Exile In Mexico Research Articles

Fempress: a communication strategy for women.

In 1981, two Chilean women living in exile in Mexico started Fempress, the Latin American Media Network which puts out a monthly magazine, operates a press service on women's issues, and provides a Radio Press Service which covers Latin America. The monthly magazine, Mujer-Fempress, started out as 200 copies of a xeroxed bulletin and now runs 5000 copies per issue. This magazine has played an important role in achieving communication within the far-flung women's movement in Latin American. Early in its existence, Fempress began to concentrate on creating alternative media channels as a means of empowering women through raising awareness and stimulating change. Since the market will not support such alternative work, Fempress is dependent upon international cooperation for funding.

Letters of Catherine Cottam Romney, Plural Wife ed. by Jennifer Moulton Hansen

Reviews 79 tion to Cather’s (and others’) questioning of domesticity. Despite disavowing essentialism, Romines variously reveals essentialist assumptions. For example, Romines writes that from the thirties, Cather’sfiction indicates that housekeep­ ing is “an inevitable portion of every North American woman’s potential heri­ tage” (my emphasis). Elsewhere, Romines implies that domesticity is an archetypally rather than historically constituted feature ofwomen’s experience when she likens fictional housekeepers to Hestia, Circe, Demeter, or Persephone. Had Romines clarified her theoretical assumptions and more fully ad­ dressed these writers’ critiques of domesticity, her study would be stronger. Nevertheless, Romines suggestively expands the scope of scholarship on the relation of American women’s writing and domestic culture. PAMELA WALKER Houston, Texas Letters of Catherine Cottam Romney, Plural Wife. Edited by Jennifer Moulton Hansen. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. 317 pages, $32.50.) Born in Salt Lake City in 1855, Catherine Cottam Romney spent most of her childhood in St. George, Utah, where her family was sent by the Mormon church to settle the Dixie Mission. At age eighteen, after persuading her parents that she could not live happily without him, she married Miles P. Romney, a personable man of many talents, twelve years her senior, becoming his third wife. He was to have five. Thus, as an untried girl she made the commitment to enter into and uphold the church’s principle of polygamy. Such a marriage conferred unusual status upon the woman: she was a wife instead of thewife and therefore always a fraction less than halfof the marriage. Not every woman so joined could abide this unequal division and maintain harmony both with husband and other wives. Catherine Romney’s letters docu­ ment a marriage that prevailed, enduring to the end of polygamy as law and practice, choosing long exile in Mexico, ultimately, over renunciation. There has been endless curiosity about the principle which gave Mormonism its most peculiar manifestation, but this is not the book to satisfy it. Nearly all of these 170 letters were to family members to whom she was devoted. Separation from them, which began in 1881 when her husband was called to settle St. Johns, in the Arizona Territory, caused lasting pain. Written in mo­ ments stolen from the rigors of her demanding life, the letters were a stay against homesickness and the desolating sense of isolation. Part of Catherine Romney’scommitment to her marriage was to endure with as little complaint as possible, thus the determinedly cheerful and newsy content. In this way she was to build a record of her family’s external life. Something in the public nature of 80 WesternAmerican Literature a letter curbs revelations of emotional or spiritual conflict, or even mention of what, to the correspondent, may seem to be merely the mundane or vexing aspects of the writer’s life. A caring daughter or sisterwho fretted over the well­ being of distant family members would not add her troubles to theirs. Written during her adult years between 1872 and 1917, her letters contrib­ ute substantial information about Mormon pioneer life in her intelligent obser­ vations of people, places, and events. They have been gathered and edited by great-granddaughter Jennifer Moulton Hansen. Though not a trained histo­ rian, the editor has painstakingly provided explanatory textual material based on archival research, family records and correspondence. If her volume lacks the density and texture of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, it nonethe­ less provides insight into another quietly remarkable life which has been pre­ served in the homely documents of her own writing. CORALIE BEYERS Logan, Utah William Saroyan: A Study ofthe ShortFiction. By Edward Halsey Foster. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991. 174 pages, $21.95.) William Saroyan died in 1981. Each year since then, as the force of his presence recedes, it becomes easier to arrive at an accurate assessment of his work. This volume, divided into three parts, is a useful contribution to that endeavor. Part 1, which makes up halfof the book, is Edward Halsey Foster’s explora­ tion and explication of Saroyan’s short fiction, from TheDaring Young Man on theFlying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934) through the posthumously published...

Tango :A poem of exile and the porteño's nostalgia for Buenos Aires

Humberto Costantini was born in Buenos Aires in 1924. He has published six volumes of short stories and three of poetry, and until his exile from Argentina in 1977 was a regular contributor to the Buenos Aire's newspaper Clarin and most of the country's literary magazines. In 1967 and 1970 collections of his stories won the Buenos Aires Municipal Literary Prize, one of the country's most prestigious awards, while a more recent story won the 1979 Casa de las Americas award (given by an international jury in Havana, Cuba). Several of his stories have been dramatised for theatre and cinema. A leading member of the Argentinian Writers' Association, which was well known for its opposition to the military government which took power in March 1976, Costantini received frequent death-threats after the coup. Close friends, also members of the Writers' Association, such as Rodolfo Walsh (see Index on Censorship 5/1977) and Haroldo Conti (Index on Censorship (6/1981), disappeared after abduction by para-military squads. In early 1977, believing that his own arrest was imminent, Humberto Costantini left Buenos Aires for exile in Mexico. He now presents a daily television programme on Mexican television about Latin American writers. The poem we publish here (slightly shortened, with the author's permission) is about exile. It is also about the attitudes and prejudices of that very particular South American character, the porteño male, the cocky but melancholic native of Buenos Aires. Many of the self-mocking references, among them plays on porteño and Mexican slang and ironic quotations from Argentinian tangos, will sadly be lost to the English-language reader. But some explanations can be given. Above all, tango is much more than a dance rhythm or a kind of song. It is an attitude and an ambience which this poem both draws on and mocks. A gringa is a North American woman (a female gringo) and gringuita its diminutive, while che is the characteristic Argentinian interpolation meaning ‘man’. Ahorita is a particularly northern Latin American usage which literally means ‘now’, but in fact is used when the speaker has no intention of acting immediately. Yerba is mate tea, the Argentinian national drink, while a corridor is a Mexican ballad. There are several renderings of Spanish spoken with a Northern American accent: ‘Vamose a comer oonos taquitos’ (vamos a comer unos taquitos) = let's go and eat some tacos; ‘musayo de Antropolgeea’ (museo de antropologia) = museum of anthropology; ‘floores para el bulin’ (flores para el bulin) = flowers for the room (a bulin is literally a ‘love-nest’). Tu tienes que saber means ‘you must know’, no es verdad means ‘is not true’, and El alma que canta (‘The songful soul’) is an Argentinian magazine which publishes lyrics of tangos and other popular songs. There are also many places referred to in the poem, both in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

Márgara Villegas, traductora de John Dos Passos

Cuando se estudia la relación de John Dos Passos con España, surge invariablemente el nombre del traductor de Manhattan Transfer al español, José Robles Pazos, por su misteriosa muerte en la Guerra Civil española. En esa trágica narrativa, su mujer, Márgara Villegas, ha permanecido hasta ahora en un segundo plano, como víctima colateral. Sin embargo, Márgara fue también traductora de John Dos Passos y de otros autores para Cenit en la España de la República y, posteriormente, continuó traduciendo en el exilio mexicano para el Fondo de Cultura Económica. En este artículo proponemos una semblanza de Márgara Villegas, traductora, una mujer fuerte a pesar de las trágicas circunstancias que convirtieron a su esposo, el traductor de Manhattan Transfer, en uno de los traductores más visibles del polisistema español.