Gustavo Fares and Eliana C. Hermann, eds.
Contemporary Argentinean Women Writers. A Critical Anthology
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Pp. 250. $49.95
Reviewed by Omar Basabe

Contemporary Argentinean Women Writers is composed of an introduction, fourteen chapters of four sections each (a short bibliography, a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, an interview with the writer followed by the story selected for the anthology), and a general bibliography that will be useful to those wishing to integrate history, class, ethnicity, and gender concerns into their critical work.

This critical anthology, with its selection of excellent to mediocre fictional narratives, could easily be a collection of women’s writing like many others. What makes it different is the introduction by the editors that profiles the ideological matter of the whole book. It begins with a rather conservative reading of Argentinean history from the arrival of Juan Domingo Perón to the present. The introduction contains some inaccurate information and uses the language and paradigms of analysis of the patriarchal system imposed by The Process of National Reorganization (1976-1983). According to this analysis, for example, the violence in Argentina began in the 1960s. In reality, Argentina had been under an illegal and repressive system since 1955, when the Revolution Libertadora removed Juan Perón, proscribed the largest political group, and extended its oppressive regime to other leftist and progressive organizations. The Revolution Libertadora staged the oligarchic, clerical, and military coup d’état whose terrible victory is celebrated in Jorgelina Loubet’s short story “Borel and I” (1978), reproduced in this volume.

Furthermore, the editors state that Peronist Youth and Montoneros were the same, but actually they were two different organizations, each with its own direction, functional structure, and goals. The chronological organization of the historical narrative presented in the introduction leads one to believe that Montoneros and ERP restarted their military actions during Juan Perón’s life and prior to 1974. In fact, Montoneros became clandestine while Perón’s widow was the Argentinean president (1974-1976) and after they were brutally attacked. These attacks were committed by rightist groups and the Anticommunist Argentinean Alliance (AAA), formed during Perón’s lifetime in response to Rucci’s murder by a rightist faction (Martin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina’s Desaparecidos and the Myth of the “Dirty War” [Boulder: Westview Press, 1993] 85-87, 92-95). The statement that guerillas produced a “state of chaos” as well as that guerillas attacked military families (3) belongs to the discourse constructed by the psychological action departments of Process to “discredit the guerilla and justify the slaughter the regime was carrying out” (Andersen 218, 235). This seeks to justify the military’s terrorism as being the result of provocation of the political right and the Army. However, human rights groups and other narratives, whose goal is to restore the voice of the victims, disappeared, and remaining survivors of the crimes against humanity committed by the Argentinean army and its supporters have dismissed this argument. For a feminist anthology that includes a reading of Argentinean history, the silence surrounding Eva Perón and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is astonishing-in the case of Eva Perón because she changed forever the role of women in Argentina, and in the case of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo because they constitute a strong and transgressive female voice against the Process’s patriarchal ideology.

Given the fact that thirty thousand people have disappeared in Argentina and that the perpetrators of the genocide still act with impunity, the editors’ assertion that there were no winners or losers in Argentina (12) is an insult to the reader. In addition, the editors’ claim that an Argentinean woman’s identity is limited to that of wife and mother (131) seems little more than a cliché, given that Argentinean women have a long history as intellectuals, union leaders, and revolutionary activists.

The introduction is followed by an excellent feminist approach to culture which proposes “to use gender and history as categories that interact with ethnicity, race, age, and class” (5). This permits consideration of women’s role in, and their contribution to, the cultural, social, and political spheres. At the same time it breaks the heavy silence that surrounds women’s voices within the historical narrative. This part of the introduction deconstructs the authoritarianism of the Process and shows how some female narratives challenged the strategies of patriarchy. Reading this, one would expect to actually hear the voices of women who have been silenced. Instead, we find Argentinean women writers whose works have long since been recognized and, in some cases, whose writings have already been translated into English. The cover, however, announces that “the voices of fourteen major Argentinean writers will be heard for the first time in English.” It would have been more challenging for the editors of the anthology to compile a selection of those women writers whose voices have been, and continue to be, silenced for ideological reasons to explore the manner in which these voices have resisted marginalization through writing, and how this resistance is articulated through class and ethnic differences. The inclusion of writers such as Alicia Jurado and Maria Esther Vázquez is as paradoxical as the historical reading in the introduction to the anthology. Alicia Jurado has been identified as an active supporter of the Process (Andrés Avellaneda, “The Process of Censorship and Censorship of the Proceso: Argentina 1976-1983,” in David Foster et al., The Redemocratization of Argentine Culture, 1983 and Beyond [Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 1989] 32, 44). So has Maria Esther Vázquez, who, together with other Argentinean representatives, was repudiated at the 1978 Interamerican Colloquium of Women Writers in Ottawa, Canada, after having defended and justified the Process’s barbarism (Hilda López Laval, Autoritarismo y cultura 81-82). The juxtaposition of these writers who supported the Process with those who resisted the cultural, political, and social paradigm of the dictatorship, including Martha Mercader, Alina Diaconu, and Maria Rosa Lojo, suggests a conciliation of discourses, a punto final (Alfonsin-Menem). Here, there is a continuity into the critical field of political and literary discourse that purports to resolve the unsolved dichotomy between authoritarianism and democracy.