Elena Poniatowska Research Articles

Para alcanzar las estrellas. Poniatowska revela el universo de Guillermo Haro

A través de la biografía de Guillermo Haro, realizada por Elena Poniatowska, se lleva a cabo una reflexión en torno al desarrollo de las ciencias en el México del siglo XX.

“Should We Try to Self Remember While Playing Snakes and Ladders?”

Emerging from the Paris surrealist group, the English-born writer and painter Leonora Carrington (England, 1917—Mexico, 2011) was perpetually suspicious of orthodoxy. She often pokes fun at, parodies, and ultimately upsets traditional hierarchies of power. In her work animals impart wisdom, Goddesses loom large, and domestic spaces become sites of occult power. In this article, I investigate Carrington’s suspicion of gurus with claims to esoteric truth. Carrington participated in Fourth Way groups run by students of G. I. Gurdjieff (Christopher Fremantle) and P. D. Ouspensky (Rodney Collin). However, while she had a deep interest in the teachings, Carrington remained suspicious of the group practices of the Fourth Way, as can be seen in Elena Poniatowska’s fictionalized biography Leonora (2015). This article explores Carrington’s contact with the ‘Work’ in order to shed light on the character of Dr. Gambit in her 1950 novel, The Hearing Trumpet, commonly thought to be a parody of Gurdjieff. In doing so, it will investigate Carrington’s feminist objections to the role of the guru, while also contributing to a discussion of the unease some felt toward the praxis of the Fourth Way, despite their attraction to the philosophy.

Reading Society: Elena Poniatowska's Children's Books in Terms of Her Body of Work

Reading Society: Elena Poniatowska's Children's Books in Terms of Her Body of Work

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...

Disability Life Writing and the Problem of Dependency in The Autobiography of Gaby Brimmer.

Independence was a core value of the movement for disability rights. People with disabilities did not have to be dependent, advocates claimed; they were robbed of autonomy by poverty, social prejudice, and architectural barriers. Recently, critics have noted that the emphasis on independence equates personhood with autonomy, reason, and self-awareness, thereby excluding those who are incapable of self-determination. The stigma of dependency is communicated to caregivers whose work is devalued and undercompensated. These values are echoed in the life writing of people with disabilities, which tends to present a singular narrative voice, even when the author requires assistance in the physical or intellectual work of composition. The 1979 Mexican memoir-testimonio Gaby Brimmer, collaboratively authored by the acclaimed journalist Elena Poniatowska, Brimmer, her mother, and her paid caregiver is a notable exception. Consisting of interwoven dialogue among its three informants, Gaby Brimmer enacts dependency at the level of form, while exploring the challenges and opportunities of interdependence in societies that devalue the giving and receiving of care.

De predicadoras, heroínas y malentendidos

Some women are ahead of their time. This is the case of Maria Luisa Bombal and the emergence of “real maravilloso”, and also of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a pioneer in the defense of women rights and their recognition in society, and before her time in demanding the right to express her opinions in the complex field of theology. Centuries later, Elena Poniatowska coincides with both of them in upholding her right to rewrite and rescue women’s testimonies from the recent history of Mexico.

Reescritura y paratextualidad en La noche de Tlatelolco: la imagen visual en la traducción y la reedición como elemento neutralizador del realismo mágico

La noche del Tlatelolco (translated into English as Massacre in Mexico), by Elena Poniatowska, avoids magical realism, the dominant representational model in contemporary Latin-American Literature, when depicting the tragic events occurred in Mexico on October 1968. In addition to the composite techniques adopted by the text in order to function as a collective testimony emphasizing the undeniability of the events and struggling against denial and oblivion, the elements that Gérard Genette calls ‘paratexts’ play a decisive role. Based on recent contributions to translation theory, this article examines the purpose and strategies of the paratextual apparatus accompanying different editions of this work, both in its original language and in English. Special attention is paid to the visual narrative and its variation over time. Focusing on specific examples, general considerations about the interrelations among the original, its translations, and other paratexts and rewritings are also included.

Once Upon a Time There Was an Indian

Alas de maguey. La lucha de Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza , by Marta Gomez-Rodulfo, with a preface by Elena Poniatowska, 2012. Embers of the Past. Essays in Times of Decolonization , by Javier Sanjines C., with a foreword by Walter D. Mignolo; translated by David Frye, 2013. The Village Is Like a Wheel: Rethinking Cargos, Family and Ethnicity in Highland Mexico, by Roger Magazine, 2012.

Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America

PERFORMATIVITY, SOCIAL ONTOLOGY, AND THE USES OF NARRATIVES IN LATIN AMERICA

This article explains the relationship between performativity and social ontology in the case of Latin American narratives of resistance and liberation. In particular, it shows how these narratives construct social facts and provide social reality to experiences of oppression and to efforts of resistance and liberation, by means of performative functions tied to the creation and maintenance of social ontologies and to the struggle for identity, social recognition, sources of legitimacy, and hegemony. Latin America is not singular in the use of these kinds of narratives but it is special in the centrality that it gives to them and in its awareness of it. By way of example, the article touches upon four narratives that display some of these narrative features and functions: Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico (1975), Rigoberta Menchu's I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1984), Domitila Barrios de Chungara's Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines (1978), and Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil's Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos (1991).

Teaching Mexico’s Remarkable Writer

Teaching Mexico’s Remarkable Writer Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez (bio) Those of us who work in the field of interdisciplinary studies, we often work from a variety of approaches and thematic collaborations. Diálogo’s goal, furthermore, is to include a wide range of issues in the humanities and social sciences. The current issue is an examination of pedagogical approaches to teaching about Mexico, through the works of the extraordinary and prolific writer, Elena Poniatowska. Journalist as well as novelist, Poniatowska has often used her work to bring issues of social justice to the forefront. “Pedagogy” can conjure multiple responses in the academy. In some cases, journals shy away from discussions of “how we teach,” preferring more theoretical approaches to critical research. And yet, during Ph.D. preparation in most of our disciplines, our studies are oriented by both theory and practice. Most academics, in fact, spend considerable time teaching classes, and mostly to undergraduate students. The current theme opens a discussion on how we involve our students in the process of learning about Mexico, and in more universal terms, the responses of people and societies to political repression, disasters and other difficult realities of the contemporary era. Discussions on “how to teach” great writers and canonical texts are occurring in other publishing venues. We chose to center our study on how to teach the innovative narratives of Mexico’s contemporary writer, Elena Poniatowska. The contributors who responded to our call represent a wide variety of disciplines and teaching experiences at both U.S. and international universities—from Mexican scholars and artists to those who study Mexican literature. In each case, the contributors have a longstanding connection to Poniatowska’s insightful subject matter and are dedicated to the reception, and understanding, of her texts by students. Guiding and assembling this first issue of 2014 has been especially enjoyable for me. I have admired Elena Poniatowska and marveled at her texts through the years, beginning in 1990 when I selected her first published text, Lilus Kikus, to translate and as the subject of my master’s thesis (M.A., New York University). I first met her when I was a new assistant professor, and have frequently heard her talks and been present for homenajes dedicated to her at numerous conferences. Since each writer in this issue has been touched by Poniatowska, and her outstanding writing, we were especially thrilled to hear of her selection for the prestigious Premio Cervantes 2014 a ward—the highest honor in Spanish-language letters—often called the “Nobel prize” of Spanish and Latin American literature. She will receive the award in a ceremony held in April in Spain. Poniatowska’s books are numerous: The first was published in 1954, followed by five in the 1960s, four the next decade, six the following, eleven in the 1990s, 22 in the first decade of the new century, and five between 2010-13 (please peruse the Chronology). It would be impossible for this issue to include articles enough to cover all of her texts. Even so, the collection presented here delves into works that invite examination from a variety of perspectives, including current critical studies in disability and human subjects, textual and structural hybridity, techniques of new media, the art of biography, artistic prowess, geographic and historical settings. From in-depth research to teaching and learning applications, to shorter reflections on the impact of particular texts, and two evocative interviews, we hereby present a guide to Mexico’s great contemporary writer, the latest recipient of the highest accolade for distinguished writing. Those of us who teach her works are acutely aware of how her books have affected us through the years: We have discovered in her writing unique turns of phrase, deeper meanings between the lines, and scintillating images. Perhaps one of the most powerful narrative frames of her texts is the way Poniatowska brings the words and presence of so many extraordinary historical characters into our understanding. Major occurrences of Mexican contemporary history have been documented in her books—the 1968 massacre of students, and the earthquake of 1985—as well as the stories of remarkable figures, including protestors and political prisoners, great artists, and other figures who...

The Archaeological Symbol: Heredia’s Volcanic Pyramid and Mesoamerican Deep Time

The Archaeological Symbol:Heredia’s Volcanic Pyramid and Mesoamerican Deep Time Carlos Fonseca Suárez He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. —Walter Benjamin, Excavation and Memory The archaeological paradigm could be summarized as follows: knowledge happens the day after the catastrophe, as a search for erased origins. An article on the Mesoamerican archaeological imaginary could then very well begin by discussing the aftermath of an earthquake. The earthquake that struck Mexico City in the early morning of September 19, 1985, razing through the city’s modern landscape, fracturing the country’s modern spine, left the city exposed to the terrible logic of its archaic modernity. What the earthquake exposed was the end of that phenomenon of economic development that, from the 1940s until the 1980s, saw the entrance of Mexico into the landscape of the modern world, a socio-economic phenomenon that had been adequately called the “Mexican miracle.”1 The catastrophe exposed the fault lines of the project as such: in the fissures of the city’s architecture one found a concrete metaphor for the economic crisis [End Page 269] that had assaulted Mexico at the beginning of the decade. Nowhere was this unearthing clearer than in Tlatelolco. There, the shock waves brought to ruin the Nuevo León Building, part of the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelco, the largest apartment complex in Mexico City, built in the 1960s by the architect Mario Pani, whose name had turned into a symbol of the Mexican miracle. Tlatelolco: the name stands for the violent cracks inherent within Mexico’s modernity. The social catastrophe that had been the 1968 massacre of Tlalelolco, where hundreds of student and civilian protesters were killed, was concretized by the earthquake’s disassembling force: the cracks in the Nuevo León Building were evidence that Mexico’s miracle was plagued with deficiencies and corruption. Soon, a discourse of civil society emerged, led by the voice of Carlos Monsivaís which soon found echoes in the more literary interventions of José Emilio Pachecho’s poem “Las ruinas de México” and Elena Poniatowska’s Nada, nadie. It would be in the aftermath of such discussions, as an aftershock of the catastrophe, that Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, an ethnologist and anthropologist whose work revolved around the question of the indigenous presence, would find the grounds upon which to base his concept of a “México profundo” in opposition to that of the “México imaginario.” The book, México profundo, was released in 1987, amidst the atmosphere of social unrest produced by the horrible earthquake, as a call—in the natural language of archaeology and geology—for a recognition of the deep indigenous strata of Mexico. Bonfil Batalla’s strategy was to bring back the concept of Mesoamerica: Let us start from a basic fact: one of the few original civilizations that humanity has created throughout all its history arose and developed in what today is México. This is Mesoamerican civilization, from which derives all that is “Indian” in México [ . . . ] Every schoolboy knows something about the precolonial world. The great archaeological monuments stand as national symbols [ . . . ] That renunciation, that denial of the past—does it really correspond to a total and irremediable historical break? Did Mesoamerica really die, and are the remaining Indian populations simply fossils, condemned five hundred years ago to disappear because they have no place in the present or in the future? (3) Bonfil Batalla’s argument against the fossilization of Mesoamerica, against its petrifaction in national museums, spirals around itself only to end up reifying the concept it wishes to place in question: the “Mesoamerican Mexico” can only be thought of under an archaeological discourse of depth and fossils, of monuments and digging, of origins. As I will soon attempt to show, this is no coincidence, but [End Page 270] rather accords with the logic of catastrophe and reconstruction, of catastrophe and excavation—namely, the archaeological paradigm of history—that surrounds the nineteenth-century discourse of ruins in Mexico. The “México profundo” that emerges amidst the ruins of the 1985 earthquake is the Mexico whose archaeological modernity must be found in dialogue with the...

Teaching Gaby Brimmer : A Disability Studies Approach

Gaby Brimmer (1979), the collaborative “autobiography” of the Mexican disability rights activist, narrates her childhood and young adulthood through the voices of Brimmer herself; her mother, Sari Dlugacz Brimmer; her caregiver, Florencia Morales Sánchez; and Elena Poniatowska. This article presents ideas and resources for teaching Gaby Brimmer from a disability studies perspective, in courses on contemporary Spanish-American literature, women writers, genre theory, human rights and activism, or in a disability studies course.

Chronology of Works By and About Elena Poniatowska

Chronology of Works By and About Elena Poniatowska

Elena y El Gaviero

Una lectura de las Cartas de Álvaro Mutis a Elena Poniatowska , efectuando análisis de la presencia del escritor colombiano en México, su encarcelamiento y las visitas de Elena Poniatowska con él en la cárcel.

Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela y las cartas de Angelina Beloff en el archivo Museo Frida Kahlo

Al leer el texto, Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela , de Elena Poniatowska, piensa el lector en posibles vínculos entre la ficción y el contexto histórico (el discurso epistolar de Angelina Beloff). Se conoce que Elena Poniatowska creó su versión ficticia luego de leer la biografía de Diego Rivera, preparada por Bertram Wolfe. En este ensayo se examinan las cartas de Angelina Beloff dirigidas a Diego Rivera, archivadas en el Museo Frida Kahlo, para proponer una comparación entre las cartas físicas, auténticas (del archivo), y asuntos de biografía y ficción, y nuevas ideas al consultar cada fuente por separado. Al final, se logra un nuevo entendimiento de la obra de ficción de Poniatowska, a partir de los documentos históricos.

Class Privilege and Social Class Awakening in Paseo de la Reforma

In this reading of Elena Poniatowska’s Paseo de la Reforma , the plot goes beyond a love story and personal transformation of the protagonist to represent a metaphor in microcosm for Mexico City. Although a shorter work than her more highly recognized novels and testimonies, the tensions between social classes and the unearned privileges of the elite in this novel stand in contrast to the suffering of the masses.

Exploring Disaster Experiences through Elena Poniatowska’s Nada, nadie : Las voces del temblor

A study of Elena Poniatowska’s Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor , based on the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, through recent critical theories on trauma and human experience in catastrophic events. This article explores the narrative context of personal and collective response to disasters as well as pedagogical approaches to disaster narration.

Reading Elena Poniatowska’s Leonora in an Undergraduate Seminar

Description of an Honors literature seminar focused on a selection of texts by prominent Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, including critical strategies involved in preparation, work required by students, and Poniatowska’s creative strategies in depicting rebellious women and other socially marginalized figures. A special focus on the biographical novel Leonora (2011) illustrates the pedagogical possibilities of this novel, and students’ analytical responses to the reading.

Elena Poniatowska: Then, Now and Forever

Elena Poniatowska’s extraordinary literary output and her delightful personality justly merit her position as Mexico’s most dearly loved and highly respected author. I consider myself truly fortunate to have had the luxury of intensively studying her writings during the process of my doctoral dissertation. In this essay, I recall my introduction to Poniatowska’s work, her impact on my postgraduate studies, and how I, as a historian, employ her testimonial literature in my classes and the teaching of undergraduate students in the United Kingdom.