Concha Michel

Concha Michel was a Mexican singer-songwriter, political activist, playwright, and a researcher who published several projects on the culture of indigenous communities. She was one of the few women who performed in the corrido style. She created the Institute of Folklore in Michoacan and was one of the first collectors of folklore and preservers of the traditions of the Mexican people. She was a cultural icon having relationships with two presidents, and a broad range of Mexico's most prominent artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Guadalupe Marín, Tina Modotti, Elena Poniatowska, Anita Brenner and others. She was born in 1899 in Villa Purificación, Jalisco, Mexico. Her grandfather, Louis Michel, was one of the feudal lords of the Jaliscan Coast where Concha was born. After her birth, the family moved to Salina Cruz, Oaxaca where her father was engaged in trade with seafaring ships. She was a precocious child and her parents sent her at the age of seven to school at the Convento de San Ignacio de Loyola, which her grandfather had built in the village of Ejutla, Jalisco. She stayed four years and learned to sing and play the guitar, but after organizing the other novices to run away and trying to set fire to one of the saints, Concha was expelled. Orphaned young, Michel's sister, Albina, who was 15 years older, was the primary person raising Concha, when she accepted a stipend to study opera at the Guadalajara conservatory. Dates of events during this period, according to Jocelyn Olcott are difficult to pinpoint, but Concha had a daughter before her 15th birthday; lived briefly in New York; returned to Mexico; married, had a son, and divorced. In 1918 Michel joined the Communist Party (PCM) and began a life partnership with Hernán Laborde, General Secretary and first Deputy of the PCM. By 1925 she had interested the government in her project to document indigenous songs and from 1925 to 1926 Concha traveled the country collecting examples of folklore and songs for the Secretary of Education (SEP). In 1932, Michel decided to move to New York, where she attended the School of Social Sciences for about a year. While in New York, she sang at a birthday party for John D. Rockefeller in his home and attended an opening held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she won $1200. She used her winnings to travel to Europe and the Soviet Union. She was a friend to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Her goal of going to Russia was to study the conditions of women in a socialist country and while there, she met Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Clara Zetkin and saw her friend Tina Modotti. Near the end of 1933, Michel returned from the Soviet Union and re-signed with SEP's Cultural Missions program as a "rural organizer". She continued to work for the PCM and SEP until 1940, when she was expelled from both organizations for her criticism of the Stalinist policies. She then devoted herself to writing plays, poems, and songs, as well as researching the culture and history of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. She died in 1990 in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico.