The Erotic Dimension of Elena Garro's "La Culpa Es de Los Tlaxcaltecas"

Bibliographic Data

ID22873507
AuthorsLee H Dowling (corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume28
Issue2
Pages31
Publication date1999-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueChasqui (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0145-8973 • E-ISSN: 2327-4247
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/29741522
OpenAlexW28587061
LanguageEN
References cited11

The late Mexican writer Elena Garro's (1920-1998) exquisite and much anthologized magical realist short story La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas (1964), called a masterpiece of the genre, has by now generated a sizable corpus of critical essays, most of these coming out in the 1980s and 90s. The application to this work of poststructural, mythological, feminist cultural critical, and other models has yielded a wealth of analytical commentary serving to bring into relief much of the remarkable semiotic richness of what Sandra Messenger Cypess aptly characterizes as a a story where multiple possibilities are presented to preclude any one-dimensional reality (165). One of its aspects not so far singled out, though meriting passing commentary in a few instances, is that of the surprising sensuality that marks those passages dramatizing the axial reencounter between Laura, an upper middle class suburban wife in the modern Mexico of President Adolfo L?pez Mateos (1958-64), and a wounded Indian warrior whom Laura somehow recognizes instantly as her other husband (and also cousin), her primo marido from the sixteenth century. In the series of tryst-like meetings that follows in the course of the story, even though battle against the invading Spanish to save Tenochtitl?n literally rages around them during these times, it is the romantic and sexual draw between the two principals that becomes the motivating force in Laura's final, significant choice, recorded at the story's end. Previous to the publication of Laura Esquivel's Como agua para chocolate in 1989, few Mexican women writers seemed drawn to the foregrounding of eroticism in their works, as noted by David William Foster in his Alternate Voices in the Contemporary Latin American Narrative (1985). While from among Argentine literati Foster is rather surprisingly able to list the names of more women than men who write unabashedly about erotic themes, from among those of Mexico he succeeds in identifying only Mar?a Luisa Mendoza, for her novel De Ausencia, pub? lished ten full years after Tlaxcaltecas in 1974 (129-36). Yet, notably, Garro's story is included in at least one anthology devoted exclusively to erotic literature, that compiled by the Mexican

Art · Humanities · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

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