Maymie de Mena (December 10, 1879 – October 23, 1953, also known as Maymie Aiken or Madame DeMena Aiken in her later career) was an American-born activist who became one of the highest-ranking officers in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). She has been credited with keeping the organization alive after Marcus Garvey's conviction for mail fraud and deportation from the United States.
De Mena was born into a Creole family in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, and obtained her education in the United States before marrying a Nicaraguan and moving to Central America. After a decade in which she raised a daughter and taught school, she divorced, returned to the U.S., and joined the UNIA. Quickly rising in the ranks from a translator, because she was fluent in Spanish, de Mena became one of the leaders of the pan-African movement. She was responsible for increasing the membership of the organization in the Caribbean and Latin America. When Garvey was deported from the U.S. to Jamaica, de Mena became Garvey's official representative in New York and was the first woman to carry such a high distinction in the organization.
After Garvey moved to London, de Mena, now remarried and styling herself as Madame Aiken, directed her attentions to women's and children's issues in Jamaica. She fought for women's suffrage and birth control rights, while establishing trade organizations to assist working-class women in improving their economic status.
Early life Leonie Turpeau was born on December 10, 1879, on a farm on the eastern banks of Bayou Teche near St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, to Isabella Hill (née Regis or Reggis) and Michel Turpeau Jr. Her paternal grandfather, Michel Turpeau Sr. was a free man of color from Martinique who had worked as a ship hand and later on the Banker plantation, enabling him to buy a small parcel of land and bring his French Guianese wife, Odeline "Dina", to Louisiana. Turpaeu's mother was the daughter of Maturin Regis, who had been a slave in Virginia, and Carrie Hill a Louisiana Creole woman. The marriage between Michael Jr. and Isabella caused disquiet from its beginnings, as Louisiana society typically did not approve of freedmen marrying former slaves.
Turpeau was the seventh sibling in the family. Her biography in the Garvey collection shows that she was privately educated and also studied at the Metropolitan Business College of New York City, the Greensboro Commercial College at Greensboro, North Carolina and at the University of New Orleans. The University of New Orleans was not founded until 1956, but Carrie, Turpeau's older sister studied at the Gilbert Academy, an agricultural/industrial college founded for freedmen which later became part of the distinct New Orleans University. Records of the university show three alumni between 1895 and 1917 with the surname Turpeau: Carrie B. who graduated in 1899, Angella (a younger sister) who graduated in 1906 both from the College of Liberal Arts, and Mary L. (née Turpeau) Thompson, later Hammett who graduated in 1899 from the normal school. Both Carrie and Mary L. Turpeau were from St. Martinville.
Reconstruction and rioting, coupled with the implementation of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana led most of the Turpeau family to leave the area and become professionals in the north. David DeWitt became a well-known preacher and a member of the Ohio House of Representatives and his daughter, Leontine T. Kelly born in Washington, D.C. was the first black woman bishop of the United Methodist Church. George remained in Louisiana, living in Lake Charles, which was very near Jennings, the destination of several of Turpeau's future trips from Nicaragua.
Turpeau, rather than moving north, chose to go south to Bluefields, Nicaragua, with her new husband Francisco Hiberto Mena (aka Francis or Frank in English sources), a Creole planter, activist, and newspaperman. When or where they met or married is unknown. On May 12, 1912, Maymie Leona Turpeau de Mena, as she now styled herself, sailed on the S.S. Dictator from Bluefields, to New Orleans. Her passenger record showed she was heading to visit her sister in Jennings, Louisiana, was born in St. Martinville, and stated her nationality was "Nicaraguan by marriage". By the time de Mena arrived in Bluefields, the Mosquito Coast had transitioned from a British protectorate to a Nicaraguan capital city of the Zelaya Department with strong commercial ties to the United States. The society was stratified with white North Americans at the highest social positions followed by Mestizos and upper class Creoles, European mixed-race elites. Those with darker skins from Asia, the Caribbean, and indigenous people held lower status. Though de Mena styled herself as Spanish American, she would have been considered as part of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.
Fluid identity At the time de Mena married Francisco Mena, U.S. law held that she lost her American citizenship and acquired her husband's. Until the Cable Act was passed in 1922, she would not have been able to reacquire American citizenship. Thus, her statements that she was "Nicaraguan by marriage" were accurate, unless she had petitioned the Naturalization Bureau to regain her citizenship. Since she used her Nicaraguan passport in 1926 to attain a Pullman berth, she had not re-nationalized at that time. In 1936, another U.S. law was passed which allowed women who had lost their citizenship by marrying a foreigner between 1907 and 1922 to forgo a petition of naturalization, only if their spouse had died or the couple had divorced and if the woman was willing to swear an oath of allegiance. But by this time, de Mena had already married a Cameroonian and a Jamaican. Though French law, under whose jurisdiction part of Cameroon fell, was amended in 1927 to allow women to maintain their citizenship upon marriage, the laws of Nicaragua and Britain, under whose jurisdiction both the remainder of Cameroon and Jamaica fell, still held in 1933 that a woman lost her citizenship upon remarriage and became an alien with the citizenship of her spouse.
Though not native to Nicaragua, having lived in the stratified social order of a Hispanic country, de Mena was able to empathize with Afro-Latina discontent in her travels through Latin America for UNIA and she spoke their language. De Mena's identity shifted as needed. When she was denied a berth on a Pullman car, de Mena used her Nicaraguan passport to gain one. On ship passenger manifests, she claimed to be African, colored, Negro, Spanish American, West Indian, and white on various voyages and was known to travel on both a Nicaraguan and British passport. On the other hand, some men in the UNIA challenged her leadership as a foreigner. She was also investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her activities and relationships with foreigners. De Mena, dedicated to the cause of improving her race, used her shifting identity for political expediency. Natanya Duncan, even observed that she chose her husbands based on whether they could advance the cause of racial improvement and disposed of them when they became either a liability or did not support her aims.
Career Nicaragua While de Mena may have been involved with the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Bluefields, as she later claimed, there is no documentation confirming her participation in the organization in Nicaragua. UNIA, founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, was a Pan-African movement with the dual goals of bringing self-authority to black people worldwide and taking possession of Africa as a Negro right. De Mena's husband was a member of the Union Club, serving as its vice president for several terms in the 1920s, which would have granted her access to the Creole elite circles. He also was involved with the Bluefields Weekly, a local English-language newspaper. Both served as mechanisms for political mobilization of the Creole populations and though women were not allowed to be members of the club, they were active in organizing political influence. In 1913, de Mena listed her occupation on a trip home as nurse but in the four following years, she styled herself as a housewife. She also made a trip that year to Panama, to give birth to her daughter Berniza I. Mena who was born in Panama City on February 26, 1913. In 1917, de Mena showed her occupation as clerk and in 1919 La Información newspaper ran an advertisement for a school run by de Mena in which she taught English, French, bookkeeping, music, shorthand and typing. In 1922, de Mena returned to the United States with her daughter. The passenger manifest showed she was divorced. She would settle near her family members in Chicago.
United States Around the time that de Mena returned to the U.S., a convention was taking place at Liberty Hall, the headquarters of UNIA in Harlem. The organization's structure was patriarchal, with clear delineation of gendered roles. Women were meant to be virtuous married mothers, in need of protection and men their gallant protectors and warriors. Though not on the 1922 agenda, the women's delegation raised a set of resolutions hoping to gain more autonomy, leadership positions and authority without male oversight. Marcus Garvey amended the resolutions so that they had little real effect, but the event marked a turning point and a rise in women in leadership in the organization. By 1929 though the organization was in decline, 39.5% of the delegates were women, rising to 49.1% in 1938. In various ways, women begin to split with the UNIA philosophies on issues that they felt strongly about, such as a woman's right to control her own child-bearing and use of birth control, as well as women's opposition to their lack of political power. De Mena's leadership of the UNIA, as a single mother, "proved that [women] were intellectually equipped to be local leaders as well as transnational policy makers within the organization". Soon after the convention, Garvey was arrested on charges of mail fraud involving the Black Star Line's scheme to bring American Negros "home" to Liberia. He was imprisoned and given a five-year sentence, but appealed his conviction and was released on bond.