Considered a prominent female writer and participant in the Mexican Revolution, she was outspoken in her criticism of the Catholic church and Porfiriato through her newspaper Vesper.
Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza (née Chavez) was born on January 27, 1875, in San Juan del Rio, Durango, Mexico.
[1] Her father, Santiago Gutierrez Lomeli was originally from Jalisco and worked as a farm worker in an estate in San Pedro del Gallo, Durango.
[1] Juana worked as a seamstress, making denim clothes for the miners, and contributed to sustaining her family by helping with her husband’s labor duties.
[2] Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza was initially inspired to begin her journalism career after witnessing the hardships Mexican miners faced while working at the "La Esmeralda" mine in Coahuila, Mexico.
[3] As a result of the poor working conditions, she would go on to utilize three prominent Mexican opposition newspapers, Chinaco, Diario del Hogar, and Hijo de Ahuizote, in order to publish a series of anonymous articles criticizing the company that operated the mine.
This activism would not go unchallenged as infuriated by the criticisms levied against them; the mining company enlisted the Mexican government's help to uncover the anonymous writer's identity.
In 1897, their request for aid paid off as Mexican officials uncovered Gutiérrez de Mendoza's identity and imprisoned her in Minas Nuevas, Chihuahua.
[4] Despite this development, Gutiérrez de Mendoza was widely admired by the miners and citizens of the area, of which approximately twenty would go on to sign a petition asking for her release.
[4] During this period, Mexico was under the leadership of Porfirio Díaz, whose presidency spanned over three decades and was characterized by the country's rapid modernization, which included infrastructure improvements and increased foreign investment.
To propagate liberation ideology throughout Mexico, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza translated the works of Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Pierre Joseph Proudhon to Spanish.
Meanwhile in Mexico City, a group of urban intellectuals including Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, Dolores Jiménez and Muro, Santiago Orozco, Camilo Arriaga, Gildardo Magaña, and Jose Vasconcelos, planned a rebellion against the military in support of Francisco I. Madero.
Juana Belén's passion of helping indigenous people feel heard and empowered influenced many of the proposed points in this plan as well as her support to improve job workers rights.
[3] Later, Juana Belén took part in establishing many feminist organizations in her state along with other intellectual women that she had met while pursuing her activism work during the Mexican Revolution.
Juana Belén along with Elena Torres, Evelyn T. Roy, Thoberg de Haberman, María del Refugio García, and Estela Carrasco, were all a part of the “Consejo Nacional para las Mujeres,” during October 1919.
[3] Juan Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza's journalistic career, spanning over 45 years, continued to flourish after the end of the Mexican Revolution.
As time went on, she became increasingly critical of the program's policies, voicing concerns about its detrimental effects on indigenous communities and the potential risk of cultural erasure.
Driven by her deep frustration with the government's colonization efforts through its educational system, she established the Consejo de los Caxcanes in Juchipila, Zacatecas, between 1922 and 1923.
in 1924, a literary work that directly challenged the policies of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) and its leadership, highlighting the issues of cultural assimilation and the marginalization of indigenous communities.
[10] Vésper was shut down around 40 times by the Mexican government which forced Gutiérrez de Mendoza to print in multiple locations like Guanajuato, Mexico City, and San Antonio, Texas.