Women, Memory, Nation: Writing Identities in Three Latin American Novels

Abstract

This essay examines how Latin American women writers Griselda Gambaro (Argentina), Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), and Magali García Ramis (Puerto Rico) represent the nation and address questions of national and self-identity through the intersection of fiction, history, memory, and autobiography. The novels examined here offer alternative representations of the nation and of national history grounded not on official historiography, but rather on microhistories, or the life stories of marginalized and displaced individuals. The representation of nation and national identity thus presented problematizes an understanding of these concepts as fixed and unchangeable, rather showing them as ambivalent and affective constructs that dialectically shape and are shaped by individuals’ own sense of self-identity. The comparative examination of Latin American novels from three different countries points to a common literary project of rewriting the nation, as it foregrounds the novels’ thematic and formal coincidences as well as their disparities.

Keywords:

• autobiographical fiction
• displacement
• history
• Latin America
• memory
• national identity
• postmemories
• self-identity
• women writers

Notes

¹Cecilia López Badano, in a comparative study of El mar que nos trajo and Setenta veces siete (2000) by Mexican writer Ricardo Elizondo, discusses both novels’ new historicist bent as informed by microhistory. According to the critic, these two novels are family sagas that utilize a form of microhistory to describe familial and local cultures (López Badano 23).

²Marianne Hirsch explains “postmemories” as memories of events lived by previous generations that affectively and otherwise impact those in the present trying to recover and make sense of the past.

³See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, as well as “The Postmodern Problematizing of History.”

⁴It should be noted that some of these “newer” actors in the sociopolitical arena had actually been part of Latin American societies for decades or even centuries, as is the case of Jews in Brazil. However, individuals from these various ethnic groups had to adapt to the dominant culture in detriment of their cultural heritage, or they had to adopt strategies and social masks to be accepted within the dominant culture.

⁵Many of the characters in the novels discussed here confront such forms of oppression. For example, the protagonists in Gambaro's El mar que nos trajo all face economic oppression, while Tito, in Machado's O mar nunca transborda, talks of the racism he has suffered in Brazil. García Ramis depicts situations of class, race, and gender discrimination in her novel.

⁶By “basic civil rights,” I mean individuals’ rights to full, equal citizenship: access to quality public education, health care, jobs, decent living wages, etc.

⁷Machado herself spent long periods of time during her childhood in her grandparents’ house on the coast of Espírito Santo. The village of Manguezal in O mar nunca transborda is a fictional representation of Manguinhos, where the author's grandparents had their home.

⁸The epigraph reads in part: “di me un’eco di memoria, / come quell buio murmure di mare” [an echo of memory, / like the dark murmur of the sea].

⁹Agostino's arrival in 1889 places him among the more than four million Italian immigrants who arrived in Buenos Aires from 1870 to 1920, a mass immigration encouraged by Argentina's federal government, as stated in the country's Constitution of 1853. Argentina, much like Brazil during the same period, sought to solve its modernization problems by subsidizing the immigration of European workers, while Brazil encouraged European immigration also as a reaction to the “scientific racialist” ideas that circulated in Europe during that time (see Graham).

¹⁰Argentina's “Tragic Week” or “Semana Trágica” was a series of violent events that took place in Buenos Aires in January 1919. The conflicts began with workers’ strikes led by anarchists and soon escalated to riots that were crushed by the Federal Police and the Army, resulting in the massacre of hundreds of workers, immigrants, and passersby.

¹¹Eliseo R. Colón Zayas points out that the narrator in Las horas del Sur “[…] elabora una extensa novela de formación [bildungsroman] que narra la vida ejemplar de Andrés” (212).

¹²Historians call 1887 the “Año Terrible” or the “Terrible Year” of Puerto Rican history, when the Spanish government in the island ordered “El Componte,” the political persecution and violent repression of the members, or those suspect of being members, of the Autonomist Party.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey

A native Brazilian, Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey has a PhD in Latin American literatures from Tulane University. She has published extensively, including books and articles on Latin American literature, her own creative works, and translations of Brazilian literature into English. She currently teaches in the Department of Romance Languages at Washington and Lee University.