Tina Modotti's Mexico: A Tale of Love & Revolution

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.