Women and La Historia Oficial

The reader who picks up Javier Ocampo López's encyclopedic Historia de las ideas de integración de América Latina^[1] encounters a rich and ambitious survey of three centuries of Spanish American political history and thought, encompassing the problematics of colonialism, independence, nation building, and transnational identity. In this impressive panorama, a lone woman makes her appearance: the cigarette seller Manuela Beltrán, who on March 16, 1781, in Socorro, Nueva Granada, tore down a tax edict imposed by the Spanish colonial government. Her act, cheered on by an angry crowd, triggered an insurrection (the conjuración de los alfaiates ) that then spread throughout the provinces, a prelude to Spanish American independence. The figure of Beltrán in Ocampo's book in many ways typifies the position women have occupied with respect to the official histories of modern times. For the most part they have been simply absent. When they are present, they are isolated figures, and they have no voice—one cannot help but notice that it is not Beltrán's "ideas de integración" that mark her place in history. Though she clearly did have the "right idea" at the time, it was never a question of recording her thoughts or words for posterity, only her gesture, as a prelude and metonymy for the larger drama.

For present purposes, it is of particular interest that this lone woman is a late-eighteenth-century popular revolutionary figure, a Marseillaise avant la lettre . She is conspicuously not a member of the criollo elites who claimed the American revolutions as their own and went on to fashion themselves into national bourgeoisies. While women have never been well represented by official histories in any age, it is worthwhile to recognize how particularly limited and repressive the bourgeois republican era has been in producing

and imagining women as historical, political, and cultural subjects. As Joan Landis put it, the democratization of politics in the nineteenth century brought with it the domestication of women, and the elision of women (along with most other people) as subjects of history.^[2] Such elisions are part of the hegemonic project of the official story—as the Argentine film of that title (La historia oficial , 1985) reminds us. Indeed, that film exhibits some of the complexities and compromises involved in trying to insert women, especially women of privilege, into modern narratives of national history. At the same time, La historia oficial bears witness to the current emergence of new female political and historical subjects in Latin America, in mothers' movements and other powerfully innovative, often cross-class forms of female activism. The discussion to follow is offered in deliberate relation to these extraordinary contemporary developments.

After some general considerations of how women are situated and symbolized by masculinist ideologies of nation, this essay looks at how such ideologies are played out in some key Spanish American literary texts by men and women writers. Though somewhat loosely related, the examples all undertake to focus interest on the ways Spanish American women writers and intellectuals have symbolized themselves in this "socio-semantic field," and how they have problematized masculinist ideologies of nationhood and citizenship. Of necessity, the focus is on times and places for which texts by women are available to contemporary researchers, but also on times and places in which questions of national definition and identity are especially pressing. Thus, writings by José Mármol and Juana Manuela Gorriti from the Argentine independence period provide an initial comparative case; the second half of the essay is devoted to the period of the 1920s and 1930s, a time of rapid modernization, social and ideological upheaval, and national redefinition. Two rather different examples are considered: first the early women collaborators of the Peruvian Revista Amauta , and second the renowned Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, specifically in her unfinished, and widely unread, Poema de Chile .