Rosario Castellanos
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Rosario Castellanos
(1925–1974), prominent Mexican intellectual, feminist pioneer, and writer. One of the best-known intellectual figures in modern Mexico, Castellanos was at the center of the cultural, political, and literary debates of her time. Her vocation as a writer was a fervent and committed exercise in critical expression.
She was born in Mexico City on 25 May 1925 and returned there at age sixteen after spending her childhood and adolescence in the heavily indigenous state of Chiapas, an experience that strongly influenced her writing. She died on 7August 1974 in Israel, where she had been Mexico's ambassador since 1971 and a professor at the universities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Her master's thesis “Sobre cultura femenina” (On Feminine Culture) traced the epistemological roots of a feminist conscience that had to do with the relations among gender, culture, and oppression, a constant in her more than twenty works.
She graduated in philosophy and letters from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1950 and went to Spain on a scholarship. Upon her return she worked for a time in Chiapas, first as a promoter of culture for the Instituto de Ciencias y Artes in Tuxtla Gutiérrez and then at the Centro Coordinador del Instituto Indigenista in San Cristóbal de las Casas. In the late 1950s she returned to Mexico City and worked for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista, and in the early 1960s she became the press director at UNAM, where she was a well-known professor of comparative literature. She was also a visiting professor of Latin American and Mexican literature at the universities of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Colorado in the United States.
As a writer, professor, cultural essayist, and defender of the rights of women and the rights of indigenous people, Castellanos synthesized in her work stimulating critical thinking on gender, power, knowledge, ethnicity, and culture. She wrote in all the genres, including poetry, essay, narrative, short story, and theater, and she collaborated energetically on cultural supplements for the principal newspapers of Mexico and on foreign academic journals.
Her work demonstrates an intense passion for and devotion to the incisive word. In her essays she evinces admiration for Gabriela Mistral , Emily Dickinson , Simone de Beauvoir , Virginia Woolf , and Simone Weil , among other women authors. Castellanos influenced the Mexican and international cultural spheres with her defiant writing that questioned the dominant hegemonic ideology that perpetuates oppression, social injustice, and exclusion and denies women a space of their own, and she denounced the burden of difference and inequality that have enslaved the indigenous subject and condemned it to a condition of timeless subalternity.
In the most important indigenist narrative trilogy of Mexico, known as the Ciclo de Chiapas (Chiapas Cycle)—which includes Balún Canán (1957; English trans., The Nine Guardians), Ciudad Real: Cuentos (1960; English trans., The City of Kings), and Oficio de tinieblas (1962; English trans., The Book of Lamentations)—she offers a representation of the indigenous subject that goes beyond its exploitation, poverty, and marginalization, dismantles the social hypocrisy of the dominant oligarchies of the landowners, unmasks language as an instrument of oppression, and examines the power relationships in a feudal microcosm drawn from her autobiographical, testimonial, ethnographic, and aesthetic-cultural knowledge. Her trilogy offers a reference point and historical perspective that exposes the conditions and causes that led to the emergence of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas in 1994.
The eminent Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska described Castellanos as an author dedicated to the use of the biting word as an instrument of critical reflection and as endowed with an inquisitive irony that allowed her to see what reality occludes. The well-known Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco has suggested that Castellanos went beyond her historical moment by making each of her works into the raw material of a lucid and mordant consciousness that demonstrated more clearly than anyone else in her time the double condition of oppression of Mexican women.
A pioneer of Mexican feminist critical thought, Rosario Castellanos deconstructed the Mexican sociocultural reality from the viewpoint of gender, dismantled the cultural domestication of women, and questioned the significance of the symbolic cultural indicators of gender such as servitude, passivity, obedience, subjugation, docility, resignation, and self-denial. She engaged in a dialogue with international feminism by proposing in her works the implementation of a humanist feminism that permitted the establishment of relationships of equality between the genders, “another way of being more human and more free” for women, while fighting for human rights and denouncing the marginalized condition of indigenous people, enslaved and perpetually excluded from the Mexican national project.
Castellanos won the Mexican Critics Award (1957), the Chiapas Prize (1958), the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize (1961), the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Literature (1962), the Carlos Trouyet Prize (1967), and the Elías Sourasky Prize (1972).
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Rosario Castellanos
| Rosario Castellanos | |
|---|---|
 Tombstone of Rosario Castellanos |
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| Born |
May 25, 1925 Mexico City, Mexico |
| Died | August 7, 1974 (aged 49) Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Occupation | Poet and author |
Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 – 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the Generation of 1950 (the poets who wrote following the Second World War, influenced by César Vallejo and others), she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.
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Life
Born in Mexico City, she was raised in Comitán near her family's ranch in the southern state of Chiapas. She was an introverted young girl, who took notice of the plight of the indigenous Maya who worked for her family. According to her own account, she felt estranged from her family after a soothsayer predicted that one of her mother's two children would die shortly, and her mother screamed out, "Not the boy!"
The family's fortunes changed suddenly when President Lázaro Cárdenas enacted a land reform and peasant emancipation policy that stripped the family of much of its land holdings. At fifteen, Castellanos and her parents moved to Mexico City. One year later, her parents were dead and she was left to fend for herself.
Although she remained introverted, she joined a group of Mexican and Central American intellectuals, read extensively, and began to write. She studied philosophy and literature at UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico), where she would later teach, and joined the National Indigenous Institute, writing scripts for puppet shows that were staged in impoverished regions to promote literacy. Ironically, the Institute had been founded by President Cárdenas, who had taken away her family's land. She also wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Excélsior.
In addition to her literary work, Castellanos held several government posts. In recognition for her contribution to Mexican literature, Castellanos was appointed ambassador to Israel in 1971.
On 7 August 1974 Castellanos died in Tel Aviv from an unfortunate electrical accident. Some have speculated that the accident was in fact suicide. Mexican writer Martha Cerda, for example, wrote to journalist Lucina Kathmann, "I believe she committed suicide, though she already felt she was dead for some time.".[1] There is no evidence to support such a claim, however.
Work
Throughout her career, Castellanos wrote poetry, essays, one major play, and three novels: the semi-autobiographical Balún Canán and Oficio de tinieblas (translated into English as The Book of Lamentations) depicting a Tzotzil indigenous uprising in Chiapas based on one that had occurred in the 19th century. Despite being a ladino – of mestizo, not indigenous descent – Castellanos shows considerable concern and understanding for the plight of indigenous peoples. "Cartas a Ricardo," a collection of her letters to her husband Ricardo Guerra was published after her death as was her third novel,"Rito de iniciacion." Rosario Castellanos said of the collection of her letters in "Cartas a Ricardo"that she considered them to be her autobiography. "Rito de iniciacion" is about a young woman who comes to Mexico City and discovers her vocation of a writer.
Selected bibliography
- Balún-Canán (1957)
- Poemas (1953–1955) (1957)
- Ciudad Real: Cuentos (1960)
- Oficio de tinieblas (1962)
- Album de familia (1971)
- Poesía no eres tú; Obra poética: 1948-1971 (1972)
- Mujer que sabe latín . . . (1973)
- El eterno femenino: Farsa (1973)
- Bella dama sin piedad y otros poemas
- Los convidados de agosto
- Declaración de fe
- La muerte del tigre
- Cartas a Ricardo (1994)
- Rito de iniciación (1996)
English translations
- The Nine Guardians: a Novel (1992), trans. Irene Nicholson
- The Book of Lamentations (1996), trans. Esther Allen
Additional reading
- Ahern, Maureen."Rosario Castellanos". Latin American Writers. 3 vols. Ed. Solé/Abreu. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989: III: 1295-1302.
- ___. "Rosario Castellanos". Spanish American Woman Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book. Ed. Diane E. Marting. Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1990: 140-155.
- Anderson, Helene M. "Rosario Castellanos and the Structures of Power". Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America. Ed. Doris Meyer & Margarite Fernández Olmos. NY: Brooklyn College Humanities Institute Series, Brooklyn College, 1983: 22-31.
- Bellm, Dan. "A Woman Who Knew Latin." The Nation. (26 June 1989): 891-893.
- Brushwood, John S. The Spanish American Novel: A Twentieth Century Survey. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1975., pp. 237–238.
- Castillo, Debra A. Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
- Juarez Torres, Francisco. La poesia indigenista en cuatro poetas latinoamericanos: Manuel Gonzalez Prada, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda y Rosario Castellanos. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1990.
- Kintz, Linda. Title: The Subject's Tragedy: Political Poetics, Feminist Theory, and Drama. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1992.
- Laín Corona, Guillermo. "Infancia y opresión en Balún Canán, de Rosario Castellanos. La niña como eje témtico y esructural de la novela". Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 88.7 (2011): 777-794.
- Medeiros-Lichem, María Teresa. "Rosario Castellanos: The Inclusion of Plural Languages and the Problematic of Class and Race in Texts Written by Women". In Reading the Femine Voice in Latin American Women's Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela. New York/Bern: Peter Lang, 2002: 84-99.
- Melendez, Priscilla. "Genealogia y escritura en Balun-Canan de Rosario Castellanos" MLN 113.2 (March 1998) (Hispanic Issue): 339-363.
- Meyer, Doris. Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Austin : University of Texas Press, 1995.
- Schaefer, Claudia. Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992.
- Schwartz, Kessel. A New History of Spanish American Fiction. Vol. 2. Coralal Gables: University of Florida Press, 1971: 299-301.
- Turner, Harriet S. "Moving Selves: The Alchemy of Esmero (Gabriela Mistral, Gloria Riestra, Rosario Castellanos, and Gloria Fuertes)". In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers. Eds, Noël Valis and Carol Maier. Lewisburg: Bucknell University press, 1990: 227-245.
- Ward, Thomas. La resistencia cultural: la nación en el ensayo de las Américas. Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, 2004: 269-275.
Links: Rosario Castellanos reading some of her poetry. Rosario Castellanos at www.palabravirtual.com Musical versions of Rosario Castellanos' poetry. http://www.alisaamor.com/alisaamor4/Rosario.html
Notes
- ^ Cordite Poetry Review Archives at www.cordite.org.au
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