Concha Michel

Concha Michel (1899–1990) was a Mexican singer-songwriter, political activist, playwright, and a researcher who published several projects on the culture of indigenous communities. She was one of the few women who performed in the corrido style. She was a precocious child and her parents sent her at the age of seven to school at the Convento de San Ignacio de Loyola, which her grandfather had built in the village of Ejutla, Jalisco. for John D. Rockefeller in his home and attended an opening held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she won $1200. She used her winnings to travel to Europe and the Soviet Union. She was a friend to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Her goal of going to Russia was to study the conditions of women in a socialist country and while there, she met Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Clara Zetkin and saw her friend Tina Modotti. Near the end of 1933, Michel returned from the Soviet Union and re-signed with SEP's Cultural Missions program as a "rural organizer". Her plans were to help women gain land independently from their fathers or husbands, so that women's collectives could farm them for subsistence. She was not a feminist, though later activists would claim her as a proto-feminist, She felt that men's endorsement and collaboration with women's projects were vital to their success. Michel provided the vocal accompaniment to the visual records left by the Mexican mural movement Aurora Reyes, Frida Kahlo and others. The themes running throughout the art in this period exalt socialism and communism, workers, and allusions to indigenous culture like bandoliers, flags, guitars, hands, machetes, peasants and opposing classism.

On December 3, 1929, Modotti opened a show at the Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico and Concha Michel performed. using her music to agitate for her political ideals and tell the stories of the revolution. Modotti and Michel served as his models for various works.

Views on women Throughout her life, Concha worked to improve the life of women. Her vision focused on the duality of humankind, and she saw that there was a need for men and women to work together recognizing equal importance of their roles.

Personal life At around the age of fifteen, Concha had a child named Yolia with a law student from Chihuahua named Fernando Cásares. Michel placed the child in a foundling home so that she could work. Her daughter contracted bronchial pneumonia and died when she was seventeen months old. While still in mourning, Concha married a German-Austrian man who was twenty years her senior, Pablo Rieder, with whom she had a son, Godofredo. She and Rieder divorced shortly after the birth of her son. In 1918, Michel began a relationship with her life partner, Hernán Laborde.

Concha Michel died on December 27, 1990, in Morelia, Michoacán at the age of 93.

Selected works Obras cortas de teatro revolucionario y popular, (1931) Pastorela o coloquio, (1932). Dos antagonismos fundamentales, (1938). Corridos revolucionarios, 1938–1939 (1939). Obras de teatro para la mujer, (1942). Amor en las sombras, novela original, adaptada para el cine, (1944). Cantos indígenas de México, (1951). Dios nuestra señora, (1966). Guanajuato : la ciudad de la belleza acrecentada, (1968). Dios-principio es la pareja, (1974). with Quetzal Rieder Espinoza. Mexico en sus cantares, (1997).