Contemplation as Resistance to Ageism, and its Historical Context: Mexican Writers Carmen Boullosa, Guadalupe Nettel, and María Rivera

ABSTRACT

Carmen Boullosa’s (1954) daring “Mis cadáveres” (My Cadavers, 2003) shares achievements with Guadalupe Nettel’s (1972) “El cuerpo en que nací” (The Body in Which I Was Born) (2011) and María Rivera’s (1971) “Variaciones para una autobiografía” (Variations for an Autobiography) (2011). The three autobiographical essays by Mexican women writers describe such sexuality-related moments as losing one’s virginity (Nettel), masturbating (Boullosa), and giving birth by caesarean section (Boullosa and Rivera). The pioneering nature of these texts becomes visible through contextual details regarding earlier Mexican women artists Nellie Campobello (1900), Frida Kahlo (1907), Griselda Álvarez (1913), Elena Garro (1916), Clementina Díaz y de Ovando (1916), and Guadalupe Amor (1918). The archives on the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (Mexican Center for Writers, 1951–2006) help to illuminate the nature of ageist pressures exerted on Díaz y de Ovando, as well as on Ángeles Mastretta (1949), Ana Cecilia Treviño (1932), and Amparo Dávila (1928). Writing by more recent generations of writers represented by Boullosa, Nettel, and Rivera suggests that ageism can be overcome in part by exiting the narrative arc of autopathology in favour of meditation, which points to a solution of emptying out the self, contemplating the present moment, and valuing community over individuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexican women writers
• autobiography
• ageism
• meditation

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Narciso Rojas Moreno at the Archive for the Center for Mexican Writers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emily Hind is an associate professor with the University of Florida, where she received a University of Florida Term Professorship for distinguished record of research and scholarship, 2016–2019. She was voted Professor of the Year 2016–2017 by the graduate students in the Hispanic literature programme. Hind has published two books of interviews with Mexican writers, as well as a book of criticism, Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska: Boob Lit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Her manuscript Dude Lit examines the performance of the role of intellectual by Mexican men and is forthcoming in spring 2019 with the University of Arizona Press. Hind was a Fulbright scholar in Mexico in 2015, and her essay on Rosario Castellanos won the Feministas Unidas essay prize.

ORCID

Emily Hind http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3244-3669

Notes

1 Maricruz Castro Ricalde (2017) summarises nicely some of that disability-themed criticism in her article on the short story “Pitosis”.