RANDALL, Margaret

Born 6 December 1936, New York, New York

Wrote under: Margaret Randall de Mondragon (1962-68)

Daughter of John P. and Elinor Davidson Randall; married Sam Jacobs, 1954 (divorced); Sergio Mondragon, 1962 (divorced);

Floyce Alexander, 1984 (divorced); children: Gregory, Sarah, Ximena, Ana

Poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and political activist, Margaret Randall resists easy classification. Out of a politically committed life that has spanned several continents and extended over three decades, she has produced more than 50 works emboding her belief that "passion and reason, socialism and feminism, art and responsibility" all need one another. Randall's life and work are an eloquent testimony to this commitment.

Randall grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she attended the University of New Mexico from 1954 to 1955. After a brief marriage and divorce, she moved to New York City in 1957, where she became closely associated with the Black Mountain poets and Abstract Expressionist artists, published two collections of poetry, and gave birth to her first child. In 1961, with her 10-month-old son, Randall returned to Albuquerque for a brief visit and then headed south to Mexico. This was the first stage in an open-ended 23-year journey that would take her to Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and, finally, back to Albuquerque. In 1962 Randall and the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragon (whom she married that year) began editing El Corno Emplumado: The Plumed Horn, a bilingual literary magazine that sought to publish the most exciting new voices of North and Latin America. In 1967, on the basis of poor legal advice, Randall took out Mexican citizenship and relinquished her U.S. passport to American consular authorities—a decision that would have grave consequences when she returned to the U.S. in 1984. Her involvement with El Corno Emplumado brought her into association with a generation of artists and intellectuals deeply committed to the struggle against social and political injustice. Randall traveled to Cuba in 1967, her first visit to a socialist country and one that was fundamental to her growing political commitments.

In 1968 the Mexican student movement erupted and was violently repressed. During the same year, Randall separated from Mondragon and began to live with a U.S. poet, Robert Cohen. She took an active role in the Mexican student movement and El Corno Emplumado supported the student demands. As a result, Randall was harassed by the government and forced to live underground. In 1969 she and her four children managed to leave Mexico and move to Cuba, where she lived for the next 10 years. In Cuba, Randall immediately became interested in what a socialist revolution could mean for women. For the next two years, she traveled around the country talking with women from all walks of life about their experiences under the Cuban variety of socialism. The result of this research, Cuban Women Now (1974), signaled yet another stage in Randall's multifaceted career, one marked by an increasing commitment to people's voices, testimony, and oral history. In 1979, shortly after the victory of the Sandinista revolution, the Nicaraguan minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal, invited Randall to visit the country and do field work on the experiences of Nicaraguan women. As a result, Randall produced Sandino's Daughters (1981), her first work in which she created both the written and the photographic images. In 1980 Randall and her daughter Ana moved to Nicaragua, where they were later joined by another daughter, Ximena.

Randall returned to the U.S. in 1984. After her marriage to Floyce Alexander, he petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for her permanent resident status. In October 1985, Randall was informed that the INS, invoking the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, had denied her application because of the political nature of her writings; she was given 30 days to leave the country. During the next four years, with the assistance of the Center for Constitutional Rights and many supporters throughout the country, Randall fought the deportation order. She also continued to write, publishing six books and completing one novel between the date of the deportation order and the end of the case. Randall's poetry, essays, short stories, articles, and book reviews have appeared in dozens of periodicals, including Nation, Chelsea Review, Women's Review of Books, Village Voice, American Poetry Review, and the Los Angeles Times. She has read her poetry and lectured at dozens of universities throughout the U.S. and Latin America. Her photography, which has won several prizes, has been shown in both group exhibitions and one-woman shows around the country. She also launched a career as a teacher at the University of New Mexico, Trinity College, Oberlin College, Macalester College, and the University of Delaware. In the summer of 1989, the Board of Immigration Appeals finally ruled that Randall had never lost her American citizenship. A resident since 1989 of Albuquerque—the setting that continues to nourish her life and imagination—Randall lives with her companion, Barbara Byers, and continues to teach and write.