Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
Torres had dramatically expanded several CFM programs; for instance, by 1922 they were distributing free breakfasts to 6,000 school children a day. The Mexican secretary of education personally appointed Torres head of the Mexican delegation to Baltimore. Hubert wrote to Torres in January, formally asking her to attend the PACW as a Mexican delegate and to raise interest in the conference among her colleagues. Torres agreed, and recruited seven of her colleagues to travel to Baltimore with her.24 They included a math teacher, a newspaper editor, and two women who had spent several years teaching indigenous Mexicans to read and write Spanish. With the exception of Torres, who came from a working-class family, the Mexican delegates were middle-class, and all but two were unmarried. Several of them had spent time in the United States, including Torres, and spoke English well.25
The Mexican delegation’s journey to the conference was a veritable public relations campaign, designed to promote Pan Americanism, Mexico, and the League of Women Voters all at the same time. Composed of eight women, the group was one of the largest contingents from a Latin American country. From Mexico City they traveled by train to Laredo, Texas, where the U.S. Treasury Department had instructed customs officials to “extend every courtesy to facilitate the passage of the Mexican women through that port.” They were met at the border by Florence Terry Griswold, president of the Pan American Round Table, who, along with several members of her organization, escorted them to San Antonio. After a few days of events and sight-seeing in San Antonio, several Round Table members accompanied the Mexican women by train to St. Louis, where they received “special hospitality” from the local branch of the League of Women Voters. From St. Louis, Torres, Griswold, and the others continued on to Baltimore. The Mexican delegation carried with them a Mexican flag made from silk and hand-embroidered by hundreds of Mexican women. President Obregón had asked them, on behalf of the entire country, to present the flag at the Baltimore conference, and afterward to carry it to Independence Hall in Philadelphia.26 On April 28, Torres exchanged flags with members of the New Century Club, a prominent Philadelphia women’s organization. They in turn presented Torres with a U.S. flag to be delivered as a gift to President Obregón’s wife.27 This was gendered public diplomacy at its finest—the journey and exchange of flags were designed to spread a peaceful and pleasant image of Mexico across the United States, establishing these representatives as friends rather than adversaries. At a time when the two countries did not enjoy a formal diplomatic relationship, these kinds of interactions held great symbolic significance.
In addition to establishing the Pan American Conference of Women as a venue for gendered diplomacy, the pre-conference activities and exchanges also revealed that while all the delegates were dedicated to furthering inter-American women’s internationalism, some had more power than others to shape its direction. The process of setting the conference agenda most clearly illustrates this imbalance. Lavinia Engle, who had the original idea for the conference, initially chose the topics for the roundtable discussions. U.S. members of the organizing committee then refined her selections. The task had to be started early; in order to solicit support for the conference from the U.S. State Department, league representatives had to be able to present a tentative agenda. Once they had secured support, they could not stray very far from their initial proposal. With this in mind, Engle chose issues she assumed would be of interest to women throughout the hemisphere. Her first list, submitted to the State Department in July 1921, included six topics: “education, child welfare, women in industry, prevention of traffic in women, suffrage for women, and international friendliness and reduction of armaments.”28 Engle admitted to Maud Wood Park, however, that in setting the agenda she was hampered by her lack of knowledge of Latin America. “I have tried to topic [sic] the points for the P.A.C.,” she wrote in October 1921. “After all the whole matter boils down to the simple fact that we know practically nothing about any of our American neighbors except Canada and not a great deal about her.”29 Less than a week later Engle, Cunningham, and the other members of the organizing committee supplied Rowe with a copy of the conference agenda—weeks before they had even begun contacting Latin American women about attending. The final list included Engle’s first four original topics verbatim. “Suffrage for women” was changed to “women’s political status,” and “international friendliness and reduction of armaments” was removed entirely, in favor of “women’s civil status.”30
Figure 3. Members of the Mexican delegation to the Pan American Conference shortly after their arrival in San Antonio. Left to right: Eulalia Guzman, Aurora Herrera de Nobregas, Luz Vera, Julia Nava de Ruisanchez, and Elena Torres. Torres told the San Antonio Express, “We are going to work out things which have been overlooked or given up as an impossibility by men.”
San Antonio Express, April 16, 1922.
In setting the agenda for the conference, league officials operated under several constraints. One was time—in order for invitations to be sent and acknowledged, and for Latin American delegates to make travel arrangements, they had to secure the cooperation of the U.S. State Department at least six months in advance. Other restraints were not so concrete. Most league members, especially those interested in international relations, were aware of the popular resentment of the United States throughout Latin America. U.S. financial imperialism in Central America and the Caribbean reached its height in the early 1920s, and many league members had already joined a coalition of anti-imperialists opposed to U.S. policies like Dollar Diplomacy.31 In her original proposal for the conference agenda, Engle argued that one important benefit of the meeting was that it would give Latin American women a chance to get to know U.S. women and to “learn that we are not as bad as we are painted.”32 Her inclusion of “reduction of armaments,” along with “international friendliness,” would have won approval not only from opponents of U.S. interventions in Latin America within the United States but also from many Latin Americans. Yet neither phrase appeared on the final version of the conference agenda. No record exists of why the change was made, but it is important to keep in mind that the entire project hinged on the endorsement of the U.S. State Department. Despite the groundswell of support for disarmament during the early 1920s, State Department officials were likely reluctant to sanction discussion of the topic at an inter-American conference during a time when the United States was involved in myriad ongoing military interventions in Latin America. Reliance on State Department support also may well have made Engle, Park, and the organizing committee feel they could not encourage any discussions at the conference that might have sounded like criticisms of U.S. foreign policies.
But the fact remains that Engle and the committee chose the topics for the conference without consulting any Latin American women, or even any U.S. women with greater knowledge of Latin America, and that they assumed the topics they chose were of common concern to all American women. They were not wrong; their issues were important to activist women throughout the hemisphere, as the delegates’ lengthy contributions to the roundtable discussions proved. But neither Engle nor the committee took into account the myriad problems unique to Latin America as a whole and to various countries in particular. Not least among these, despite the LWV’s reluctance to discuss it, was the problem of U.S. imperialism.
The Mexican delegation did not share the league’s reluctance. Two months before the conference opened, the members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano sent a telegram to the league, begging all U.S. women to exert pressure on their government to change its Mexican policy. The concerns they iterated echoed closely the arguments Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri had been making to the Women’s Peace Society and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom for over a year. “The Mexican ground has been bloodied by more than ten years of revolution,” they wrote, and “all the implements of destruction have been furnished by the United States.” They charged that American mining companies continued to exploit Mexican workers, paying them infrequently and with devalued currency. The CFM implored U.S. women to demand action from their government to stop facilitating the devastation in Mexico.33