of Texas P, 1984; Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934,NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995 (first ed., 1971); Lauren Hutchinson Derby, “The Magic of Modernity:Dictatorship and Civic Culture in the Dominican Republic, 1916–1962,” unpubl. Ph.D. Diss.,University of Chicago, 1998.

4. See, for example, Mire Koikari, “Exporting Democracy? American Women, ‘FeministReforms’ and Politics of Imperialism in the U.S. Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952,” Frontiers1, 2002, 23–45; Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations,1945–1949, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2003; Lisa Yoneyama, “Liberation under Siege: U.S.Military Occupation and Japanese Women’s Enfranchisement,”American Quarterly 3, 2005,885–910; Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & thePhilippines, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 2007.

5. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics,Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2000, 44–5, 54–9.

6. Eileen Kuttab, “Palestinian Women in the Intifada: Fighting on Two fronts,” ArabStudies Quarterly 2, 1993, 69–86; Souad Dajani, “The Struggle of Palestinian Women in theOccupied Territories: Between National and Social Liberation,” Arab Studies Quarterly 2,1994, 13–26.

5 7 0 T H E H I S T O R I A N

Nicola Pratt recently restated the argument that nationalists have once againsuperseded the feminist movement, not only by claiming their greater importancebut also by assigning to women subservient nationalist roles as transmitters ofnational culture and rhetorical pawns.7

Documents from Latin-American occupations, produced almost entirely bymen, tended to solidify this interpretation of women as victims or symbols.Anti-occupation activists noted hundreds of times that U.S. marines raped andharassed women and inflicted other suffering on “women and children.” Leavingthese victims nameless was a rhetorical tactic meant to stir in nationalist men asense of outrage and of duty to protect their honor rather than to redressindividual injustices.8 An example was the ode of Dominican poet Fabio Fiallo,“The Anguish of Santo Domingo: Holy Crusade to the Women of America.” Itread in part:

There the wind blows ashes of a fireWhich devoured women, children and old men;Here rises the tomb of an immature virgin, killedBy the multiple outrages of savage soldiery.. . .Do you turn pale, Matrons, Do you tremble for your sons?Are you frightened, maidens? Do you fear for your honor?And do you flee, terrified, carrying a picture ofThe awful doom which the Saxon is preparing for you?Go chaste maidens; run, worthy matrons,Carry to your men the startling visionOf our wasted fields, the hearth in ashes,The virgin profaned, the sons in torture.On guard, noble women; bring out of lethargyIn which they lie sleeping, your brave men,

7. Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq,Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2009.

8. A few examples among many are Tulio Cestero, “American Rule in Santo Domingo,” TheNation, 17 July 1920, 78–9; Richard Grossman, “‘La Patria es nuestra madre’: Género,patriarcado y nacionalismo dentro del Movimiento Sandinista, 1927–1934,” unpublishedpaper presented at the Third Congreso Centroamericano de Historia, San José, Costa Rica,15–18 July 1996, 16; Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, Ahora sé que Sandino manda,Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1986, 131; Roger Gaillard, Charlemagne Péralte lecaco: 1918–1919, Port-au-Prince: R. Gaillard, 1982.


And in the face of common danger, form at last the allianceOf the brave cubs against the grim vulture.9

Fiallo not only invokes the very real fear of sexual violation but also paradoxi-cally circumscribes the role of women in resistance: to flee, to fear, to inform menof U.S. atrocities, and to call men to arms. Women, in other words, are not to fightback.

Likewise, anti-occupation leaders portrayed women as symbols of the down-trodden nation’s pathos and sentimentality. Dominican historian José UlisesFranco praised a schoolteacher who handed her nation’s flag to a Dominicanlieutenant to replace the U.S. flag upon the departure of the marines. In an act thattransferred Catholic piety onto nationalist devotion, all the women present kissedthe ground, prompting the otherwise stony lieutenant to break into tears.10

Dominicans and others repeatedly assigned women the marginal role of invokingthe pure sentimentality of nationalism. It followed, just as it did Fiallo’s verse, thatwomen were to avoid a set of political acts reserved for men, such as armedstruggle, political writings, and political speeches. In all cases women were torefrain from expressing anger, sarcasm, ambivalence, or any other tone that mightconvey authority, individuality, subtlety, or national division.

Fiction by nationalist men also asserted the symbolic (im)potency of women.Writers under these three occupations produced over a dozen novels and playsthat portrayed relations between occupiers and occupied.11 The most remarkablerecurrence in them is the depiction of romantic relationships as allegories ofinternational politics. Two plays, one Haitian, the other Dominican, even had

9. Fabio Fiallo, “The Anguish,” La Tribuna (Managua), 6 February 1921, enclosed in 839.00/2390, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of the Dominican Republic, 1910–29, General Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59 (hereafter RG 59),National Archives, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA II).

10. José Ulises Franco, Nuestros grades patriotas y la intervención norteamericana del año 1916,Santiago: ANMI, 1984, 31.

11. A more or less comprehensive list includes: for Haiti, Fernand Hibbert, Les Simulacres,Port-au-Prince: Atelier Fardin, 1974 (first ed.: 1923); Léon Laleau, Le Choc, Port-au-Prince:La Presse, 1932; Stéphen Alexis, Le Nègre Masqué, Port-au-Prince: Ed. Fardin, 1933;Cléanthe (Virgile)Valcin, La Blanche Négresse, Port-au-Prince: V. Valcin, 1934; AnnieDesroy, Le Joug, Port-au-Prince: Imp. Modèle, 1934; and Maurice Casséus, Viejo, Nendeln:Kraus, 1970 (first ed., 1935); for the Dominican Republic, Horacio Read, Los civilizadores,Santo Domingo: Imprenta Altagracia, 1924; Rafael Damirón, ¡Ay de los vencidos!, SantoDomingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1925; and for Nicaragua, Hernán Robleto, Sangre en eltrópico, Tenerife, Isla Canarias: Ediciones de Baile del Sol, 2000 (first ed.: 1930); Salomón dela Selva, La guerra de Sandino o pueblo desnudo, Managua, Nicaragua: Editorial NuevaNicaragua, 1985, (first ed.: 1935). See the following note for two further plays.


titles that both translated as Marriage, Yankee-Style.12 And within these relation-ships, women, more often than not, played weak and capricious characterswho gave in to marines, while male counterparts displayed true nationalistconviction.13

VIOLENT RESISTANCE

Women’s realities were more complicated than men’s rhetoric, fiction, and col-lective memory would make us believe albeit not self-consciously feminist. Theoccupations of Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic did take place in aproto-feminist age without female suffrage and little trace of even first-wavefeminist organizations. So why would women defend a nation that gave them nopolitical rights? Women who organized politically did so largely for the anti-occupation cause. Paradoxically, however, this political subsuming into men’spolitical goals gave women a key space in which to prepare themselves for theirown struggles: They articulated arguments that were somewhat different fromthose of men; they sometimes found success where men did not; and, mostimportant, they transcended the role of victims or symbols that men assignedthem.

The historical scholarship on women in resistance to U.S. occupations hasfocused on the possibility of women fighting alongside guerrillas, with the intentof finding historical antecedents to contemporary guerrilla women.14 This

12. Neither of the plays has apparently survived, but José Narciso Solá, Matrimonio a loamericano of 1916, is mentioned by Calder, Impact, 13, and the anonymous MarriageHaïtiano-américain of 1933 is discussed by Yvette Gindine in “Images of the American inHaitian Literature During the Occupation, 1915–1934,” Caribbean Studies 3, 1974, 37–52:44.

13. Plots and their meanings are discussed in detail in Gindine, “Images,” 37–52; J. MichaelDash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination, NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1997; Nancy J. Conrady, “Le Roman haïtien d’expression françaiseet l’occupation américaine de 1915–1934: Trois décennies d’histoire vues par quatre roman-ciers haïtiens engagés (Stéphane Alexis, Annie Desroy, Léon Laleau, Mme Virgile Valcin),”unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Middlebury College French School, 1995; Nadève Ménard, “TheOccupied Novel: The Representation of Foreigners in Haitian Novels Written During the USOccupation, 1915–1934,” unpubl. Ph.D. Diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002.

14. For example, see Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, Augusto C. Sandino, padre de larevolución popular sandinista y antimperialista, Managua: Nueva Nicaragua, 1985. Itaffirms, for instance, that Sandino’s wife Blanca Araúz was seen aiming a rifle. See also, onthe larger topic of women and revolution in Nicaragua, Helen Collison, ed., Women andRevolution in Nicaragua, London: Zed Books, 1990; Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daugh-ters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994; KarenKampwirth, Women & Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba,University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2002; and Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and theLegacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004.


emphasis is misplaced because it looks for evidence of equal participation amongwomen and men where little existed and neglects equally meaningful politicalparticipation at the margins of violent resistance.

Women could certainly be violent in the face of foreign occupation. The 1912Nicaraguan civil war was a case in point, especially in León. In August of thatyear, when a Honduran general entered the town, insurgents trapped his 450 menin a square surrounded by houses and fired upon them. A British consul noted that“an unpleasing feature of this engagement, or rather massacre, at León was thatthe women were armed and fought with even greater ferocity than the men.”15 Afew days later a U.S. captain wrote in his diary that he was unable to leave Leónbecause of hostility on the railroad: “Even women spat at us, many women werearmed with rifles and machetes, it was a crazy mob.”16 And in the single mosthumiliating event of the U.S. intervention in that war, Navy Captain WarrenTerhune and his troops fled their own train as Leonese inhabitants attacked it,forcing the bluejackets to march thirty miles back to Managua. “Oh, you don’tknow that crowd,”explained Terhune upon his return. “They’re bloodthirsty.Even the women spit in your face. One of those female demons sharpened her boloon the very window where I was sitting in the train.”17

Later, in the 1920s, women fought as guerrillas, though they were few and maynever have been accepted by men as full-fledged armed combatants. In theDominican Republic, historian Bruce Calder notes, “women and sometimeswhole families joined the insurgent bands.”18 To “join” a band was not necessarilyto fight in one. And the evidence for fighting does exist, but it is slight. One marinenoted that a band of insurgents of thirty-three included three women, yet he addednothing about their role within the band.19 Another incident showed direct par-ticipation by a woman: In 1919, marines looking for “bandits” approached theback door of a suspicious home. As they did, “a woman flung herself at Sergeant

15. H. Cavendish Venables, British Acting Consul, report, Managua, 20 October 1912, fileA54926, reference 1308, Foreign Office 371, Public Record Office, Kew, UK.

16. Captain Nelson P. Vulte, “Expedition to Nicaragua,”10 August 1912, folder Nicaragua-1912, Nicaragua, Geographical Files, Reference Branch, Marine Corps History Division,Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia.

17. Cited in Smedley Butler, Old Gimlet Eye: The Adventures of Smedley D. Butler as told toLowell Thomas, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933, 141.

18. Calder, Impact, 125.

19. James J. McLean, Director, memo to Commandant, GND, Santo Domingo, 7 May 1919,legajo 379, 1919, fondo Secretaría de Estado de Interior y Policía (hereafter SEIP), ArchivoGeneral de la Nación, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (hereafter AGN-DR).


Davey and grappled with him.”20 He shook her loose but insurgents immediatelyfired upon the house, which hid another insurgent and his four children, some ofwhom were “severely wounded” by the gunfire.21 Their mother turned out to bethe “woman”of a nearby “bandit chief.”22 Nothing else is known of the case, butworth noting is that the woman was unarmed yet willing to risk her life (and thatof her children) against the occupation. Yet nothing indicates that this womantraveled with a band or that anyone considered her a member of one.

Other women were valuable advisers, but they, too, were but a handful. Haiti’spreeminent insurgent or caco chief Charlemagne Péralte, for instance, got hard-nosed advice from his sister Marie Louise, who discussed a (never consummated)alliance with British diplomats against the U.S. occupation:

20. Third Lieutenant R.W. Conkley, USMC, memorandum to Commanding Officer, Dos Rios, 4March 1919, folder Santo Domingo, Contacts, Reports of, box 2, Miscellaneous Collectionof Records Relating to the Marine Occupation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic),1916–1924, Records of the United States Marine Corps Record Group 127 (hereafter RG127), National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NARA I).

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

Figure 1: Colonel Rosa Forina (center) and her two aides de camp. Described as a Nica-

raguan “Amazon” Conservative who raised fifty men and women for President Adolfo Díaz

against the Liberals of José María Moncada in the 1926–1927 civil war. Photo # 56R-

522044, folder 56R Guerrillas/Partisans, box 15, Record Group 127G, National Archives

Building, College Park, Maryland.


A delegation [of Haitians] will be sent to you probably—They will use somefine words—pay no attention to them. Take all the delegates prisoners. Theenglishman [sic] leaves tomorrow for England. The money which you haveto send will be sent to him through a bank which he will tell me. Theenglishman once on the other side will send ammunition to you. You haveonly to tell me where you want it sent. . . . The news is good for us—it is themoment to make a coup on the foreigner.23

As the passage implies, Marie Louise acted as not only a consigliore but also aconduit for sensitive information both financial and military. She even gave Péraltethe text of a letter and instructed him to have his generals sign it and call himselfthe Chef Suprême de la Révolution d’Haïti.24 Clearly, then, women played severalactive war roles, going beyond the genteel proscriptions of Fiallo and others.

The more comprehensive work on sandinista women tells us far more abouttheir roles within insurgencies but also confirms that men did not consider themguerrillas. During the heyday of the rebellion in the Segovia mountains, someclaimed that Augusto Sandino had with him over 150 women out of two thousandfollowers.25 Historian Richard Grossman concluded that, despite the myth, noevidence shows that women fought in any appreciable number with Sandino.26

Former insurgents, interviewed in the 1980s, claimed that one or two women wereofficial members of Sandino’s Army for the Defense of National Sovereignty.27

One of the few women later interviewed recalled that Sandino explicitly toldwomen not to fight but “to wash, iron, and cook.”28

23. Marie Louise fils, letter to Charlemagne Péralte, Port-au-Prince, 15 July 1919, folder BanditActivities and Descriptions, box 3, Records of the Gendarmerie d’Haiti, 1915–1934, RG127, NARA I.

24. Ibid.

25. Leland Harrison, U.S. Minister, memo to Secretary of State, Montevideo, 29 August 1930,817.00/6807, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Nicaragua, 1930–1944,RG 59, NARA II.

26. Grossman, “ ‘La Patria’,” 29n71. Confirming this is Natalia Altamirano viuda de Ortez,interviewed by Susana Morales, 12 and 13 August 1983, EDSNN-71, Instituto de Estudiodel Sandinismo, Centro de Historia Militar, Managua, Nicaragua (hereafter CHM-N).

27. Francisco Ceteño Fonseca, interviewed by Auxiliadora Rosales, 26 July 1983, EDSNN-66;Anastacio Rodríguez Casco, interviewed by Auxiliadora Rosales, 21 September 1983,EDSNN-80; Aurelio Osoba Izaguerri, interviewer unknown, 6 July 1983, EDSNN-57, allInstituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, CHM-N.

28. My translation. Angelina Rugama interviewed by Julio Cineros, April 1983, EDSNN-46,Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, CHM-N. Confirming women’s non-participation asinsurgents is Apolinar Hernández, interviewed by Auxiliadora Rosales, 13 May 1982,EDSNN-43, Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, CHM-N.


Women indeed played almost exclusively non-violent roles as cooks, laun-dresses, nurses, and spies, yet these roles suggested meaningful modes of politici-zation.29 First, taking on a non-combatant role did not release women from thethreat of violence. Marines held one woman named Tiburcia García “as a sand-inista spy . . . reported to have given valuable information to Sandino, . . . leadingto a contact in which two Officers were killed and also to have sent someammunition to Sandino.”30 Marines reported that they often interviewed thewives or lovers of combatants, thus placing them in precarious positions. Theyarrested one rebel’s mother until he surrendered. Women also proved reticent toshare information with marines.31 Others could engage in subterfuge. One womaninvited marines to a meal at her house. They accepted, only to find it soon aftersurrounded by guerrillas who engaged them in a twenty-minute firefight.32 AndSandino often spoke of the prostitutes in the Caribbean town of Puerto Cabezaswho helped him obtain arms to launch his insurrection.33

Lovers, wives, and concubines, “the most usual role for women in banditry,”according to Eric Hobsbawm, were always in particular danger because theycould divulge intimate knowledge about the insurrectionists to the marines.34

Rebel propagandists barely mentioned these women, but they played an impor-tant role. First, they legitimated the social meaning of an anti-occupation struggleby involving families in it. For this reason rebels tended to discuss wives ratherthan mistresses. Sandino, for instance, all but abandoned his new bride BlancaAraúz in the small town of San Rafael, while he kept Teresa Villatoro as a loverin his camp. Later sandinistas such as Carlos Fonseca never mentioned this.35 Nordid they add that, when Villatoro, a Salvadoran nurse, became too “difficult,”

29. José Román, Maldito país, Managua: El Pez y la Serpiente, 1983, 141.

30. Hamilton M. H. Fleming, Chief of Police, memo to Commanding Officer, National Peniten-tiary, Managua, 18 June 1930, folder Law Sect. Political Prisoners 6 Mar–11 Jul 30, box 34,Headquarters, Historical Section, Records Relating to Marine Corps Units in Nicaragua,1927–1933, RG 127, NARA I.

31. Captain Charles G. Knoechel, Guardia Nacional Dominicana, memo to Director, Depart-ment of the North, Santiago, 4 June 1918, legajo 20, 1920–1921, fondo Gobierno Militar,AGN-DR.

32. Calder, Impact, 147.

33. Román, Maldito país, 69.

34. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, New York: The New Press, 2000, 146.

35. Mathilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution,Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000, 154.


Sandino sent her back to El Salvador.36 In fact, “Toro,”as she was called, perhapsfor her toughness, was more than a lover. While Sandino went to Mexico foralmost a year in 1929–1930, she administered everything in his camp that wasnon-military, including all the work of other women.37 She was also not as docileas Sandino may have wanted. Marines reported that she traveled against Sandi-no’s explicit orders.38 And, shortly before he abandoned her for Mexico, she,unwittingly or not, leaked his whereabouts to the marines.39 Blanca, too, wasclearly frustrated by her alienation, admitting once to Augusto that she hadthoughts of suicide and jealousy. He responded with patriarchal patronizing: “Ilove you, you are my wife, stop wasting your tears in the sea. I am your sea andyou must trust me.”40

Araúz may have been used in another way. She was the local telegraphoperator in San Rafael through whom Sandino originally sent messages untilmarines began to spy on her.41 Her job indicated the second role of lovers, thatof messengers. A Haitian caco named Papillon “sent his women” to negotiate asurrender.42 Sandino also used women to carry written documents, because theytended to travel along mountain paths less harassed than men. One U.S.diplomat reported that three women carried mail for Sandino in thick packagesbound by ropes, pretending to be rope merchants.43 When Sandino agreed

36. Román, Maldito país, 85.

37. Armando Amador, Sandino y la derrota militar de los Estados Unidos en Nicaragua, MexicoCity: Federación Editorial Mexicana, 1987, 61; Comisión de Información de la Represent-ación en Cuba, del Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, Gustavo Machado nos hablade Augusto C. Sandino, n.p.: c. 1976, 7.

38. Major Otto Salzman, Guardia Nacional, memorandum for B-2, Managua, 27 June 1930,folder Nicaragua—Bandits, Activities of, box 18, Operations and Training Division, Intelli-gence Section, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.

39. Major Fred T. Cruse, intelligence report, San José, 12 April 1929, 817.00/6305, CentralDecimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Nicaragua, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

40. My translation. Augusto Sandino letter to Blanca Araúz de Sandino, San Rafael del Norte,6 October 1927, E-001, C-001, 000427, Collección ACS (Augusto César Sandino), CHM-N.

41. Sofonías Salvatierra, Sandino, o la tragedia de un pueblo, Madrid: n. p., 1934, 54; “Nica-ragua: Lieut. Big Feet,” Time, 25 February 1928, 27.

42. Captain Herman Hanneken, Commanding Officer, memo to Department Commander,Department of the North, Headquarters troops in the field, Le Trou, 20 January 1919[probably 1920], folder Bandits-Rpts of Operations against, box 4, Records of the Gen-darmerie d’Haiti, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.

43. Jefferson Caffery, U.S. Legation, to Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, San Salvador, 18January 1928, 817.00/5362, Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Nicaragua,1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.


to lay down his arms in 1932, it was Araúz who carried the news toManagua.44

Most historians have failed to ask about women’s motivations for supportingthe insurgencies, perhaps assuming them to be the same as those of men.45

Grossman has parsed the issue more carefully, speculating that women wereattracted to traditional roles in the face of commercialization, war, and theencroaching paid labor force.46 This played a role, but there were other reasons,too. Family relationships were foremost in women’s considerations. When amarine asked the daughter of Nicaraguan rebel Pedro Altamirano, “Aren’t youBandit Pete’s daughter?,” she responded, “that’s the daughter of General PedroAltamirano to you, mister son-of-a-bitch tough-guy.”47 The wife of Nicaraguanleader Santos López, Engracia Uriarte, confided that she joined the camp onlybecause he was her husband.48 Some joined because of a political party. Thewomen warriors of 1912 León, for instance, were Liberals engaged in a vendettaagainst Conservatives. And Sandino, also a Liberal, attracted early followers withpromises of political revenge. The prostitutes of Puerto Cabezas helped himbecause they were Segovians, suggesting a regional identity at play. One woman’scase, finally, showed concrete material reasons. In 1928 marines arrested MariaValls for having been with Sandino’s troops. She explained that she joined becauseone of Sandino’s men “owed her money.” She spent almost two months with therebels making food, finally obtained the debt owed to her, left, and gave themarines valuable military details as to sandinista routes, leaders, and arms.49

Rather than a more general nationalist motivation, most women demonstratedsimilar personal reasons for joining.

44. Joseph Baylen, “Sandino: Patriot or Bandit?,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 3,1951, 418.

45. Others have accused Sandinista men of forcing women to cook and clean for them; see forexample David Clark Brooks, “Rebellion from Without: Culture and Politics along Nicara-gua’s Atlantic Coast in the Time of the Sandino Revolt, 1926–1934,” unpubl. Ph.D. diss.,University of Connecticut, 1998, 269–70.

46. Grossman, “‘La Patria’,” 35.

47. Zimmermann, Sandinista, 149.

48. Engracia Uriarte, interviewed by Susana Morales, 22 August 1983, EDSNN-82, Instituto deEstudio del Sandinismo, CHM-N.

49. Captain F. D. Strong, USMC, memo to B-2, 2nd Brigade, Managua, 4 March 1928, folder“Matagalpa”3 of 3, box 4, General Correspondence of the 2nd Brigade, 1928–30, RG 127,NARA I.


There were never many women directly involved in insurrections, owing tothe dangerous, male-defined nature of war and, regardless of their motivations,made a relatively small contribution. Even those few who participated in theinsurrections learned little about politics, for they suffered almost all militarydefeat.

PEACEFUL RESISTANCE

Women directly working for a peaceful end to the occupations were far moreorganized, effective, and distinct from their male counterparts than were femaleinsurgents. They have been largely understudied but should be seen as morerepresentative of emerging women’s politicization.50 Of the three occupationsstudied here, the Dominican had the most developed women’s anti-occupationmovement. The reason might be similar to what Frances Hasso discovered whencomparing women’s movements in the authoritarian regime of the Kingdom ofJordan with the authoritarian regime in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territo-ries.51 Counter-intuitively, women under the foreign occupation of Israel had morepolitical power. The explanation was that, since half of Jordanians worked fortheir own government, there was little room to dissent there. In Palestine, incontrast, practically all opposed the occupation, so women’s groups operatedwithin a more flexible nationalist Palestinian universe. Among our three cases,Haiti stands in for Jordan in that its treaty with the United States left a nominalgovernment in place and so created a division between “ins”and “outs” amonganti-occupation groups. In the Dominican Republic the marines imposed a mili-tary dictatorship and removed almost all Dominicans from power, thus allowingthem to unite against the occupation. Dominican women also shared two uniqueintellectual traditions that prepared them to be anti-occupation activists. Beforethe occupation, hostisianismo, or the philosophy of Puerto Rican educatorEugenio María de Hostos, targeted young, educated women, usually teachers, tobecome moral leaders and provide an ideal of female social involvement. Theoccupation actually mitigated this ideal because male nationalists opposed impe-rialism with latinidad, which emphasized unchanging Hispanic traditions that

50. Virtudes Álvarez bemoans that women have been largely absent from Dominican historiog-raphy “because of the machista nature of that historiography” (see Virtudes Álvarez, Mujeresdel 16, Santo Domingo: Mediabyte, 2005, 13).

51. Frances Hasso, Resistance, Repression, and Gender Politics in Occupied Palestine andJordan, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2005.


included chaste, quiet women, rather than politically active ones. Yet latinidadalso rejected Americanization and so women were, according to April Mayes,“committed to Latinidad nationalism and ending the occupation without excisingwomen completely from public activism.”52

Elite Dominican women found themselves caught between the strictures ofoccupation and those of male nationalism. Ana Teresa Paradas illustrated thedifficulty of navigating these stormy waters.53 A source of tension betweenDominican women and men under occupation was the military government’sdecrees to modernize the status of women. They allowed women to practice law,medicine, dentistry and pharmacy, permitted women to manage their ownfinances, employed them in government offices, made divorce easier, and forcedparents (that is, fathers of illegitimate children, who formed 60% of all children54)to support offspring.55 Paradas was the first woman to obtain a law degree fromthe Dominican Republic and the military government praised her as “charmingand exceptionally intelligent.”56 In early 1922, trouble arose when the New YorkWorld apparently cited her as agreeing with U.S. reforms. Dominicans in NewYork responded by expressing their “unpleasant impression.”57 Paradas admittedin a Santo Domingo article to speaking with the female World reporter aboutfeminism but not agreeing with feminist reforms and angrily denounced “thecomplete lie and despicable slander” of the World.58 The episode suggests,however, that Paradas, struggling to get her law practice off the ground in

52. Mayes, “Dominican Feminism,” 351.

53. Ana Teresa Paradas, “En respuesto de una falsa imputación,” El Siglo (Santo Domingo), 22March 1922, in Arístides Incháustegui and Blanca Delgado Malagón, eds., Vetilio AlfauDurán en Anales: escritos y documentos, Santo Domingo: Banco de Reservas, 1997, 652–3.

54. U.S. Army School for Military Government and Administration, second section, group V,The United States Military Government in the Dominican Republic 1916 to 1922: A CaseHistory, New York: 14 August 1943, (MS) F1938.45 U58, box 37, Hoover InstitutionArchives, Stanford, California, 42.

55. Calder, Impact, 88; Mayes, “Dominican Feminism,” 357; Kelsey, “American Intervention,”170; Derby, “Magic of Modernity,” 55–6.

56. El libro azul, 1920; reprint Santo Domingo: UASD, 1976, 63.

57. My translation. Paradas, “En respuesto,” 652–3; author unknown, “Mentira Grosera,” ElCójelo, 25 March 1922, in Arístides Incháustegui and Blanca Delgado Malagón, eds, VetilioAlfau Durán en Anales: escritos y documentos, Santo Domingo: Banco de Reservas, 1997. Iwrite “apparently” because the World did not publish an issue on that day and did notpublish this article for at least a month before or after that day. But clearly the article waspublished since it prompted a reaction.

58. Ibid.


male-dominated Santo Domingo, did make pro-reform statements but then deniedthem in the face of criticism. She struggled with a feminist’s nationalist dilemma:not only had “the nation” done little for her, but the occupation had. She hadbenefited from foreign occupation but lived in a nationalist environment almostcompletely opposed to it.

Other Dominican women imitated Paradas’s efforts to further women’sachievements but within an anti-occupation framework that did little to threatentraditional gender roles directly. Petronila Angélica Gómez, for instance,encouraged women “to cooperate with [men] in that great work of socialimprovement . . . assisting [men] as brothers and compatriots in all that is within[your] power, in harmony with [your] character and condition as women.”59 Sheorganized the country’s first National Women’s Congress and founded its firstfeminist magazine, Fémina, in 1917. She and Ercilia Pepín also tried to revivehostisianismo within latinidad by arguing that women offered special talents tothe anti-imperialist cause. Pepín explained that women could engage in politics“without losing graces, without scorning beauty, without tempering hearts, norbecoming masculine because of ideas, actions, or opinions.”60

Such activism, however mitigated, laid the groundwork for the creation ofwomen’s affiliates of anti-occupation movements. In late 1919, the military gov-ernment lifted censorship, which revived nationalist groups such as the NationalDominican Union (UND) in February 1920. Already before then, women hadcreated their own organizations.61 On 26 November 1919 five elite Dominicanwomen founded the Ladies Committee Pro Santo Domingo in New York Cityto raise funds for the diplomacy of exiled president Fernando Henríquez yCarvajal.62 The committee established an office in Washington, DC, sent circularsto over one thousand newspapers in the Americas, and apparently prompted

59. Petronila Angélica Gómez, “Feminism,” trans. Daisy Cocco de Filippis, reprinted in Coccode Filippis, ed., Documents of Dissidence, 39–44, esp. 42–3, as cited in Mayes, “DominicanFeminism,” 358.

60. This speech of July 1925 can be found as Ercilia Pepín, “Diversas consideraciones relativasa la capacidad que tiene la mujer para adquirir una cultura integral en la misma intensidadque el hombre,” reprinted in William Galván, ed., Antología de Ercilia Pepín, SantoDomingo: Universitaria, 1986, 30–2, as cited in Mayes, “Dominican Feminism,” 358–9.

61. Roberto Cassá, “Movimientos sociales durante la intervención militar norteamericana enRepública Dominicana,” Ecos 8, 1998, 177–206: 202.

62. Comittee of Ladies for Santo Domingo, letter to Director of La Hora, New York, 6November 1919, legajo 15, 1920, fondo SEIP, AGN-DR. The committee soon was composedof Julia P. McGrigor, Catherine P. de Cocco, Isabel López, Mercedes Benedicto, MercedesMota, and Alicia de Cestero.


Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels to declare that the occupation should endnow that the Great War had ended.63

“Should women in the Republic’s capital remain with arms crossed? No, athousand times no,” responded a Dominican woman in Santo Domingo wishingto emulate the activity of the New York women. On 15 March 1920, eightmembers there founded the Patriotic Ladies Committee and in the country’ssecond largest city, Santiago, a parallel group advanced the idea of a fund-raisingweek of activities.64 “Patriotic Week” occurred in June 1920 and raised at least$115,000.65 Armed with the motto “patriotism in action,” the Committee orga-nized tens of thousands in every major town in what was by far the mostsuccessful political project by women in any of these three occupations.66 Inorder not to upset traditional gender roles, organizers used religious analogiesto celebrate their success: “During this week of blessings, hopes, and faith,foreigners, mendicants, lepers, the wealthy, children, women, and the elderlyturned out in haste to lay down before the altar of the subjugated Fatherland thesacred donation.”67 A comprehensive accounting showed that women donatedmany if not most of the funds. They also held events that might appeal to menand women alike: violin concerts, dances, movies, and auctions of jewelry,dishes, and clothes.68 Women were apparently more successful than men atfundraising: In explaining one of the few local failures to raise much money, onegroup noted that the meager funds collected were due “to the indulgence thatmakes all gentlemen feel obligated to contribute to the ladies.”69 The resultof Patriotic Week, reported the French chargé in Santo Domingo, was to

63. Alicia de Cestero et al., letter to Editor, The Sun and Herald (New York), 3 May 1920, legajoPapeles 1919–1920, Tomo 1, Archivo de Tulio Cestero, Fondo Antiguo, UniversidadAutónoma de Santo Domingo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (hereafter UASD-DR).

64. Rosa de Noel Henríquez M., et al., Al pueblo dominicano, pamphlet collection, AGN-DR,4.

65. Major Earl H. Ellis, USMC, Brigade Intelligence Officer, summary of intelligence, 31 July1920, folder D-28 Dominican Rep. Intelligence Summaries, box 8, Operations and TrainingDivision, Intelligence Section, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I. Others estimated that up to$300,000 were raised or at least pledged.

66. “Acuerdos Importantes—La Asociación de Damas—Patriotismo en acción,” Listín Diario, 1June 1920, legajo 54, 1921–1922, fondo Gobierno Militar, AGN-DR.

67. Ibid.

68. My translation. De Noel, Al pueblo dominicano.

69. My translation. “Varios Banielejos,” memo to Secretario de Estado de Interior y Policía,Baní, 2 July 1920, legajo 67, 1920, fondo SEIP, AGN-DR.


“reanimate already excited spirits,” making “the schism between Dominicansand Americans . . . absolute.”70

The independence of these committees from men’s oversight is not entirelyclear. One U.S. official sneered that nationalist men were “working behind theskirts of the ‘Patriotic Dames’,” and there is some evidence to that effect.71 Thetreasurer of the New York committee, for instance, was Alicia de Cestero, verylikely the wife of Tulio Cestero, Henríquez’s representative in the United States.She wrote that the ladies founded their committee “by instruction” of the exiledpresident.72 This left unspecified whether Henríquez ordered the committee to beformed or merely gave his assent and advice to its founders. To be sure, deCestero’s explicit mention of the link was meant as an assertion of the legitimacyof the committee, not of its control by men. And more importantly, Patriotic Weekgave women invaluable experience in fund raising, event planning, and speechmaking.

The situation was similar in Haiti, where women also organized peacefulprotests, albeit later. In 1920, the Patriotic Union, the Haitian equivalent of theUND, launched its own campaign to secure funds, and its rank and file includedaround two hundred women who knocked on doors and accosted passers-by fordonations.73 Yet Haiti’s elite women in the 1920s founded no distinct organizationand seemed even more to be extensions of male relatives. At one protest of tenthousand, the only female speakers were the widow of Anténor Firmin and themothers of Charlemagne Péralte and Rosalvo Bobo, three of the fiercest anti-occupation Haitians.74

Haitian women’s activism increased as the occupation settled into semi-permanent colonialism. In 1929, students and workers struck against U.S. policies

70. My translation. French Chargé d’Affaires Barré-Ponsignon, letter to Minister of ForeignAffairs, Santo Domingo, 30 June 1920, dossier 2, République Dominicaine, Amérique1918–1940, Correspondance Politique et Commerciale 1914–1940, Archives Diploma-tiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris, France.

71. Ellis, summary of intelligence, 31 July 1920.

72. The Spanish original is “por indicación.” Alicia de Cestero, letter to Tulio Cestero, NewYork, 1 February 1920, legajo Papeles 1919–1920, Tomo 1, Archivo de Tulio Cestero, FondoAntiguo, UASD-DR.

73. Léon D. Pamphile, “The NAACP and the American Occupation of Haiti,” Phylon 1, 1986,97.

74. Le Nouvelliste, 13 March 1930, ascited in Garde d’Haiti, Extracts from the Newspapers, 14March 1930, folder Garde News Digest, 1930 March 6–15, box 1070, President’s Commis-sion for Study and Review of Conditions in Haiti (hereafter President’s Commission),Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch, Iowa (hereafter HHL).


and women from nearby colleges joined them.75 In 1930, when a U.S. commissioncame to Haiti to investigate withdrawal options, it was “Mrs. Perceval Thoby,”the wife of a storied nationalist, who organized a women’s march to greet it, witha remarkable turnout of up to fifteen thousand.76 Women invoked their “specialpowers,” in this case to refrain from violence or inflammatory speeches thatwould invite a crackdown.77 U.S. administrators pressured Haitians in the gov-ernment to grant permission to Thoby “with the understanding that the proposedmanifestation be of a purely pious, speechless and feminine nature.”78

Organizers held to those constraints but interpreted them in their own manner.They were certainly not “speechless.” They held a meeting of 1,200 in a church,invoking God’s help in favor of Haiti, and using “safe” religious language to gettheir point across.79 “Haiti’s finest singer” invoked “this new Calvary,” meaningthe occupation itself, and intoned, “have pity, O God, on these erring men whooutrage Thee and know not what they do,” giving the commission a banner twodays later that represented “the heart of Christ, in a crown of thorns, reflecting theheart of the Haitian Woman aggrieved and wounded by fifteen years of nationalhumiliation and suffering.”80 Haitian nationalist men, invested in far more heatedrhetoric, simply could not have walked such a fine line between obsequiousnessand assertiveness. During its trip to Haiti, the commission overstepped its instruc-tions from President Herbert Hoover and recommended a specific formula forwithdrawal.

In all three countries, women also pursued international allies, no doubtenhancing their own political experience and sense of their rights as women. TheLadies Committee had its origins in New York City partly because of censorshipin the Dominican Republic but also because it aimed “to work with the aid of highminded Americans and of the Latin American colonies residing in the United

75. Georges Condé, La ville des Cayes, Port-au-Prince: Imprimeur II, 2002, 281.

76. “Quize milles femmes debout réclament la libération du territoire,” Haïti-Journal, 4 March1930, 1.

77. Ibid.

78. Garde d’Haiti, Extracts from the Newspapers, 4 March 1930, folder Garde News Digest,1930 March 1–5, box 1070, President’s Commission, HHL.

79. Harold Denny, “Haitian Women Pray That We Quit Island; Lead Liberty March,” New YorkTimes, 3 March 1930, 1.

80. My translation. Letter by Haitian women, Port-au-Prince, 4 March 1930, folder Recom-mendations and Suggestions Submitted to Commission, 1930 January-March, box 1073,President’s Commission, HHL.


States for the restoration of the Dominican Republic.”81 In Haiti, again two wivesof prominent nationalists, Theresa Hudicourt and Eugénie Sylvain, worked withthe African-American-led International Commission of Women of the DarkerRaces to petition the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom torecognize them as a chapter, which the WILPF did in 1925.82 The followingyear the Haitian women pushed for a fact-finding mission by U.S. women. EmilyBalch led this bi-racial endeavor, which produced several lobbying and academicevents, including the book Occupied Haiti.83 In 1930, at a meeting of the Inter-American Commission of Women, demonstrators protested the U.S. occupationof Nicaragua.84

In Nicaragua, a movement for women suffrage and access to education in the1920s existed, but it seems that it was neither opposed to the occupation norprompted by it, perhaps because before 1926 the U.S. military presence was slightand after 1926 it was concentrated in the mountainous north.85 The country’s firstfeminists, writers such as Rosa Umaña Espinosa and Josefa Toledo de Aguerri,founded two unabashedly feminist magazines in 1918. Yet neither tied theirfeminism to the presence of U.S. troops in their country and they only referred tothe United States when positing its suffragist movement as a model for Nicaraguato follow. Toledo admitted that the feminism of her countrywomen was “ingeneral asleep.”86

PRO-OCCUPATION WOMEN

At the other end of the spectrum of women’s responses were more positive ones.Given women’s small numbers among insurgents and supporters and their general

81. Cestero et al., letter, 3 May 1920.

82. Anne Regis Winkler-Morey, “Good Neighbors: Popular Internationalists and United States’Relations with Mexico and the Caribbean Region (1918–1929),” unpubl. Ph.D. diss.,University of Minnesota, 2001, 200.

83. Emily Greene Balch, ed., Occupied Haiti, New York: Garland, 1972 (first ed.: 1927).

84. David Whisnant, Rascally Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua,Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1995, 406.

85. Victoria González, “Somocista Women, Right-Wing Politics, and Feminism in Nicaragua,1936–1979,” in Victoria González and Karen Kampwirth, eds., Radical Women in LatinAmerica: Left and Right, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2001, 41. See alsoVictoria González, “Josefa Toledo de Aguerri (1866–1962) and the Forgotten History ofNicaraguan Feminism, 1821–1955,” M.A. thesis, University of New Mexico, 1996, 47–51,in which the only mention of the occupation is the name of Carmen Sobalbarro, a “Sand-inista poet,” 48.

86. Whisnant, Rascally Signs, 410; see also 409–11.


exclusion from formal politics, adopting collaborationist, even pro-occupation,attitudes was not surprising. But of course, there were mostly “pull” factorsattracting women to occupation forces. While polls of the period do not exist,anecdotal evidence suggests that women more than men tended to accommodateoccupations while still shaping their political orientations on personal and familyconsiderations rather than nationalist ones.

Occupied men did not look fondly upon women’s acquiescence to occupation.Several novels of the era portrayed women’s insufficient passion against occupa-tions as naïve and dangerous for the nation. For instance, Léon Laleau’s Le Choc,written in 1920, featured several Haitian women with forgiving attitudes towardthe marines, because for instance men danced with black women; it had onefemale character say that “these people are superior to us!”87 That almost allnovels included such characters suggests that men observed women expressingpositive reactions to occupations.

However, there is no non-fictional record of women welcoming occupiersbecause of any inferiority complex. Rather, they did so almost always because theystood to gain (or to stop losing) personally from the presence of foreign troops.Following the 1912 intervention in Nicaragua, for instance, 216 “ladies ofGranada” wrote to marine commanders thanking them for ending the “state ofhorror and fright in which the mother, the daughter, the wife and the sister sawthemselves” during food riots aimed at the elite.88 Class, therefore, tended toreinforce pro-occupation sentiment at the top ranks of society.

As it did at the bottom. An unknown number of women, usually near thelowest socioeconomic rank, took up with U.S. troops either as sexual partners,mothers to their children, or wives. The least affective and permanent of theserelationships belonged to sex workers, who existed before every occupation andexpanded their numbers after the appearance of the troops. In Port-au-Prince, acity of 100,000, there were 147 registered saloons or dance halls and prostitutesoperated out of all of them.89 Perhaps because of their marginal status, prostituteswere the only women who materially helped marines in their counter-insurgencies.

87. Laleau, Le choc, 82.

88. Women of Granada, letter, Granada, 11 October 1912, folder 7, box 1, Papers of Joseph H.Pendleton, Marine Corps Archives and Special Collections, Gray Research Center, Quantico,Virginia (hereafter GRC-QV). For background on the riots, see Michel Gobat, Confrontingthe American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005,94–110, and Michel Gobat, “Granada’s Conservative Revolutionaries: Anti-Elite Violenceand the Nicaraguan Civil War of 1912,” paper presented at the Third Central AmericanCongress of History, San José, Costa Rica, 15–18 July 1996.

89. Balch, Occupied Haiti, 119.


In Haiti, some acted as guides against cacos and helped identify them. Otherstaught marines Kreyol.90

More typically, prostitutes simply slept with marines, finding in them a steadysource of income and even personal security. In Nicaragua, one Navy captainexplained, prostitutes favored marines because their pay was higher than those ofNicaraguan soldiers, police, or artisans.91 In the Dominican Republic many actedas medium-term lovers exclusive to one marine. In 1920 the chief sanitary officercomplained that several marines had been found living with prostitutes. Thewomen explained “that they were not subject to the requirements of the lawregarding prostitutes because they were ‘concubinas’ of Marines.”92 Clearly, thesewomen attempted to use marine connections to climb up the social ladder, in thiscase out of the “outlaw” category. Happily for them, the marines confirmed “thatthey were responsible for the women in question,” with the sanitary officerclarified that the marines were not pimps.93

Non sex-workers sometimes took up with marines, though estimates varydepending on the source. When asked if there was intermarriage between Domini-cans and marines, one brigadier general who was a first lieutenant in the occu-pation answered: “Very little, if any, and very little shack-up except temporaryliaisons; just one-night stands.”94 In his recollection, marriages that did resultjoined U.S. officers and white Dominican girls of “prominent Spanish fami-l[ies].”95 Part of the reason was that, from 1921 on, officers’ wives could accom-pany them when on tour to the Dominican Republic. Another author judged that“not a few” marines married Nicaraguan women and stayed in country after theirtour of duty.96 Perhaps this was because in Nicaragua the Navy discouraged

90. Renda, Taking Haiti, 171.

91. Captain M. M. Taylor, USN, Commandant, 15th Naval District, memo to Secretary of theNavy, Managua, 27 January 1922, roll 30, M1140 Secret and Confidential Correspondenceof the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Office of the Secretary of the Navy,1919–27, General Records of the Department of the Navy Record Group 80, NARA I.

92. R. Hayden, Chief Sanitary Officer, letter to Military Governor of Santo Domingo, SantoDomingo, 23 July 1920, legajo 1, 1917–1920, fondo Gobierno Militar, AGN-DR.

93. Ibid.

94. Brigadier General Robert C. Kilmartin, USMC, oral-history interview by Benis M. Frank,Quantico, 9 May 1970, Marine Corps Audiovisual Research Archives, Marine Corps Base,Quantico, Virginia (hereafter MCARA-QV).

95. Ibid.

96. Roscoe Hill, “Los Marinos en Nicaragua, 1912–1925,” Revista conservadora del pen-samiento centroamericano 27, 135, 1971, 9.


families from accompanying marines by denying extra pay for dependents.97 InHaiti, where few marines expressed admiration for the beauty of Haitian women,Renda judged that “a few, perhaps more than we know, married Haitian women,raised Haitian families, and even became citizens of Haiti.”98 Yet a brigadiergeneral who served in all three occupations said that, while marines chased after“local ladies” in Haiti, the “thought of intermarriage” was “horrifying” tothem.99 Unspoken in many of these observations was the marker of race: U.S.racism long considered black-white marriage taboo, while “Spanish” was asynonym for “white.”

Women understood love and/or sex with marines as acts that carried politicalmeanings, both for them and occupied men. When marines first landed in SantoDomingo in 1916 to silent hostility, debutantes who had once flirted with marinesnow stayed behind closed doors but made sure to hum a new song whose refrainwent, “I don’t love you any more” (te quiero a ti no má).100 In so doing theylegitimated the sentiments of male nationalists such as Fabio Fiallo, who threat-ened in verse:

To the woman who abandonsthe matrimonial bedI might forgive herwere I to judge her:she who joins a YankeeI would burn her alive.101

In Nicaragua, Conservative Party demonstrators marched with signs that read“Death to the Nicaraguan women married to Yanquis.”102

The behavior that perhaps most bothered men (and was most widespreadamong elite women) was the adoption of occupation-influenced, U.S.-definedcultural modernity. In 1921 a Dominican newspaper listed

97. General Robert E. Hogaboom, USMC (ret.), oral-history interview by Benis M. Frank, St.Mary’s City, Maryland, 1 April 1970, MCARA-QV, 75.

98. Renda, Taking Haiti, 86.

99. Brigadier General Ivan W. Miller, USMC (ret.), oral history interview by Maj. Thomas E.Donnelly, USMC, Coronado, California, 10 December 1970, MCARA-QV, 24.

100. Juan Gómez, “The Gallant Dominicans,” American Mercury 17, May 1929, 94.

101. My translation. Fiallo cited in Álvarez, Mujeres, 49.

102. Gobat, American Dream, 254.


nine things which our women have learned in six years: To show their legsmore than they should. To go marketing playing the role of servants. Tobecome typists and neglect the kitchen. To go out riding in automobiles orin airplanes with whom they think best. To become chauffeurs. To marry forbusiness. To cross their legs in public places. To wear excessively low-cutdresses and to dance in cafes and restaurants.103

In the Dominican Republic, women who took clerical jobs offered by themilitary government (the third sin above) risked associating themselves with theoccupation: The English term “shopping girl,” shortened later to “chopa,”denoted young women who worked for wages.104 Rafael Damirón, responsible forone of the few occupation-themed novels of the era, portrayed his main femalecharacter as anti-nationalist because of her feminist leanings: She holds an admin-istrative position with the occupation government and makes good money, andnot incidentally she frequents a marine captain.105 “When a woman becomes if notthe only but the greatest bread winner in her home,” preached Damirón, “sheearns the respect of her betters, reducing their moral authority over her andacquiring a gradual emancipation so dangerous that it might easily lead to thecomplete disintegration of the household.”106

Dominican writer Horacio Read blamed what he saw as the decadence ofwomen directly on the example of U.S. women accompanying occupation forces.In his sarcastically titled 1924 novel The Civilizers, he denounced how drunken,adulterous wives of occupation administrators invited to their African-influenceddances “maidens of our country, daughters of fawning fathers fearful of losingtheir government job.”107 Read directed his frustration at the way the occupationcollapsed the traditionally separate markers of race, gender, generation, andpolitics. In a similar protest, an unsigned article from 1921 bemoaned the “moralbankruptcy” of U.S. women and the fact that “[o]ur girls copy, perhaps uncon-sciously, some points presented daily before their eyes at the moving picture showsand in the lives of the mercenary women who come to my country from the north,

103. El Indice (Santiago), cited in Derby, “Magic of Modernity,” 98.

104. Ramón Alberto Ferreras, Enfoques de la intervención militar norteamericana a la RD(1916–1924), Santo Domingo: Editorial del Nordeste, 1984, 15.

105. Damirón, ¡Ay de los Vencidos!

106. My translation. Damirón, ¡Ay de los Vencidos!, 18.

107. My translation. Read, Los civilizadores, 93.


and go smiling towards a sad destiny, prepared, perhaps, by the infamous inten-tions of this nefarious intervention.”108

The Haitian elite, too, rejected revealing or loose-flowing clothing, hair à lagarçonne, and the wearing of négligés on the outside. L’Essor complained about“a great loosening in the dress of the country’s chic women. They say they followParisian and American fads.”109 Port-au-Prince’s finest flirted in front of theirparents, kissed in public, and held saucy conversations. Clergy bemoaned the lossof authority by parents. Public opinion associated U.S.-style dances like the foxtrot with prostitution, as suggested by the name of brothels: dancings.110

Michel Gobat found in Nicaragua under occupation perhaps the most wide-spread, consistent, and organized male opposition to women’s social liberation.There, prominent men founded the Catholic Knights (Caballeros Católicos) afterthe Great War, not coincidentally at the same time as Nicaraguan women foundedthe country’s first feminist organization.111 The Knights soon focused on demon-izing U.S. modernist behaviors of women, and they looked askance at the expan-sion of the film, record, magazine, and radio industries. And some women alliedwith them. In 1925 conservative women from Grenada joined them in hurlingstones, “excrement and other filth” at U.S. missionaries and their parishioners.The Knights succeeded mostly in the realm of their own homes but also convincedCatholic priests and bishops to refuse to give sacraments to women who attendedservices in sleeveless blouses or skirts that ended above the ankles.112 Culturalconservatives even agreed with Sandino on one thing: U.S.-style music was too“sensuous” for Nicaraguan women.113

AMBIVALENCE

The great majority of women under occupation were involved in no movement foror against occupation. Instead, they occupied an ambivalent space in which they

108. “Woman,” in Kelsey, “American Intervention,” 187.

109. Georges Corvington, Port-au-Prince au cours des ans, vol. 6: La capitale d’Haïti sousl’occupation, 1922–1934, Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1987, 118–22.

110. My translation. Corvington, Port-au-Prince, 118–22. For a Dominican example of criticismof dancing, see “La Vida en Provincias: De Samaná,” Listín Diario (Santo Domingo), 15September 1922, 6.

111. Gobat, American Dream, 177. Women also began playing basketball, another U.S. import,in the early 1920s.

112. Ibid., 186–9.

113. Ibid., 254.


mostly looked out for their own interests or those of their family or each other.Their behavior indicates a search for accommodation and normalcy amid abnor-mal conditions. Merchant women made up a salient portion of these in-betweenwomen because they had sustained contact with U.S. forces in most occupations.They especially stood out in Haiti, where the tradition of impressing peasant meninto caco armies had, long before the occupation, devolved to Haitian women thejob of bringing goods from farm to market.114 Carl Kelsey noted that, for that veryreason, it seemed to outsiders that there were twice as many women as men inHaiti.115

The market women became important to the marines in two ways. First,merchant women controlled a major segment of the economy. Women came toPort-au-Prince and other towns to sell either surplus food from their own smallplots and export crops (except coffee, which men sold) to spéculateurs, who werealso women. Without Port-au-Prince’s five thousand marchandes, there would

114. “The Missionary Marines,” New York Times, 8 June 1919, sec. 3, 4. In the DominicanRepublic, where there was less insecurity, markets included men and women; see Kelsey,“American Intervention,” 170.

115. Kelsey, “American Intervention,” 118.

Figure 2: Nicaraguan “flappers,” likely to be identified with U.S. occupation. Photo #

56H-523858, folder 56H [Nica] Populace.—Nicaraguan series, 1927, box 15, Record

Group 127G, National Archives Building, College Park, Maryland.


have been no food market in Haiti.116 As major producers and traders, marketwomen protested the regulations of the occupation and enhanced their powervis-à-vis the marines. In the Dominican Republic, for instance, market womenmade bread, sweets, and other goods at home and brought them to market. Themilitary government passed a Sanitation Law that, according to historian LaurenDerby, “became a focal point of popular resentment, particularly for marketwomen.”117 Many of them complained of “impossible sacrifice” because theycould not comply with the requirements for proper waste disposal.118 Similarly, onthe Haitian island of La Gonâve, where storied marine Faustin Wirkus lived foryears as the lone “White King” among Haitians, Wirkus struck a power-sharingdeal with the local matriarch Queen Ti Meminne primarily because she controlledan agricultural guild.119

116. Renda, Taking Haiti, 49; Balch, Occupied Haiti, 61.

117. Lauren Derby, “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-DominicanBorderlands, 1900 to 1937,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, 1994, 507–8.

118. Ibid.

119. William B. Seabrook, The Magic Island, New York: Paragon House, 1989, 186 (first ed.:1929).

Figure 3: Haitian market women in Port-au-Prince, a political force to be reckoned with.

Photo # 52D-519913, folder 52D Haitian populace, box 14, Record Group 127G, National

Archives Building, College Park, Maryland.


A second reason merchant women wielded power was that they were often theonly urban Haitians who had contact with the countryside and thus becameimportant carriers of information.120 Sandra Ott has shown how women resistedoccupation in France by disseminating information through gossip, rumors, anddenunciations.121 In Haiti, marines often conveyed messages to illiterate peasantsor to the insurgency through trusted market women. And vice versa, for theylooked to the market women for information about developments beyond thecities. As one contemporary put it, “market-women are the newspapers of Haiti.They possess and dispense all manner of information.”122 One month after themarines landed, for instance, officers distributed handbills “to the most intelligentmarket women leaving the town” intended “for the information of the privatesoldiers pertaining to the Caco forces and not for the Chiefs.”123 Years later, whenthe marines did seek to send a message to caco leader Charlemagne Péralte, theyagain relied on the market women, who did not disappoint: they found the manwho eluded hundreds of marines.124 Conversely, the market could also be a site fordisinformation. Marines returned to the marchandes often to quell wild rumorsor correct misinterpreted orders.125 In order to control information, therefore,marines had to set aside their stereotypes of gender and race and heed the opinionof market women. One can imagine that market women found enjoyment in thepower that information gave them over these white males, or merely in the simpleexchange of information. Carl Kelsey noted that market women refused to selltheir goods along the roads “for they would thus lose the joy of barter and chatterafforded in the town.”126

120. George Eaton Simpson, “Haitian Peasant Economy,” The Journal of Negro History 4,1940, 506.

121. Sandra Ott, “Good Tongues, Bad Tongues: Denunciation, Rumour and Revenge in theFrench Basque Country, 1943–1945,” History and Anthropology 1, 2006, 57–72.

122. John Houston Craige, Cannibal Cousins, New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934,67.

123. Eli K. Cole, Regimental Commander, memo to Commanding Officer, Champ de Mars,Cap-Haïtien, 28 August 1915, folder Correspondence May-Aug 1915, box 6, Papers ofSmedley Butler, GRC-QV.

124. R. H. Greathouse, “King of the Banana Wars,” Marine Corps Gazette 44, June 1960, 32.

125. Waller, letter to Caperton, Port-au-Prince, 18 May 1916, folder Correspondence Jan-May1916, box 1, Papers of William Banks Caperton, Manuscripts Division, Library ofCongress.

126. Kelsey, “American Intervention,” 121.


Women merchants, like most merchants, also seemed thankful for the personalsecurity that the occupations brought. Despite their relative security as women,marchandes did tend to be mugged by cacos because they carried goods.127 Butafter marines disposed of the last insurgency in 1920 some mentioned that “eventhe women can carry all their money on their person and they feel safe anywhere.”128 Marines also clearly valued the market women. They built a “resthouse” for them to sleep in after walking all day. They even ran a nursery for theirchildren while they sold their wares.129

But market women also responded negatively to the occupation when it threat-ened their self-interest or their identity. Writer James Weldon Johnson witnessedYankee motorcars frightening their horses and spilling their produce all over theroad.130 In most occupations, marines leveled taxes on agricultural goods and realestate, infuriating the middle and upper classes, groups with which merchantsidentified. In 1917 Haitian newspapers reported that market women complainedthat gendarmes taxed their goods as high as 20–25 percent and shot their hogs,leaving them for dead.131 Some market women, finally, opposed the oppositionbecause of family ties to the insurgency. Benoît Batraville took over as caco chiefafter Péralte’s death; one Haitian described his wife as a marchande who rode hermule with “a number of other market women [who] all belong to the men incamp.” “Mme Benoît,” he added, “always carries a revolver under her dress.”132

Insurrectionists therefore also understood market women as a political constitu-ency that everyone wanted on their side because of their status as conduits ofcommerce and information. In 1930 one anti-occupation Haitian running for adeputy seat specifically promised market women at Mont Organize that he and hisilk “would do away with the Garde [U.S.-run constabulary] and return to the old

127. Blair Niles, Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s Eldest Daughter, New York: Putnam,1926, 139.

128. Michel J. Kouri and 45 others, petition, Port-au-Prince, January [1921], 838.00/1770,Central Decimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1910–1929, RG 59, NARA II.

129. U.S. Congress, Senate, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo,Sixty-Seventh Congress, First and Second Sessions, vol. 1, 1921, Washington: USGPO,1922, 629, 541.

130. James Weldon Johnson, “Self-Determining Haiti II. What the United States Has Accom-plished,” The Nation, 4 September 1920, 266.

131. “Nouvelles du Cap,” Le Matin (Port-au-Prince), 26 December 1917, 2.

132. Statement of Methius Richard, Headquarters of Gendarmerie d’Haiti, Hinche, 18 April1920, folder Bandit Activities and Descriptions, box 3, Records of the Gendarmerie d’Haiti,1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.


Haitian Military system, . . . abolish tobacco and land laws, immediately get ridof the whites.”133

Most women in these occupied countries did not respond to such entreaties,but, like the market women of Haiti, they were pragmatic in their pursuits of theirrights and interests when the forces of occupation threatened these. Severaloccupied men wanted nothing to do with an occupied government—unless theywere offered a job. But archives are filled with letters and petitions by women whoepitomized female ambivalence vis-à-vis occupation: On the one hand, theyquickly recognized occupied governments, giving them legitimacy, while on theother hand they positioned themselves as claimants on the state, implicitlydemanding of it justice as the price of recognition.

Elizabeth Saint-Bernard, a market woman at Gonaïves in Haiti, was such aclaimant. In September 1919 a marine private raped her teenage daughter Elanorin the presence of another marine and a Haitian boy. The private admittedhaving intercourse with Elanor but countered “that the girl did not resist verymuch. . . . He also states that he paid her a gourd [$0.20] after he had finishedwith her.”134 Only Saint-Bernard’s vigorous pursuit of the case pushed the marinesto investigate and recommend a court-martial. This meant little to Saint-Bernard,however, who requested only that the private pay a fine (to her) of 100 gourdes($20) “on the grounds that the girl has lost her reputation and it will be difficultfor her to get work to do.”135 No document indicated whether Saint-Bernard trulysaw Elanor’s value only in monetary terms, or whether she imagined that sucharguments were the only ones liable to move U.S. authorities.

Other female claimants interceded on behalf of persecuted male familymembers. A French priest at Thomazeau, Haiti, for over five years reported thatfemale parishioners went through him to denounce occupation crimes “againsttheir husbands.”136 And Dame Desdune Sylvain wrote to the U.S. chief of theconstabulary in 1929 asking for clemency for her husband, who served a two-year sentence “for infringing on his service” as a sergeant (he probably defected

133. R. P. Wiliams, Commandant of Garde d’Haiti, memo to Brigadier General John Russell,American High Commissioner, Port-au-Prince, 20 September 1930, 838.00/2887, CentralDecimal Files Relating to Internal Affairs of Haiti, 1930–1939, RG 59, NARA II.

134. Lewis L. Gover, District Commander, memo to Brigade Commander, Gonaives, 2 Septem-ber 1919, folder Brigade Commander—Correspondence, box 5, Records of the Gendarm-erie d’Haiti, 1915–1934, RG 127, NARA I.

135. Ibid.

136. Abbe Louis Marie Le Sidanier, testimony in Senate Hearings, vol. 2, 850.


or left his post).137 Sylvain was careful to flatter U.S. pride, offering her admi-ration for “the descendants of Washington, John Brown, abraham [sic] Lincoln”and stating, “where the Star-Spangled Banner waves, there reign Charity andhumanity.”138 She also used racial and gendered self-deprecation to elicit pity,describing herself as “a poor black girl imploring the assistance of a greatsoul.”139

The widow of Ciriaco Russo, a storekeeper, claimed the attention of the statefor a different reason.140 Over three years earlier an inebriated marine had struckher husband’s head, causing a fatal brain hemorrhage. The marine was court-martialed but she never received the indemnity promised by the occupation. Shewas now destitute. Archives do not contain any response to her claim. Yet Sylvainand Russo, more than men, tended to speak of their experiences with the occu-pation not in the vague notions of “sovereignty” and “pride” used by nationalistmen, but rather by recounting concrete experiences of loss and suffering thatreveal important motivations of ordinary people during occupation. When the1930 U.S. commission invited communications from Haitians, dozens respondedbut only two brought up personal hardships. Both were women.141 And womenclaimants tended to be the least overtly political when making claims. JuliePetit-Frère Joseph, for instance, wrote a polite letter (first inquiring about hishealth) to the caco leader Péralte to request that her goods (or their worth, in thiscase 300 gourdes, about $60) be returned to her since the cacos took them.142

Overall, women were bolder than men in requesting money from occupationauthorities, yet that boldness has been forgotten. To cite only one example:Dominicans widely believe to this day that Emeterio Sánchez, a bystander whoheroically rescued several sailors when the USS Memphis crashed on the shores of

137. Dame Desdune Sylvain, letter to General Evans, Chief of Garde, Dessalines, 28 January1929, folder Haiti, 1928–1931—Haitiana, box 20, Papers of Oliver P. Smith, GRC-QV.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

140. Mme Veuve C. Russo, letter to Forbes Commission, 6 March 1930, folder CommissionPetitions, 1930 March 1–6, box 1068, President’s Commission, HHL.

141. One was from the Veuve Russo and the other was Mme P. Prophète, letter to ForbesCommission, Port-au-Prince, 6 March 1930, folder Recommendations and SuggestionsSubmitted to Commission, 1930 January-March, box 1073, President’s Commission, HHL.

142. Julie Petit-Frère Joseph, letter to Charlemagne Péralte, Rannibille, 7 June 1919, folderCorrespondence Captured by Captain W. F. Becker, box 1, Special Correspondence of theChief of the Gendarmerie d’Haiti, 1919–1920, RG 127, NARA I.


Santo Domingo in 1916, refused a pension from the Navy.143 Others state that hedid not.144 Navy records show that, upon his death, his widow requested one.145

CONCLUSION

It may be tempting to conclude that occupations in Latin America were crucialstepping-stones for the development of women’s political consciousness and orga-nization. Certainly, the presence of foreign troops did prompt some women intopolitical action, channel others into the paid workforce and the professions, andflood new markets with U.S. goods and cultural influences that intensified over-lapping tensions of gender, race, class, and generation. Yet occupations may alsohave halted incipient women’s movements, replacing them with more “urgent”anti-occupation struggles. The dilemma between feminism and nationalism cer-tainly existed, and it is not yet resolved. It is still not clear, for instance, whetherthe founding of women’s organizations soon after the departure of the marines (in1930 in the Dominican Republic and 1934 in Haiti) would have occurred earlierhad there been no occupation. What does seem more evident is that women foundduring the occupations several ways to keep their political consciousness aliveand active.

More interesting is that women, whether they participated or not in resistance,defined their reactions to occupations in ways that reflected the slogan of feministsecond-wavers, that “the personal is political.” In this case, the consequences ofoccupations became the stuff of women’s daily lives and concerns—emotional,financial, and security. Women had to find ways to survive and thrive despiteshifting and ambiguous military situations, state decrees, and cultural mores.Most, it appears, chose to embrace occupations when they benefited and rejectthem when they did not. Ambivalence, therefore, was a more representative stanceof women toward occupation than was hostility or enthusiasm. Women looked atthe forces of occupation with less formal political baggage than men and with akeener eye to how they or their families could survive unharmed. The assertion ofsurvival with sanity, dignity, and perhaps a bit more power and wealth was, initself, a political statement.

143. Several students told me this story from oral tradition while I taught at the UniversidadAutónoma de Santo Domingo in fall 2006.

144. Carlos V. de León, Casos y cosas de ayer, Santo Domingo: Núñez, 1972, 20.

145. Lieutenant W. M. Quigley, USN, Flag Secretary to the Military Governor of SantoDomingo, memo to W. W. Russell, Minister of the United States, 31 July 1921, folder 3,1–25 American Legation, box 46, Military Government of Santo Domingo, Records of theOffice of the Chief of Naval Operations Record Group 38, NARA I.


Personal Occupations: Women's Responses to U.S. Military Occupations in Latin America

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