"A Woman Schooled in Latin": Rosario Castellanos, Ambassador of Mexico and Chiapas - review of Castellanos, 'Balún Canán', ed. Dora Sales Salvador
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ABSTRACT:
NB: a Spanish-language version of this review also exists (see separate getcited entry). For this English-language version, the text at the URL cited above is complete
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Book reviewed:
Details: Rosario Castellanos, Balún Canán (1957). Edited by Dora Sales Salvador (Universidad Jaume I de Castellón, Valencia region, Spain). Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra (Collection 'Letras Hispánicas'), 2004. Paperback, 393 pp. With introduction (pp. 9-118) and bibliography (pp. 119-128). ISBN: 84-376-2181-X
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Extract from review:
On 7 August 1974, a Mexican woman aged 49 died in Tel Aviv, struck down by an electric shock from a household lamp. Her name was Rosario Castellanos. She was Mexico's ambassador to Israel, but she was also much more than that - she was a writer (a poet, novelist, author ofshort stories, dramatist and essayist), and she was also another kind of ambassador, child of a family from Chiapas and spokeswoman for all of the marginalised, subordinated andundervalued people of her region. In 1998, no less a figure than José Saramago described her as the 'embajadora de Chiapas' ('ambassador of Chiapas'), a writer who 'supo contar las vicisitudes de los indios y las tropelías de los blancos' ('had it in her to narrate the sufferings of the Indiansand the abuses of the whites'): it is equally the case that Castellanos, as an acknowledged pioneer of feminism in Latin America, had it in her too to recount, with a delicacy-tinged bitterness, the desires and misfortunes of the female population of her region and nation, and in this sense she may further be termed the declared ambassador of the womenfolk of Mexico. She was also the author of Balún Canán (1957), the novel to whose first-ever edition on the Spanish market the present review is dedicated. Today, more than three decades since her tragically premature death, Rosario's fame in hernative land is established and undeniable. She is even buried, cheek-by-jowl with the 'great men [sic]' of the Republic, in Mexico City's National Pantheon. Personalities as diverse as Carlos Fuentes and Subcommander Marcos have lauded her as the storyteller of her state of Chiapas, where she grew up in the town of Comitán, reading her work as a map - still essential today - for understanding the realities of what is still a deeply conflict-ridden and problematic part ofsouthern Mexico. Despite this, and notwithstanding her posthumous fame at home, until now not a single one of her works had ever appeared under the imprint of a Spanish publisher: readers in the peninsula had had to content themselves exclusively with imported editions. Now and after
all this time, the gap has been filled by Ediciones Cátedra and the scholar Dora Sales Salvador: at last, Rosario is there on the shelves next to Cervantes, Lorca or Neruda, published in one of Spain's most prestigious collections of classic Spanish-language texts. The series in which this volume appears, 'Letras Hispánicas', is known for its exceptionally high quality, and within that tradition Dora Sales has produced a critical edition of Balún Canán which combines intellectual rigour and informative richness with a visible commitment, expressed through empathy and engagement, to the text of Rosario Castellanos' novel and its underlying world-view.
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