Sisters at War: Mexican Women’s Poetry and the U.S.-Mexican War

Abstract

During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848), Mexican women published po- ems that tested the boundaries of conventional defi nitions of female subjectivity domesticity. Central to the construction of female authorship was the idea of a collective women's voice, a lyrical sisterhood that situated the individual poetic voice within a broader historical tradition a contemporaneous coalition of women writers. In speaking out about the war, women poets foregrounded their symbolic authority to exalt Mexican resistance to the invader, to decry Mexico's political military failures, or to measure the horrors of war. In doing so, they self-consciously used gender to blur the distinction between the public domestic spheres. One of the most promising areas of future research into literature national identity in early Republican Mexico is the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848. Mexican literary responses to the U.S. invasion of its territory, to Mexico's continued defeats on the battlefi eld, constitute an invaluable archive for examining the emergence of Mexican nationalism. Indeed, during the war its aftermath, Mexican writers recognized the value of national unity as they never had before, because they saw their defeat on the battlefi eld as a function of their political disunity. A nation is nothing but a large family, wrote the distin- guished moderado writer Mariano Otero (1848/2010, 139) in his 1848 assessment of Mexico's defeat, and for this to be strong powerful, it is necessary for all its members to be intimately joined by common interest other feelings of the heart. 1