This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska’s essays...

This Palgrave Pivot offers new insights into leading Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, investigating the dynamic composition of her texts, and situating her work in a larger hemispheric tendency of performativity emerging at the turn of the millennium. Presenting Anzaldúa as a quintessential figure of feminist and decolonial theory-making in the Americas, this book argues that the Chicana writer articulated her notions on fluctuations through “performative concepts” which did not respect the borders of single texts or editions, but organically grew through them. The offered close readings...

This book explores how Chicana literature often represents gender violence while simultaneously presenting strategies of survival in response. Adrianna M. Santos aims to contribute to a broader conversation concerning the intersections between Chicana literature and decolonial trauma theory, one which questions the colonial matrix of power and the universality of Western knowledge. Santos argues that Chicana survival narratives arise out of colonial wounds and form scars that both mark and protect the violated body.Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlandsproposes a...