Description:
A member of Mexico’s privileged upper class, yet still subordinated because of her gender, Rosario Castellanos became one of Latin America’s most influential feminist social critics. Joanna O’Connell here offers the first book-length study of all Castellanos’ prose writings, focusing specifically on how Castellanos’ experiences as a Mexican woman led her to an ethic of solidarity with the oppressed peoples of her home state of Chiapas.

O’Connell provides an original and detailed analysis of Castellanos’ first tentative venture into feminist cultural analysis in her essay Sabre cultura feminina (1950) and goes on to trace her moral and intellectual trajectory as feminist and social critic through her fiction and essays. An overview of Mexican indigenismo establishes the context for individual chapters on Castellanos’ narratives of ethnic conflict (the novels Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas and the short stories of Ciudad Real). In further chapters O’Connell reads Los convidados de agosto and Album de familia and Castellanos’ four collections of essays as developments of her feminist social analysis.


CONTENTS:

Preface......vii

Acknowledgments......xi

1. Prospero’s Daughter......1

2. Castellanos as Resisting Reader: Sobre cultura femenina......26

3. Castellanos and Indigenismo in Mexico......45

4. Balun Canan as Palimpsest......67

5. Ciudad Real: The Pitfalls of Indigenista Consciousness......106

6. Versions of History in Oficio de tinieblas......131

7. ‘Buceando cada vez mas hondo...’: The Dangerous Memory of Women’s Lives......172

8. Public Writing, Public Reading: Rosario Castellanos as Essayist......207

Afterword......227

Notes......229
Bibliography......245
Index......257