Wednesday’s Wise Women … Rosario Castellanos

‘Writing has been, more than anything, explaining to myself the things I don’t understand” Rosarios Castellanos

Now back in the UK my little stash of memories are dwindling. However I have another Southern American woman who attracted my attention while I was in Rio.
Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) a poet and novelist born in Mexico and grew up on her family’s farm in Comitan, Chiapas; which was the setting for much of her fiction.
Much like the other authors  I have celebrated lately she chose to write because she was lonely, but this decision only compounded her isolation.  She was the first woman in her community in Chiapas to write. It was considered shocking, and subversive. She was banished from her place of birth and because of this she could not expect to find a husband and have children.
In Latin America education for girls began in the mid 1800s, but it progressed very slowly and decent married women remained hemmed in the domestic walls until much later.  Very few women were able to play leading roles in public life; those who did become famous in their own right did so in the literary world.
Gertrude Gomez de Avelaneda for example left her native Cuba at 22 to write her well known poetry and novels in Spain and her work was banned in Cuba.
Castellanos was born to a privileged upper class family but subordinated because she was  female. Her only brother was favoured by her mother and then when he died as a child her mother was even more resentful towards her.The family moved to Mexico when she was 15 years old and a year later her parents were dead, she was left to fend for herself.
Not only did Castellanos write and teach, but she championed policies that prompted literacy in impoverished areas. One of the institutes was founded by President Cardenas ironically, who was responsible for the destruction of her family’s land.  She also wrote a weekly column in the Excelsior a famous liberal Mexican newspaper that supported the  Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Always faithful to her literary background Castellanos held several government posts and was appointed ambassador to Israel shortly before her death in 1971.  At the age of 49 she died as a result of an electrical accident in Tel Aviv .
Castellanos who was not an indigenous Mexican but a Mestizo shows considerable campassion to the plight of the indigenous peoples paricularly of Mexico the her semi-biographical novel the Book of lamentations perhaps depicts this.