USC.edu

Marjorie Becker

Associate Professor of History and English
Email mbecker@usc.edu Office SOS 172 Office Phone (213) 740-1674

Biography

Marjorie Becker holds a doctorate and two of her three masters in Latin American History from Yale University. Her Yale dissertation, long taught in graduate courses, reveals the material cultural roots of Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico’s most important twentieth century president’s approach to government. Long viewed as highly popular, her multi-archival and oral historical work revealed the complex authoritarianism characteristic of his rule. Her monograph, Setting the Virgin on Fire, focuses on the grass roots resistance movement to the post-revolutionary government’s efforts to transform its citizens. That movement, in fact, altered modern Mexican political culture. Her other m.a. is in History with a focus on the Deep South, African American History, the multiple relationships between Mexican poet Octavio Paz and the Mexican revolution; this m.a. is from Duke University. She served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay, teaching nutrition, textile arts, health and first aid to Paraguayan women and girls, and she did so in the unwritten indigenous Guarani language. She was invited to return to Paraguay to direct the program in which she served. She also worked as a former print journalist writing about race relations, health, the emerging nature of Southern life and culture. She has written and published about the Mexican revolution, its attendant counter-revolution, about the artist Frida Kahlo, about Mexico’s distinctly gendered time which she has named “ghost time.” She is also a creative writer as historian and poet, and has written widely and deeply about longing, redemption, heroism, and most especially, dance. Her most recent poetry collection, “Glass Piano, Piano Glass,” was published in 2010; her previous collection, Body Bach, came out in 2005.  Her subsequent poetry collection, The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance came out in 2020 and her forthcoming historical monograph, Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz will come out in 2022.

Education

  • Ph.D. , Yale University, 1/1988
  • M. Phil. , Yale University, 1/1983
  • M.A. , Yale University, 1/1982
  • M.A. , Duke University, 1/1980

  • Summary Statement of Research Interests

    An expert in Latin American history, Professor Becker researches the Mexican Revolution and counter-revolution, issues involving gender, ethnicity and class, and African American slavery in the U.S. South. For many years, she has conducted research into the poetics of Mexican poet Octavio Paz assessing his connections to Mexico’s 1910 revolution.

    • I have completed three chapter drafts of the four chapter monograph Dancing on the Sun Stone: An Exploration of Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz. This monograph enters the gendered realms both of Octavio Paz, most particularly in his signature poem, “Sun Stone,” and those of the Mexican women dancers I discovered in my grass roots Mexican historical research. The monograph enables the women to enabling them to both respond to Paz’s own complex assessment of Mexican gender relations and to reveal the fashions in which their own expansive gendered behavior defined and reconstructed Mexican historical practices.
    • Blending my body of research exploring Mexican women’s perspectives on revolutionary and post-revolutionary social orders denying them equality before the law, with Octavio Paz’s ground-breaking Poem “Sun Stone,” I immersed myself in a body of historical research that questions how gendered subjectivities operated in a specifically intriguing post-revolutionary setting; I also explore the fashions in which certain bodies of poetry render the architecture of gendered subjectities. This research enables me to question the fashions in which two highly complex and divergent fields themselves can communicate with one another.
    • One of my central, long-standing research projects has focused on the architecture of emotional life experienced by impoverished, frequently illiterate, ethnically divided Mexican women. In particular, my recent articles challenge assumptions about revolutionary approaches to race and ethnic relations. They also ponder the ways in which Mexican women, denied equality before the law, nonetheless challenged both historical and historiographic efforts to silence them.
    • My current research project, tentatively entitled “Opening the Eye of Water,” draws on my original researh into the economic and ethno-history of Michoacan’s Tarascan indigenous population. Reconstructing, analyzing, seeking to re-name Tarascans’ modern situations, situations historically based on colonial theft of Tarascan property, on laws and customs denying Tarascan women and many men property ownership and Spanish-language literacy, this work envisions a reclamation of the Tarascan world. This work draws on the documentary and oral research I conducted in multiple Mexican urban, rural, local, and private archives.

      For a number of years I have conducted an oral history project, interviewing a number of Macon, Georgia African Americans, German Jews and Russian Jews. I was able to draw on some of this research for my Rethinking History articles, “A Meta-Reflection on ‘Talking Back to Frida'” and “Talking “Talking Back to Frida: Houses of Emotional Mestizaje” This work is part of a larger project that seeks to reconstruct and analyze the complex communities forged by southern outsiders.

    • During my sabbatical leave, I engaged in complex, multi-lingual and multi-disciplinary research, utilizing documents I was fortunate enough to discover, including in Mexican archives I was fortunate enough to have opened. These documents, and my original approach to La Purisima, particular illiterate Mexican women’s complex and vibrant approaches to her, form part of the reseach and writing I have developed. Another crucial element of this research has enabled me to consider potential connections between Mexican women’s literacy and longing during the post-revolutionary period.

  • Book

    • Becker, M. (2020). Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press.
    • Becker, M. R. (1995). Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. fifth printing Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Book Chapter

    • Becker, M. (2004). When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepcion Gonzalez and a past that would not stay put.. New York, New York: Routledge. Vol. Experiments in Rethinking History,
    • Becker, M. (2004). Afterword to When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepcion Gonzalez and a past that would not stay put. New York, New York: Routledge. Vol. Experiments in Rethinking History,
    • Becker, M. (1996). Black and White and Color: Cardenismo and the Search for a Campesino Ideology in Daniel H. Levine, ed., Constructing Culture and Power in Latin America. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
    • Becker, M. (1994). Torching La Purísima, Dancing at the Altar: The Construction of Revolutionary Hegemony in Michoacán, 1934-1940″, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Mexico. pp. 247-264. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

    Book Review

    • Becker, M. R. (2010). Imagining la Chica Moderna. Journal of Social History.
    • Becker, M. (2010). Stephanie A. Smith, Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatan, Women, and the Realities of Patriarchy. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Review.
    • Becker, M. R. (2008). Book review of Susan Kellogg, Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America’s Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present. Chicago, Illinois: The American Historical Review.

    Encyclopedia Article

    • Becker, M. (2002). “Lazaro Cardenas” in David Carrasco, Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures”. New York, New York: Oxford University Press.

    Journal Article

    • Becker, M. (2019). “Music, Sudden Music: When Mexican Women Altered Space in Time”. 1 London,: Rethinking History. Vol. 23 (1),
    • Becker, M. (2016). “Had Pilar Ternera Co-written Cien Anos de Soledad, I’d Never Write you Now: Toward a Letter to the Dead”. pp. 28.
    • Becker, M. (2016). “Had Pilar Ternera co-written Cien Anos de Soledad, Gabo, I’d never write you now: toward a letter to the dead”. 2 Feb. 2016 pp. 1–13. Oxford: Rethinking History:The Journal of Theory and Practice.
    • Becker, M. (2008). As Though They Meant Her No Harm, María Enríquez Remade the Friends Who Abandoned Her-Their Intentions, Their Possibilities, Their Worlds–Inviting Them (Perhaps, It Is True,) To Dance. Rethinking History.
    • Becker, M. (2002). Talking Back to Frida: Houses of Emotional Mestizaje. History and Theory. Vol. 41,
    • Becker, M. (2002). Talking Back to ‘Talking Back to Frida:’ A Meta-reflection. 41 History and Theory.
    • Becker, M. (1997). When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepcion Gonzalez and a past that would not stay put.. 3 New York, New York: Rethinking History. Vol. 1 (3),
    • Becker, M. (1989). Cardenistas, Campesinos and the Weapons of the Weak: The Limits of Everyday Resistance in Michoacan. Mexico, 1934–1940. 4 Salt Lake City, Utah: Peasant Studies. Vol. 16 (4),
    • Becker, M. (1987). El cardenismo y la busqueda de una ideologia campesina. 29 Zamora, Michoacan: Relaciones: Estudios de Historia y Sociedad.

    Other

    • Becker, M. (2015). Hispanic American Historical Review on line. Durham, N.C.: Hispanic American Historical Review on line.
    • Journal article, “When I Was a Child, I Danced as a Child, but Now that I am Old, I Think about Salvation: Concepcion Gonzalez and a Past that Would Not Stay Put,” Rethinking History. Nominated for Conference of Latin American History article prize. This article is one of my collection of innovative dance articles., 1997-1998
    • encyclopedia article, “Lazaro Cardenas,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures.”, 2001-2002
    • article in edited volume with new afterword, Afterword and selected republication of “When I Was a Child, I Danced as a Child, but Now that I Am Old, I Think about Salvation: Concepcion Gonzalez and a Past that Would Not Stay Put,” (selected commmissioned article from Rethinking History,” in Experiments in Rethinking History, 2004-2005
    • Poetry collection, Body Bach, 2005-2006
    • Poetry collection, Piano Glass/Glass Piano, 2010-2011
    • In collaboration with USC Dornsife English Professor David St. John, I began preparation for the “Drawn to Language” conversation at USC’s Fisher Museum, I turned to my grass roots research and teaching about gender in Bolivia and Peru, about Latin America’s cultural history, and my assessment of St. John’s recent Andean-inflected poems. ,
    • In order to introduce my Yale mentor Florencia Mallon’s historical, theoretical and literary work at the History Department event for which she read from her novel, assessing links between history and fiction, I entered the scholarly worlds she has pioneered (and those we have together developed,) and created an extensive introduction to her work.,
    • nominated for USC Mellon Mentoring Award for Graduate Students, 2011-2012
    • USC Mellon Mentoring Award for Undergraduate Students, 2012, 2011-2012
    • “Listening,” “Suddenly the Future,” and “A Broken Untold World of Dance” named runners up in Second Annual Beyond Baroque Poetry Contest, 2010-2011
    • Piano Glass/Glass Piano nominated for California Book Awards, Commonwealth Club of California, 2010, 2010-2011
    • Piano Glass/Glass Piano nominated for California Book Awards, Commonwealth Club of California, 2010, 2010-2011
    • Piano Glass/Glass Piano nominated for Cleveland Foundation, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 2010, 2010-2011
    • Piano Glass/Glass Piano nominated for USC Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award by Professor David St. John, 2010-2011
    • Arts and Letters grant to teach ARLT g.e. course, “Magical Realism in Latin American History and Literature”, 2009-2010
    • College Faculty Development Award, 2009-2010
    • Invited Guest Lecturer for Professor Robert Rosenston’s Post-Structural History course based upon research and narrative innovations displayed in my monograph Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution and Rethinking History article, “As though they meant her no harm, Maria Enriquez remade the friends who abandoned her–their intentions, their possibilities, their worlds–inviting them (perhaps, it is true) to dance,”, 2009-2010
    • nominated for USC Mellon Mentoring Award, 2009-2010
    • “As though they meant her no harm, Maria Enriquez remade the friends that abandoned her–their intentions, their possibilities, their worlds–inviting them (perhaps, it is true) to dance,” nominated for Conference of Latin American History article award, 2008-2009
    • College Faculty Development Award, 2008-2009
    • Arts and Letters Research Grant to Create, Develop and Teach “Magical Realism in Latin American History and Literature”, Spring 2009
    • Poetry reading with internationally renowned poet Jane Hirshfield with nationally celebrated poets, U.S.C. students, and the general public, Fall 2008
    • Certificate of Appreciation, USC Chapter, Alpha Lambda Delta, exemplary performance for professors, 2007-2008
    • College Faculty Development Award, 2007-2008
    • Invited guest professor at Cal Tech in Professor Robert Rosenstone’s post-structural and innovatie history course. Invited to teach my Setting the Virgin on Fire and recent Rethinking History article reproducing what I have named “ghost time,” a woman’s courageous generosity in the fact of sexual assault, and revolutionary dance., Spring 2008
    • Ahmanson Foundation Award, “The Many Faces of Frida.”, 1998-1999
    • nomination, Raubenheimer, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, 1995-1996
    • Phi Kappa Phi recognition, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution, 1995-1996
    • Invited Visiting Research Fellowship, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1990-1991
    • This national dissertation fellowship was awared in recognition of my original Mexican research project., 1989-1990
    • Invited Visiting Scholar-Teacher, Colegio de Michoacan, Zamora, Michoacan, 1989-1990
    • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship Recipient, 1988-1989
    • USC Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund Award, 1988-1989
    • summer stipend, summer 1989, Spring 1989
    • Inter-American Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, extension, 1985-1986
    • Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Charlotte Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation, 1985-1986

  • Other Service to the University

    • Guest professor in Prof. Robert Rosenstone’s Post-structural History course, California Institute of Technology. Drawing on expansive historical research tools to excavate elements of Mexico’s buried women’s histories, asking what illiterate women tell us, what physical language reveals, and how.,
    • Guest professor in Prof. Robert Rosenstone’s Post-structural History course, California Institute of Technology. Drawing on expansive historical research tools to excavate elements of Mexico’s buried women’s histories, asking what illiterate women tell us, what physical language reveals, and how.,
    • Guest professor in Prof. Robert Rosenstone’s Post-structural History course, California Institute of Technology. Drawing on expansive historical research tools to excavate elements of Mexico’s buried women’s histories, asking what illiterate women tell us, what physical language reveals, and how.,
    • Developed and Administered grad student training for Teaching assistants for Thematic Options class on comparative racial history, (Race Matters: From Malinche to Cornel West),