Historical Overview

This Companion to Latin American Women Writers introduces the reader to an overview of the socio-historical context that has shaped the voice of these women. The diverse range of writers covered in this volume offers an exposure of feminine literary discourse, which is of great relevance to understanding the ‘matriheritage of founding discourses,’ revealing the rich textual examples of a wide range of women writers in Latin America, from those well-established to the lesser known and forgotten. The female writer has been largely absent from the literary canon with the exception of a few isolated examples2 (Díaz-Diocaretz, 1990: 104–5). It is in the recent past that women writers have gained recognition, filling a vacuum created by their exclusion, allowing the exploration of the transgressive and revolutionary import of their writings.

Laura Restrepo (Colombia, 1950– ), the author of half a dozen major novels, is fast emerging as one of the leading female writers of Spanish America. The pervasive socio-historical preoccupations of her work might seem to merge almost seamlessly within a body of Spanish American novelistic writing traditionally judged by its social effectiveness. But such a first impression is misleading – at least in part: if there is one common thread running through her diverse literary output it is her consistent blurring of boundaries between traditionally distinct identities, categories and concepts: truth and fiction, historical fact and imaginative re-creation; the sacred and the profane. Temporal and spatial border territories recur in her work: Siete por Tres, the protagonist of La multitud errante (2001) [A Tale of the Dispossessed], is born on 1 January 1950 (on the cusp, therefore, of mid-century) in a rural village located on the border of Huila and Tolima (2001: 25). He is discovered in the church vestibule at the liminal midnight hour. In later life, he engages in a fruitless search for his missing guardian, Matilde Lina, who, as the narrator reflects, ‘se fue al limbo, donde habitan los que no están ni vivos ni muertos’ (2001: 14) [went into limbo, the abode of people who are neither alive nor dead].

Writing by women is often seen as a form of resistance, even as a revolutionary act, as Debra A. Castillo points out (1992: 20). Even so, it is not always taken seriously (Marting, 2003: 200), often regarded, sometimes by women themselves, as limited: Castillo (1992: xix) points to the Mexican critic Sara Sefchovich, who – ironically – herself claims to be a militant feminist (Franco, 1996: 227). Nonetheless, the best Latin American writing is ‘antihegemonic and challenges a monumentalizing or totalizing view of literature’ (Castillo, 1992: xxii). Many women writers are constructing ‘una voz propia’ (1992: 100) [a voice of their own]: Castellanos espouses an ‘adjectival writing’ and advocates the celebration not of depth (the unquestioned virtue of traditional male writing) but of the superficial. Valenzuela subtly employs masculinist assumptions against themselves (1992: 101). The concept of the ‘post-lettered city’ ‘stretches Rama's work on urban, elite cultural space’ to offer a place ‘where women's writing, not only their resistance, their orality, or their sexuality, can play a role” (Schwartz, 2007: 14).

In their common focus on gender these women writers engage with what is arguably the paramount cultural issue in contemporary Latin America. Their deconstructive work assumes particular urgency in the case of Argentina where the patriarchal authoritarian regime conceived of its mission in overtly gendered terms. Kantaris claims that ‘awareness of gender as a horizon which can no longer afford to be ignored marks what we might call an epistemological shift in both the practice and the theory of culture in Latin America’ (1995: 3).