Retracing One’s Steps is an archive consisting of evidence and documentation relating to female writers, teachers, journalists, photographers, soldiers, runners (military couriers), ideologists, feminists, social activists, weapons and munitions carriers, agitators and rebels who belonged at different times to the Mexican Liberal Party, which itself underwent a transition from liberalism to anarchism.

These women were relevant participants in the first uprisings that eventually led to the Mexican Revolution. Their voices were loudly heard in the Regeneración newspaper as well as in various other articles protesting Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship. Like male insurgents they were exiled and persecuted, but unlike them, stories of their heroics have gone largely ignored. Many of them—Andrea Villarreal, Margarita Ortega, Sara Estela Ramírez, Elisa Acuña, Juana Belén Gutiérrez, María Talavera Brousse, Lucía Norman, Elizabeth Trowbridge and Ethel Duffy—were merely identified as the “lovers,” “wives” or “daughters” of male Liberal Party members. Over time, they were forgotten and overlooked by history.

Retracing One’s Steps is a continuing investigation, a collection of gestures, a reviewing of documents, photographs and newspaper clippings—of everything that might evoke these women’s existence and allow them to accompany us in the present. I’m interested in lending meaning to certain historical documents that have been largely neglected in archives or collections. I feel that these female faces belong to rebels brimming with utopian ideals and that we need them in order to reclaim our own history of feminism in Mexico today.

The images here are records of documents that I found in different archives around the country: Archivo El Hijo del Ahuizote, the Archivo General de la Nación and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.