Against Representation: Women's Writing in Contemporary Mexico

AGAINST REPRESENTATION: WOMEN’S WRITING IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICO by Oswaldo Estrada University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill De mis más antiguos recuerdos, uno muy claro fue haber percibido que el mundo se dividía en dos. El de los hacedores y el de los fabuladores. Los hacedores eran los hombres. A ellos pertenecía el reino de los cielos. Ser hacedor era irse a trabajar todo el día, era “tu papá es muy responsable y como es muy responsable no está.” Ser hacedor era otra de las formas de llamar al abandono. Mi madre, en cambio, era la fabuladora. A través de ella conocí el olor y el tacto, mis primeras narraciones sobre el mundo, y poco después, el sonido de las cosas. Rosa Beltrán, “Ars poética” (11) ALTHOUGH women have made countless “uses of the word” in Mexico and the rest of Latin America for a while – successfully exploring their position in society through orthodox Catholic mysticism during colonial times, employing sentimentalized romanticism throughout the nineteenth century, or relying on various testimonial, critical and fictional narratives over the course of the twentieth century –, only recently have we developed critical tools for reading women who have historically been excluded from literary canons (Schlau xixiii ). In recognition of the negative impact that religion, colonialism, nationalism and modernization have had on women, not only as hegemonic narratives but also as symbolic systems that have relegated them to the outskirts of knowledge and power (Franco 12), over the past twenty years the field of 63 women studies has produced new approaches to analyze the presence of women in mexica and colonial societies, their stereotypical representations, and the gradual development of a feminist and postfeminist consciousness. In one way or another, these critical perspectives have contested the fact that Mexican literature has represented women through a series of female archetypes that only solidify their image as an extreme and never as a continuum of conflicting forces, as if they were eternally condemned to play the roles of “the good one” or “the bad one,” “the virginal,” “the whore,” “the old maid,” “the unselfish wife,” “the untouchable nun,” “the school teacher,” and “the pious woman” (Leal 241). The main problem with these representations is that, in any shape or form, they confine women to the state of passiveness and ignorance that Rosario Castellanos denounced in her collection of essays Mujer que sabe latín… (1973). They depict women as mentally handicapped, as if they were only capable of maintaining certain ideals associated with femininity – loyalty, patience , chastity, impeccable conduct, maternity, submission, humility, abnegation , and sacrifice – for the well-being of societies that privilege men (14-31). Surprisingly, even when it is possible to distinguish different types of sensibility in the creation of female characters such as Nacha Ceniceros in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931), Isabel Moncada in Elena Garro’s Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), or Jesusa Palancares in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (1969) – the portrayal of women through female archetypes continues to be privileged in the commercial writings of Ángeles Mastretta (b. 1949) and Laura Esquivel (b. 1950). Some notable exceptions, of course, are marked by Rosa Nissán (b. 1939), Cristina Pacheco (b. 1941), María Luisa Puga (b. 1944), Bárbara Jacobs (b. 1947), Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954), and Sabina Berman (b. 1955), among other writers whose creative works reshape and redefine the depiction of women in contemporary Mexican literature. The radical shift, however, not as the exception to the norm but as the trademark of a new generation of women writers, is established by those born in the sixties. Distancing themselves from their predecessors, writers such as Cristina Rivera Garza (1964), Ana Clavel (1961), and Rosa Beltrán (1960) challenge our notions of women’s literature with transgressions of all types, with controversial explorations of gender and sentimentalism in contemporary societies, and with the problematic construction of identities in globalized or deterritorialized environments . When we approach their narratives, it is clear that this group of writers intentionally problematizes the dichotomy of male and female, in sync with current waves of postmodernism and postfeminism.1 In response to a...