The Political Becomes the Personal: Rosario Castellanos and the US Women's Liberation Movement

In September 1966, during the incipient stages of the US Women's Liberation Movement, Rosario Castellanos (1925–1974) began a yearlong stay in the United States as a visiting professor of Spanish at three state institutions. This article studies the lasting impressions of US liberationist discourses on Castellanos, who was simultaneously negotiating separation from her then-husband Ricardo Guerra. Through a close reading of the letters she wrote to Guerra and through interviews with two of her former students, this article contends that it was during this decisive year abroad that Castellanos began to reconcile the dissonance between her public feminist persona and its private enactment in her family life.