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A Politics of the Word: Claribel Alegría’s Album familiar and Despierta, mi bien, despierta

1997; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/itx.1997.0016

2156-5465

Mary Jane Treacy,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

A P o l i t i c s o f t h e W o r d : Claribel Alegna’s Album familiar and Despierta, mi him, despierta Mary Jane Treacy S i m m o n s C o l l e g e In recent years considerable attention has been given to the emergence of Latin American women into the public sphere to protest injustices against family members, particularly politically active husbands and sons. As Jean Franco has pointed out, during the 1970s and 1980s many governments began to encroach on spheres which had been considered marginal to everyday maneuverings for state power, particularly indigenous populations and the family (“Heroines” 114-15 and “Beyond Ethnocentrism” 505-06). Just as certain governments attempted to eliminate Indian peoples through massacres and policies of assimilation, so too many others violated the presumed sanctity of the home, women’s traditional domain, through practices of kidnapping and disappearing individuals, as well as sacking the households of their presumed political enemies. Historians, journalists, and literary critics have described how groups of continent orgamzed protests in the name of motherhood and family and used domestic crafts to politicize their individual mourning, the Argentine Mothers/Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Chilean arpilleristas being only the most famous of these.^ These women generally do not find serious contradictions between their traditional roles as nurturers and their often dangerous oppositional activities. On the contrary, they claim that their femininity inspires or creating anew and better nation for all those who are literally as well as figuratively in their care.As SoniaAlvarez explains, many of these women areinvolvedina“feminineorganizing,”which“growsoutofandaccepts prevailing female roles and asserts rights on the basis of these roles” (24; qtd. in Kampwirth 80). Yet LatinAmerican women writers of fiction portray quite another story when they depict the elite woman living during recent times of national crisis.^This “woman of porcelain,” as Ileana Rodriguez describes her, seems to captivate the imagination of many contemporary writers^ as they lament or satirize her frivolity and question how she can begin to take part in political life given that women’s upbringing and the structures of daily life infantilize her, control her sexuality and, in the end, position her as useless ornament. Most of these writers portray the elite woman as both an throughout the w o m e n even demands political action in the name of 6 2 Treacy—A Politics of the Word 6 3 ahistorical and nationless being: she has or is expected to have the same values and social spheres as her female elders—^with some modifications that fashion and changing times permit—and she is almost identical fi-om Mexico to Patagonia, the Caribbean to the Andes. The character lives for home and family, sometimes anuclear family, more often an extensive clan. She is attractive and feshionable, has abeautiful house, serves as hostess for family and business affairs, is intelligent but seldom intellectual or well trained. She is white or predominantly so, influenced by European or American culture, and unconscious of the vast problems of economic injustice in her very household. Although she has no political views of her own, she frequently comes from afamily that holds reactionary positions, at times the arch-conservative ideas of post-independence landowners, at others the counterrevolutionary beliefs of abeleaguered capitalist class facing revolution or reform. Thus the elite woman embodies many values of her international, if not globally interconnected, class along with isolation from any debate about the merits or justice of the national governments this class has developed for its benefit. Despite this common depiction, the elite or bourgeois female character is not ahistorical, but rather appears in fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Latin American novelists were debating the nature of modernity for their countries as well as the place of women in asocial order that was emerging from the semifeudal hacienda/plantation systems ofpost-independenceperiod.MaryLouisePrattpointsoutthatwomendid have aposition within the rural oligarchy, representing femily lineage and inheriting property. But once nations became industrialized and the oligar¬ chic families moved to town, women no longer retained their economic positions nor did they have the freedom to enter...