Please join the Center for Gender and Sexuality as we welcome Dr. Reyna Esquivel-King, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and at the Center for Latino/an and Latin American Studies.

Dr. Esquivel-King's talk dives into how the Mexican Revolution briefly shattered the rules for women, only to slam them shut again. We follow figures like the Ehlers sisters, who grabbed cameras, launched companies, and cut newsreels in the middle of wartime upheaval, stepping into roles that defied rigid gender norms. We then trace how filmmakers such as Adela Sequeyro navigated a new landscape where censorship, state cultural projects, and everyday social negotiations together tried to script what “proper” Mexican womanhood and citizenship should look like. Finally, we look at stars like Lupe Vélez and Andrea Palma, whose on-screen and off-screen lives show how these experiments were contained, as women were steered back into respectable wife-and-mother roles or punished with melodramatic, often tragic endings when they threatened to step outside the script.