FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tina Modotti's Mexico: A Tale of Love & Revolution, by
Bonnie Hayman. Edited by Andrea Alessandra Cabello, UC
Berkeley. ISBN: 0-915745-40-2 $39.95 Hardbound
Hayman situates Modotti
(1896-1942) profoundly within her social period from her 1913 emigration from
Udine, Italy, to San Francisco to a full-fledged member of the intellectual wing
of the Mexican Communist Party. She became the lover of Cuban revolutionary
Julio Antonio Mella and when he was murdered, Modotti became the main suspect.
When the Mexican president was assassinated, she was accused and deported. She
returned to Mexico many years later and lived alone in a small cottage until her
mysterious death in a taxi at age 46. Octavio Paz claimed that Modotti belonged
“more to the history of passions than to the history of ideologies,” Hayman
propounds that Modotti lived a full life of her own choice, and that politics,
ideology, and history were never paramount to her own personal life—an
indescribable story of fame, style, gossip and turmoil. She wrote her own
biography like a liberated woman of the 1960s, far ahead of any one of her
contemporaries. In the end she was a visionary, a trend setter, a model of
womanhood, which would be emulated many decades later.
Andrea Alessandra Cabello, Editor
University of California, Berkeley
“This book details the evolution of a very evocative and
fascinating woman. Tina Modotti was truly a free spirit in every sense of the
word. Author Bonnie Hayman does an inspiring job of showing Tina’s independent
spirit, integrity, and search for a meaningful life.” Shanna Mota
“Tina Modotti is a great read. Bonnie Hayman has captured her
essence and presented a colorful picture of a very interesting woman.” Barbara
Jung
Bonnie Hayman, the
author of The Cult of the Jaguar, has written the most important account of Tina
Modotti’s life in Mexico and the United States. Hayman’s Tina is a passionate
woman seeking love and sexual freedom within her political and ideological
activism, her life among the emerging Mexican nationalist intellectuals,
including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and others. Hayman brings a Tina demanding
justice for the Mexican disenfranchised and forgotten majority—in direct
conflict with the Mexican government and ruling elites— but living, despite of
it, a full life as a woman and a lover.
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