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Tina Modotti in Los Cuatro Caminos: the experiences in Madrid of the communist photographer whose life is worth half a century
We still have a long way to go for the flight of the years to give us the perspective that allows us to qualify the century that we are living, as it already happens to us with the near twentieth century. Of this, much has been said that it was the crossroads in which humanity looked into the mirror of horror, drawn in the shape of the death camps; that it was the one of the last swan song of the great stories or that the consumption and the society of the spectacle bathed everything. The 20th century is also the one of great biographies, movie lives that have elapsed, precisely, between these warlike events and their sedimented sublimation in popular culture. Biographies that still continue to appear, novel for the general public, who discover them with their mouths open as the 21st century has already entered.
Something like this happens with the photographer and political activist Tina Modotti, whose death marked 80 years on January 5. The enumeration is astonishing: a textile worker who emigrated to the United States in her early youth. In San Francisco she married the poet Roubaix de L’Abrie Richey, in Hollywood she began her acting career, then went from posing to learning photography with camera teacher Edward Weston. And it’s only the begining.
In fact, it is difficult to know if he learned from scratch with Weston or had already brought part of the trade through his uncle Pietro Mondini, an Italian experimental photographer, or through his own father, who also practiced photography. In any case, Tina Modotti will soon become an esteemed photographer in her time, of which the portraits, the photos of the murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, or the details of the lives of indigenous and Mexican workers stand out.
The twenties were spent in Mexico, where he joined the Communist Party, interacting with Diego Rivera, Frida Khalo and the communism staff of the time. He closely supported all the struggles that touched on: Sandino’s in Nicaragua, Sacco and Vanzetti’s or Cuban students. In 1929 her partner, the Cuban student Julio Antonio Mella, was assassinated and died in her arms. Tina was accused of being an accessory to the crime, a matter that was widely aired in the Mexican press at the time, which affected her a lot. Despite being released without charge following a support campaign, she was expelled from the country in 1930. She will land in Moscow – following going through hardships in Berin – which gives way to her European adventure. After his participation in the war in Spain (which we will deal with below), he returned to Mexico in 1939 and continued his political activity aboard the Giuseppe Garibaldi Antifascist Alliance. His heart suddenly stopped aboard a taxi in 1942 and Pablo Neruda wrote him an epitaph: “Pure your soft name, pure your fragile life, / bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, / combined with steel, wire and / pollen to create your firm / delicate being ”.
Although her fame is not as great as the contours of her biography, the life of Tina Modotti has deserved a play, a comic and even a novel by Elena Poniatowska, who braids in Tinisima an impressive portrait of the Italian woman, as detailed in details regarding her life as dense in her psychological portrait.
The days of Tina Modotti in Spain are not among the best known of her life, although they are narrated in the fictionalized biography of Poniatowska and we know some data thanks to the testimonies of Flor Cernuda, a communist militant with whom she shared activism in the International Red Aid during war. With this testimony and the analysis of the magazine Help, a publication of the same body of which she was supervisor, the historian Laura Branciforte was able to reconstruct the steps of Modotti in Spain in the article Tina Modotti: an intense life between Europe and America.
Tina Modotti –Mary, during his Spanish stay – would have arrived in Spain on July 19, 1936, just two days following his partner, the controversial Vittorio Vidali (in Spain, Carlos), political commissioner of the Fifth Regiment, whose headquarters was installed at the Salesianos college on Francos Rodríguez street.
In Madrid he forged a good friendship with Matilde Landa, with whom he worked at the Hospital de Jornaleros de Maudes, a unique building of the first Antonio Palacios that is still standing and that the Republican government seized to install a Hospital of Popular Militias organized by the Red Help. Along with them were the Cuban María Luisa Lafíta, the English nurse Mary Bingham Urquidi and Dr. Juan Planelles.
Elena Poniatowska, who spent ten years documenting her work in the different settings of Modottí’s life, describes the environment of the Cuatro Caminos hospital as follows:
“When she heard someone call “Maria” addressing her, she was not surprised and responded immediately. It was Dr. Juan Planelles. Maria down the stairs and glass corridors, Maria in the middle of the chaos of this hospital in organization. Maria in the operating room, Maria in front of the large dusty gray windows. They had to be washed. Anyone knew that an operating room has to be pristine. Where the buckets, the cloths, where the pharmacy, where the spare beds, where the wardrobe and the X-ray departments, where, bloody nuns? Hopefully and rot. The wards were numbered 1 through 10, each with twenty-five beds. What a rest not to be Tina anymore! In the council room, a photograph of a mustachioed nun and the image of San Francisco de Paula adorned the wall. As she passed, Matilde flipped them once morest the wall just as she had taken down crucifixes from the walls of the rooms. María Luisa Lafita, energetic, also removed the pious images:
–To the garbage.
–The beds are not going to be enough –Matilde warned–, we are going to have to put others; the wounded are more and more, so are wars. At the Cuatro Caminos roundregarding I saw ambulances. Where are they going to take our wounded? Good thing the elevators work”.
At Maudes, Modotti cared for people of special relevance, including Dolores Ibárruri La Pasionaria, who was admitted for hepatitis.
With the transfer of the republican government to Valencia in November, before which the fall of Madrid was believed imminent, she also moved together with the offices of the SRI. There, Tina continued to work at Ayuda magazine. For example, Modotti and Vidali were the promoters in Valencia of the publication of Vientos del pueblo, by Miguel Hernández (Ediciones del Socorro Rojo), illustrated with a series of seventeen photographs that Tina herself probably took, according to Professor Branciforte.
He also continued with the usual work of republican women in the rear, who following the first months of popular defense had withdrawn from the fronts. In February 37 she and Matilde Landa were the architects of the transfer of the mobile blood transfusion unit of the Canadian medical pioneer Norman Bethune during the massacre of thousands of civilians evacuated from Malaga, on the way to Almería, known as The Desbandá.
Modotti would still return to Madrid during the war as a member of his organization’s missions, such as the II International Congress of Intellectuals in the Defense of Culture once morest fascism that took place between Valencia and Madrid in July 37. Tina Modotti participated in the congress as a representative of the SRI and covered it for Ayuda. In the context of this event, the meeting between our protagonist and Robert Capa and Gerta Taro would take place, whom she said she did not photograph in Spain because she was focused on her political activity. Despite this, her partner Flor Cernuda said that Tina was always accompanied by a Leika.
Modotti was one of the thousands of people who had to cross the French border following the fall of Barcelona, the city in which he was at that time, in January 1939. And he did it with Vidali and before saying goodbye to his friend Matilde Landa , who would return to Madrid to reorganize the party, be arrested in 1941 and die in jail a year later.
It was only in the 1970s that the figure of Tina Modotti began to be rediscovered as a photographer and public figure outside of Mexico, but in Spain she is still little known despite works such as the aforementioned Ángel de la Calle comic or some articles in the press. The image of Tina –María– in the Cuatro Caminos, going to the hospital and the popular militia barracks of Francos Rodríguez, takes us to the international dimension of the war in Spain in Madrid from its earliest days.
