Elvia Carrillo Puerto (30 January 1881 – 18 April 1965) was a Mexican socialist politician and feminist activist. She is known for her work with various feminist organizations and for her attempts to run for office in Yucatán and San Luis Potosí. Some refer to her as "The Red Nun of the Mayab".
Carrillo was born to a middle-class family in Motul, Yucatán. She became politically active by 1910, when she served as a courier and spy in the Valladolid Rebellion against dictator Porfirio Díaz and his favored candidate in the 1909 Yucatán gubernatorial election, Enrique Muñoz Arístegui. She founded the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminst League in 1919, which advocated for birth control and literacy for rural women. In 1923, she was elected to the Yucatán legislature but fled during political unrest following the assassination of her brother, Yucatán Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto. She also campaigned to become a deputy in San Luis Potosí's fourth district. Despite winning the popular vote, her victory was overturned on the grounds that women were ineligible for office.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Carrillo advocated for women's suffrage and labor rights by organizing national conferences and working with feminist organizations such as the Sole Front for Women's Rights (Spanish: Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer, FUPDM). However, she experienced financial hardship later in life and ultimately died of bronchopneumonia in Mexico City in 1965. The Mexican Senate established the Elvia Carrillo Puerto medal in 2013 to honor women advocating for gender equality and women's rights, and she has been commemorated with several statues. She is recognized for her pivotal role in advancing women's rights and women's suffrage in Mexico.
Elvia Carrillo Puerto was born in Motul, Yucatán, on 30 January 1881, to Justiniano Carrillo and Adela Puerto. She was the sixth of 14 children. Her family was middle class, with her father working as the owner of a hardware store and as a political operative for Francisco Cantón, a politician who had served as a commander in the Caste War of Yucatán. Both Justiniano and Adela spoke a Mayan language, which Elvia learned to speak as well. While little is known about Elvia's education, she did complete elementary school, and some sources state that she was educated by a Catalan anarchist priest named Serafín García. She allegedly learned to play violin at García's home, and was also introduced to works by feminist and socialist authors in his library. Some also state that she was a student of Mexican educator Rita Cetina Gutiérrez, co-founder of the La Siempreviva (transl. 'Liveforever') school and literary society. In 1900, at the age of 19, Carrillo married Vicente Pérez Mendiburu, a 28-year-old merchant. The couple had two children: Marcial and Gloria, the latter of whom died shortly after birth.
Between 1909 and 1910, Carrillo became involved in opposition to dictator Porfirio Díaz's regime. Díaz's regime, which lasted for over three decades, was marked by industrialization and modernization, as well as economic inequality, intensified policing, increased government surveillance, and an enlarged prison system. Throughout the 1900s, political reformer Francisco I. Madero opposed the Díaz regime. In Yucatán, Madero's adherents, the Maderistas, and an anti-Díaz faction called the Independent Electoral Center challenged Díaz's candidate, Enrique Muñoz Arístegui, in the 1909 gubernatorial elections, leading to the arrest of many opposition leaders. As a result, the opposition devised the Plan of Dzelkoop, which called for an uprising in Valladolid, Yucatán. Carrillo participated in this uprising, called the Valladolid Rebellion, acting as a courier and spy for the insurrectionists. All of their correspondences in the leadup to the uprising were routed through her father's hardware store under her name and distributed to their intended recipients. The uprising ultimately took place on 4 June 1910, with 1,500 participating in total. It was suppressed by a federal battalion from Veracruz.
Some sources state that Carrillo organized the first Peasant Feminist League in 1912. However, biographer Dulce María Sauri Riancho argues that this is "premature" and that this claim lacks documentary evidence. Her husband also initiated divorce proceedings against her in 1912, allegedly due to "long-standing differences". Reformer Salvador Alvarado became governor of Yucatán in 1915, introducing several reforms aimed at increasing women's social autonomy. In January 1916, it is likely that Carrillo attended the Alvarado-sponsored First Feminist Congress of Yucatán alongside Hermila Galindo, Raquel Dzib Cicero, and Rosa Torre González. In total, over 600 women attended the congress, discussing various topics including women's education, labor, and leadership. She did attend the second Feminist Congress in December 1916, where she advocated for women's suffrage. Later, in 1917, she married Francisco Barroso, a public servant from Motul. In 1919, she established the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminist League, which advocated for various reforms, including birth control, drawing the antipathy of the Catholic Church. Yucatecan socialists, including Carrillo, also faced persecution under the presidency of Venustiano Carranza, with the offices of the Socialist Party of Yucatán being raided, prompting Carrillo to temporarily relocate to Mexico City for over a year beginning in November 1919.
Throughout the early 1920s, feminist leagues spread throughout Yucatán, with most being dominated by the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminist League. Carrillo's brother, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who was the president of the Socialist Party of the Southeast (Spanish: Partido Socialista del Sureste, PSS), gained political influence through the establishment of his own resistance leagues, eventually becoming the governor of Yucatán in 1922. As part of her work with the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez Feminist League, Carrillo coordinated a literacy drive for rural women, offering a $50 reward to educators who successfully taught twenty or more girls to read within three months. She also established a library for the league's female members, securing over 150 books from Secretary of Public Education José Vasconcelos during a May 1922 visit to Mexico City. She divorced Barroso in 1922, but she remarried him six months later.
In 1923, Carrillo was nominated as the PSS candidate for Yucatán's fifth local district. In the November elections, she won by 5,115 votes, a significant majority, making her one of the three women to be elected to the Congress of Yucatán that year, alongside Raquel Dzib Cicero and Beatriz Peniche Barrera. However, after her brother Felipe endorsed Plutarco Elías Calles—viewed by some as being too left-leaning—for president, he was targeted by supporters of Adolfo de la Huerta, Calles's rival. De la Huerta's supporters, who called themselves the anti-imposicionistas (transl. 'anti-impositionists'), initiated an armed rebellion in December 1923, prompting Felipe to attempt to flee the state. He was captured on 21 December and executed by an anti-imposicionista contingent on 3 January 1924. Elvia also fled Yucatán during this period, disguised as a man. The PSS regained control of the state in April 1924, but the elected female legislators were not reinstated. The feminist leagues were also dissolved. In 1925, Carrillo's marriage to Barroso ended in a second divorce. Subsequently, she relocated to the state of San Luis Potosí.
In 1925, Carrillo began her campaign to become a deputy in San Luis Potosí's fourth district. Her campaign was supported by the state's governor, Aurelio Manrique, as well as Calles, who had become president in 1924, and Adalberto Tejeda Olivares, Calles's Secretary of the Interior. She selected a woman, Hermila Zamarrón, as her alternate against the advice of local liberal politicians, who believed that it would be "impossible" to find a woman in the state who was neither a Catholic nor a "reactionary". However, Manrique was removed from office in November 1925. According to academic Graciela Yolanda Estrada Alcorta, this was because of "radical socialist reforms" he pursued, which she alleges led to labor unrest, unemployment, and opposition from the ASARCO mining company, which had significant investments in the state. His replacement, Abel Cano, was strongly opposed to Carrillo's candidacy. He took various measures to obstruct her campaign, and near its end, her opponent's alternate attempted to assassinate her. Despite this, she won the popular vote by 4,576. However, the Federal Electoral College ruled that Carrillo's candidacy was invalid because women were ineligible for office, thereby officially confirming her opponent's election. With no legal recourse to challenge the college's decision, she abandoned her candidacy and moved to Mexico City. In 1926, Carrillo presented a petition to the Congress of the Union to amend Article 34 of the Constitution of Mexico. Article 34 was written using the grammatical masculine gender, which meant that only men explicitly had a right to participate in the electoral process. The petition received thousands of signatures.