About Marjorie

Bio

Marjorie R. Becker is a Macon, Georgia native and the author of Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (UC Press, 1996); the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz (University of New Mexico Press, 2022); and the poetry collections Body Bach (2005), Glass Piano/Piano Glass (2010,) and The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance (2020), all published by Tebot Bach.

Global Connections

Becker learned Spanish in childhood and studied in Spain at La Universidad de Madrid. A Peace Corps volunteer, she served in the Peace Corps in the village of General Aquino in rural Paraguay as a nutritionist whose work included establishing nutrition clubs for girls and women and, with an AID-funded team, creating a nutrition manual in both Spanish and Guarani, the indigenous language spoken in Paraguay. 

Becker holds a PhD in Latin American cultural history from Yale, and serves as Associate Professor of History and English at the University of Southern California. She trained as a historian of Latin American at Duke and Yale Universities, with Mexico’s 1910 revolution a major research focus.

Marjorie Becker long has been acclaimed as a pioneer because of her life-threatened and anti-fascist research in rural Mexico, because of her multi-genre work as historian, innovative historical writer, and poet, and because she has been widely published in all of these genres. Her grassroots Mexican archival and oral historical research about the ways the 1910 Mexican revolution actually affected impoverished Mexican women, girls, indigenous people and the poor led to her discovery of the grassroots resistance movement centered on Mexican women’s illicit dance that altered Mexican history. Her monograph depicting that movement and that dance received book contracts from Cambridge, Yale, California, Duke and the University of Wisconsin university presses, and prompted an array of speaking engagements at conferences in Quito, Ecuador, Amsterdam, Palo Alto, Miami, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, and Michoacán, Mexico. One of the invited participants in the conference leading to the journal Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice (on whose editorial board she now serves,) her multiple articles frequently focus on unknown or unsung Mexican girls and women, on the gendered dimensions of time itself, on the relationships between history and poetry, and, in a fictional exploration of the gendered and Jewish Deep South, on Frida Kahlo.

 Connecting with the World

Among Becker’s awards: a Faculty Fulbright Research Fellowship for Mexico, awards from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and a University of Southern California Mellon Mentoring Award, which honors faculty contributing to “an engaging, supportive, inclusive academic environment through their mentorship of students and faculty.”  

One of Becker’s poems was honored as a finalist in the 2019 Joy Harjo Cutthroat Journal contest. Another was a notable Honorable Mention in the 2020 Ventura County Origins Poetry Contest, Ventura County. Still another was selected as a finalist in the Second Beyond Baroque contest. Marjorie R. Becker was honored as “Poet of the Day” by Gyroscope Poetry Journal. Her poems have been widely published in national and international anthologies and magazines. One of the hosts of the longstanding Venice Poetry Collective, Marjorie R. Becker lives in Santa Monica, California.