Troubled Memories: Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representation by Oswaldo Estrada (review)

Taking the turn of the twentieth century as a chronological point of departure, Oswaldo Estrada’s Troubled Memories: Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representations is a powerful study of literary representations of Mexican historical women—Malinche, Sor Juana, Leona Vicario, las soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution, Frida Kahlo. The main thrust of Estrada’s argument is that the normalization of gender inequality makes it necessary to examine the ways in which recent works centered on the lives of these historical figures reproduce, perpetuate, or problematize “current patterns of domination and subordination, sexual discrimination, determinism, limited acts of empowerment, and prevalent inequality” (9).

While Estrada’s text is unique because it centers on works written in the early twentieth-first century and covers a sizable group of Mexican writers, his study engages with and builds upon the work of writers who have made similar studies in the past, such as Seymour Menton, Noé Jitrik, Karl Kohut, Juan José Barrientos, and Fernando Aínsa among others. The author’s penetrating analysis reveals how, given the rise of neoliberalism, the symbolic power these iconic women possess has transformed them into cultural commodities for global consumption and exchange, a fact made more poignant by their felicitous appearance in Mexican currency. Their enormous symbolic power rests on the fact that they embody social tensions, cultural desires, historical traumas or pieces of the past that have not yet been overcome, or are still being processed. However, as neoliberal tendencies allow for their representation to circulate in high and low culture circles, these female icons undergo a secondary cultural appropriation of sorts as writers portray aspects of their intimacy and sexuality often absent from the historical record. In this way, the life of these women is imagined and remembered in innovative and troublesome ways.

In chapter 1, “Forget Me Not: Malinche’s Struggles in Twenty-First-Century Mexico,” the author lays out a careful analysis of Malinche’s representation in the works of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, Marisol Martín del Campo, Laura Esquivel, and Fanny del Río. Here, Estrada underscores the fact that, despite their best intentions, some writers end up reproducing the binary power dynamics as well as the silencing effect historical representation has had on Malinche’s story.

Chapter 2, “Impossible Nun: Sor Juana and the Traps of Representation,” centers on four novels that seek to recreate or imagine Sor Juana’s life: Mónica Zagal’s La venganza de Sor Juana (2007), José Luis Gómez’s El beso de la virreina (2008), Mónica Lavín’s Yo la peor (2009), and Kyra Galván’s Los indecibles pecados de Sor Juana (2010). The comparative approach allows for a winnowing of each novel’s individual contributions to the nun’s complex character and intimacy that Estrada characterizes as a voyeuristic act that reveals more about issues of our own age than of Sor Juana’s life as a woman and nun in the Baroque period.

In chapter 3, “Leona Vicario: The Sweet Mother of the Nation,” the author surveys three novels published in 2010 in celebration of the two hundred anniversary of Mexico’s Independence from Spain: Celia del Palacio’s Leona, Carlos Pascual’s La insurgenta, and Eugenio Aguirre’s Leona Vicario: La Insurgente. This is one of the most thought-provoking chapters as the woman who is at the heart of these novels is the least known outside of Mexico, and the least celebrated within its borders. In this chapter, using historical data, Estrada reminds readers of the political significance of Leona Vicario’s insurgent activities that led to her recognition as the mother of the nation, a role occupied almost exclusively by men. Although much of Leona Vicario’s political thought, found in her public and private letters, informs the literary recovery effected by these novels, in some instances Estrada finds that Vicario is remembered not by her political thought...