Evelyn Trent (1892- 1970)

Jesse Olsavsky, in Jacobin, writes of one of those too often overlooked Mexico City gringa “influencers” who… whatever she was up to here, had a major impact on India’s own anti-colonial struggle.

Trent … received her first experience of revolution in Mexico City rather than Moscow. Mexico, whose revolution began in 1910 — initiating the epoch of socialist and anti-colonial revolutions — was then in a ferment. Emiliano Zapata had yet to be assassinated, and Pancho Villa had recently launched a small-scale invasion of the United States.

While the Mexican Revolution would take its own path… borrowing something from Communism, but emerging as something very different (and for many years turning towards neo-liberalism) Trent — who Olsavsky claims was the one who “converted” her husband, the Indian nationalist exile M.N. Roy to Marxism, she was active, both writing for the then radical El Heraldo and a serialized book, Mexico and Her People… perhaps limited by what she gathered from the Roy’s elegant home in Roma Norte), but nonetheless:

A deeply anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist portrait of Mexico, with some forays into class analysis as well, this long-forgotten book stands out as one of the first of many romanticized accounts written by foreign communists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein about the country that had experienced a major revolution many years before Russia.

During her stay in Mexico, she was also active in the feminist wing of the Mexican Socialist Party, organized a “Friends of India” committee, and at one point hid out the globe-trotting (on a forged Mexican passport) Mikhail Borodin.

And has been largely forgotten. She doesn’t even have a “wikipedia” entry.