women-authors-from-mexico

"The exquisite roses that my father brought over yesterday have totally withered. I felt like I was them. How can he say he loves me if he doesn't care if I'm withering?"

""The way our people do it..." says my mother-in-law, and my mother says, "Our people do it differently because.." Well, if there are differences among the Jewish people, they must really be great between Jews and non-Jews."

"Ladino is a unique cultural and linguistic phenomenon. I think that well beyond the question of community belonging, it’s tremendously interesting for any Spanish speaker. To listen to its words is like seeing your own language in its infancy, and even earlier: in a nascent state. This language was spoken for five centuries by people who were totally distant from Spanish. That is, the mother tongue of all those speakers could be Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Italian, Greek, French, Romanian, etc. Doesn’t it seem unique that they’d speak their mother tongue in the street and inside their homes they’d switch to this archaic Spanish? The biography of Judeo-Spanish is wonderful and tragic. Whether or not it has a future is up for debate, occasionally between very antagonistic positions. Listen, it’s hardly used by anyone at this point. The last speakers of the language are dying. There are many academic initiatives seeking to preserve it, and there are also isolated writers, but as you know, a language does not stay alive by decree. What is indisputable is that there should be some kind of souvenir—sound-based, literary, or poetic—marking its passage through the world. It makes me sad to talk about that. It’s as if I were beside a beloved person on their deathbed. I don’t know. There are surely other opinions on the matter. There are those who think it won’t die. I’d like for them to be right, but if there aren’t kids anymore who hear it daily, if it’s not used by anyone other than a handful of older people, how could it stay alive, then?"

"Identities can be an obstacle and a source of conflict between people and nations when they are erroneously carried like a flag. But it’s a different story when we recognize that nothing makes us better as beings in the world than our differences."

"A language is historical memory. Sometimes it preserves information and turns of phrase that people have forgotten, but the language doesn’t forget. In the case of the Sephardic community, language served as a binding agent that linked men and women across faraway geographies, carrying those words like an unconscious and pleasurable way of remaining united."

"...it’s an idea of displacement that has animated my work. I get bored always doing the same thing. On top of that, I have no interest in purity or fidelity to a genre or a tone or a single channel of exploration. I’m not careful. I think that maintaining one foot outside the tradition we belong to is a good thing. And even if it weren’t, I’d do that regardless. That impulse arises from a restlessness within me that’s manifested in many ways over the years. All digressions eventually become a different peephole through which to glimpse that displacement I’m talking about. Displacement has marked my destiny: family displacement and also creative displacement. Imagine, how could you not love Judeo-Spanish (which had not appeared in my previous work): a language made from geographic, linguistic, and family displacements . . ."

"Catharsis consists in getting out from under something that’s been there constantly, buzzing around irksomely in your ear. And, when you do that, there’s a certain state of emptying that almost immediately initiates another disturbance. If it were any other way, it wouldn’t be possible to keep writing."

"The debt I have with my heritage becomes a declaration of love for what I’ve lost..."

"What I find is never definitive—that would be a pretension and an idiocy."

"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."

"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."

"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"

"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"

"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"

"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."

"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."

"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."

"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"

"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"

"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"

"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."

"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"

"Without his walks, the evenings were not the same, and my sidewalks were full of fruit husks, peanut shells, and ugly words."

"here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos..."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"There is nothing easier for my people than that quick show of grief."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"Your verses were leafy trees, uncertain roads where the healers nested in the century plant."

"He venido, feliz como los ríos,/cantando bajo un cielo de sauces y de álamos/hasta este mar de amor hermoso y grande./Yo ya no espero, vivo."

"we see the surprising similarities between the renowned Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos and the young Peruvian poet Giovanna Pollarolo. The lyrical voices in this section subvert and rebel against routine; they speak about it as if it were a prison. The poets rebel through language which casts a light on and makes of their everyday lives a battlefield where objects become the signifiers of disorder and of liberty."

"El idioma salía de sus labios, como debe salir de todo labio humano, enrojecido de vergüenza. Y Rominka, al arrancarse la costra de sus pecados, lloraba. Porque duele quedar desnudo."

"mi corazón, lugar de las hogueras,/y mi cuerpo que siempre me acompaña."

"(who would you suggest we should be reading more among the women poets, especially in Latin America?) Well, she died already, but in Mexico, there was a poet called Rosario Castellanos. She was very good."

"Castellanos is one of the most brilliant writers of the last century, but when the Latin American boom in literature resounded in the United States, it was only the male voices that were heard."

"la visión turbia como si sus entrañas estuvieran latiendo en medio de las cejas."

"ternura, la palabra pequeña, familiar/que cabía en mi boca."

"don Agustín, que no tenía afición por la copa ni por el tabaco, que había guardado rigurosamente la continencia, era esclavo de un vicio: la conversación. Furtivo, acechaba los diálogos en los portales, en el mercado, en la misma catedral. Don Agustín era el primero en enterarse de los chismes, en adivinar los escándalos y se desvivía por recibir confidencias, por ser depositario de secretos y servir intrigas."

"Adiós para la tierra que en mi torno bailaba."

"I warn you that we Mexican women are taking due note of what is happening to our northern cousins and making ready for the day it becomes necessary for us."

"Lo que soñó la tierra/es visible en el árbol."

"El viento de las alturas huía graznando lúgubremente. Un sol desteñido, frío, asaeteaba aquella colina estéril."

"Su silencio le producía vergüenza, como si callar fuera burlarse de los otros. Y como un castigo inmediato crecía, junto a la vergüenza, una sensación de soledad. Teodoro era un hombre aparte, amordazado por un secreto."

"Of course, there have been commentaries. And, of course, the gamut of these commentaries has been exactly what one might expect. From foolish outbursts and impudent plays on words to the rending of garments in the face of this new apocalyptic sign that heralds the decadence and perhaps even the death of our civilization and culture."

"The march, as you know, was not only to express their dissatisfaction but also to begin a strike against household chores-those jobs so sui generis, so unique that they are only noticed when left undone"

"sonríe ante un amanecer sin nadie."

"Possibilities were available to me, doors were opened to me, all because of one government official's concept of justice and the consistency of his desire to see the law equally applied. I refer to Lázaro Cárdenas."

"You may not be interested in hearing it, but I want to talk about it. To talk about them, rather: the forty-five years (exactly the number I have lived) as of today. I don't want to hide anything or misrepresent the date, like one covers up a gray hair or a wrinkle. No, each day has been worth what it has cost, and much more."

"I've been at this long enough to realize that my column is like a mirror-a little mirror to which each Saturday I pose the question of who is the most marvelous woman on the planet."

"I tried what all children try in their desire to be noticed: tantrums and every sort of illness I could dream up. But since these were not successful, I found myself obliged to seek other means. And so it was that I came to write and publish my first verses. At ten years of age I was already perfectly installed as a poetess."

"Heme aquí, ya al final, y todavía/no sé qué cara le daré a la muerte."