Margaret Randall de Mondragón; Randall de Mondragon, Margaret; Meg Randall; Randall, Meg

Randall, Margaret, 1936-  

The three-year-old son of Margaret Randall, Gregory, in a Flag Day parade with other children in Mexico City (sent with 1963/10/11 letter to Merton).

Descriptive Summary

Scope and Content

This is a file in the correspondence of Thomas Merton under the heading: "Randall, Margaret".

Biography

Born in New York, Margaret Randall spent much of her youth in Albuquerque, New Mexico. After a year at the University of New Mexico, she spent time in Spain and in New York. During those years she married for the first time and had a son. In 1960, she moved to Mexico City and from 1962-1969 co-edited El Corno Emplumado (the feathered horn). "Corno" was a bi-lingual literary journal bridging the cultures of North America and Latin America. Randall married one of her co-editors, Sergio Mondragón. The couple had two daughters and Randall became a Mexican citizen. She divorced Mondragón in 1969 and had a daughter with another co-editor of Corno, Robert Cohen. With Robert Cohen, the family moved to Cuba where Randall remained until 1980. After working for the Cuban Book Institute for a number of years, she began work as a free-lance journalist, photographer, and oral historian, specializing in the struggles of women in Cuba, Nicaragua, Peru and Vietnam. In 1980, she continued this work while living in Nicaragua with her youngest two daughters. In 1984, Randall moved back to Albuquerque and married poet Floyce Alexander, where she taught Women's Studies and American Studies at the University of New Mexico. The INS denied Randall permanent residence in the United States in 1985 citing the McCarran-Walter Act, which denied citizenship to those thought to be subversive and could charge individuals who had either been members of the Communist Party or even those who were deemed supporters of communism. After a long legal fight with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the INS decided in 1989 that she had not relinquished her citizenship while in Mexico, and therefore, was still a citizen of the United States. Having resolved the case, she felt free to become public as a lesbian, addressing what that means in our culture in her writings. She also had written and lectured on being an incest survivor. She continues a prolific legacy of books, poetry and essays, while continuing to lecture. (Sources: Biography from "Inventory of the Margaret Randall Papers, 1954-2000". Center for Southwest Research, Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico. Accessed 15 Feb. 2006. ‹http://elibrary.unm.edu/oanm/NmU/nmu1%23mss663bc/nmu1%23mss663bc_m4.html›; with biographical information from the prior website excerpted from: "Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States". Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Randall biography by Trisha Franzen.)

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Related Information and Links

See also letters from Merton to Randall published in The Courage for Truth, pp. 214-223; and see also contributions to Monks Pond, Volume 1.

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