Deception and Danger: Women and Cross-border Espionage in Mexico, 1923–1929

Abstract: “Deception and Danger: Women and Cross-border Espionage in Mexico, 1923–1929” focuses on women’s roles in cross-border espionage in exile in the United States and the Confidential Department agents who labored in the offices of state, and along the US-Mexico border, tasked with countering their work. Women who became the political standard-bearers of Catholic social action and those who were respected as intelligence brokers among political Catholic exiles operated within, but also despite, extant patriarchal structures. While recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated that women’s Catholic social action in favor of the Mexican clergy was not the product of clerical manipulation, but rather motivated by a host of political, social, economic, and gendered factors in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods, this research demonstrates that Catholic social action provided the same platform for women to become essential players in the political and military intrigue of the 1920s and 1930s. Catholic women were powerful actors, not only in matters of charity, church, and state, but also espionage. The conflicts of the 1910s and 20s, the variety of distinct visions for the future of the nation, and the negotiation of the contours of post-revolutionary state-civil society relations created the space for women to engage in myriad forms of public, political, and sometimes contradictory activism. Women engaged in Catholic social action understood this moment of conflict in the course of the Mexican Revolution as propitious for their own forms of political participation and social activism, including in the dangerous field of espionage.