La tierra natal is a journey into the past, and also a farewell. Since 1831, when forced to follow her father into exile in Bolivia, Juana Manuela Gorriti had not returned to Salta; though there are some opinions about the stealth trip disguised in man's clothes, depicted in her short story "Gubi Amaya," being somewhat autobiographic. A trip from Buenos Aires up to the country's North in 1878 becomes frustrated at Tucuman. And it is just in 1886, fifty five years after her departure, that she can return to Salta. Just twenty days, to walk her memories, talk with with the descendants of her...

In 1875, Juana Manuela Gorriti hurried to finish her new novel, Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, in order to include it in the two-volume collection, Panoramas de la vida, published in 1876, dedicated to the women of Buenos Aires. Peregrinaciones is both the story of a young woman's dramatic liberation and self-discovery, and a critical travelogue of conditions in southern South America. The narrator, Laura, tells a close woman friend about her escape from her home in Lima, where she was dying of tuberculosis, and the series of adventures that stimulated her into health, independence and...