This is the web version of Americanas, the newsletter of EL PAÍS America that deals with news and ideas with a gender perspective. To receive it every Sunday you can subscribe in this link.
The phrase is at the same time a denunciation of those who have not been and a recognition of those who have. Every time that song is shouted and repeated a thousand times in a feminist march, “The State does not take care of me; my friends take care of me”, the absence and the presence are indicated. In Mexico, it is estimated that there are 10 femicides a day and brazen impunity: 95% of the cases are not resolved. The police judge, the judges ignore, the prosecutors cover their eyes. The friends, on the other hand, listen, accompany, advise. The friends get a wake-up call before the police and they are those text messages asking “did you get home okay?”, while a lawyer asks “what was I wearing that night?”. Three recent novels, by three Mexican authors, are a tribute to them, the friends who keep us alive.
your tongue in my mouthby Luisa Reyes Retana (Random House) is a novel that takes place in Torreón where a group of four girls meets at night to read poetry together and criticize the men who have mastered the language. “We thought that the poets were ninety years old and were men with sucker names and a single girl from several centuries ago,” says one of them (the ‘girl’ is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz). Life outside of that small group is bleak: in the plot there is a mysteriously missing teacher or a gang member who threatens the lives of two of the girls. But in the book friendship is, one of them describes it, “like a house with heavy doors and high bars, in which the world was sheltered”. For another it is “the only place where I feel myself”. It is precisely with text messages that they try to save the life of one of them, babes, whose brother is willing to kill her. “We are one; no one will be able to tell us apart when we are dead,” he writes to them babesin a poem, that he sends them with his mobile.
What happens if the friends leave? “The absolute void” thinks Lucía, the protagonist of a novel titled Thermal sensationby Mayte Lopez (Asteroid Books). For her, a young woman in crisis, friendship is someone who “respects silence”, who listens when she wants to talk but “does not insist if she notices that she prefers to remain silent”. Lucía is Mexican but she is studying for a postgraduate degree in New York, where she meets Juliana, a Colombian who has a violent relationship with a professor. “What name is she given to disappearing someone little by little, to get them out of the way with episodes?” Lucía wonders when she sees the mortal risk that her friend is running. “Why doesn’t she count it a crime to annihilate a woman drop by drop, tearing apart her morals and self-esteem in easy deliveries?” Witnessing the danger that Juliana lives generates a return to childhood for Lucía, who sees reflected in her friend the tragic story of her mother: Dalia, beaten by her father for years. As she says in another song, if they touch one of us, they touch us all.
The friendship between Mila, Dalia and Citlali is a safe place in Cross-stitch (Almadía, 2021), by Jazmina Barrera. The unexpected death of one of them at the beginning of the novel originates a story in which the author intertwines several times to explore the friendship of the three girls. In adolescence, that time to which Barrera returns, the friends share trips, readings and silent embroidery sessions. When they move away, their bond continues to be like a care space within a society plagued by violence. The novelist weaves the text with essay fragments about embroidery, an activity that has “liberated and constrained” women in different times, as Margo Glantz writes in a text cited by Barrera. “In embroidery, patterns and stitches are reproduced, shared, given away and taught”, says the narrator of Cross-stitch. “By being relegated to the category of ‘craft’ or ‘craft’, embroidery was saved from the ridiculous idea of originality that governs the masculine canon of Western art. The same thing happens with a lot of literature written by women, we borrow words from other women to help us express ourselves or for the sheer pleasure of sharing them.”
Simone de Beauvoir said, when she remembered a friend from her childhood, that she was one of the first people who taught her “the joy of love, the delight in an intellectual exchange, and the ability to count on an intimate alliance on a daily basis”. Last year her unpublished novel about the friendship between two friends was published, entitled Inseparable, in which at one point a friend confesses to the other “I would have given up anything not to lose you.” The State in Mexico and Latin America loses us any day. Friends, on the other hand, find us.
Our recommendations of the week:
The environmental leader believes that her electoral success is based on young people, women and the Afro people.
“Anything that does not involve a change in who holds power is not liberation,” writes Susan Sontag in a 1972 text that is now published in Spanish.
The draft Constitution includes the voluntary interruption of pregnancy and obliges the State to guarantee “the conditions for a voluntary and protected pregnancy, childbirth and maternity.”
Informality, care overload and unemployment rates have reopened “very alarming” inequality gaps, according to the ILO.
Gender-balanced leadership and equal participation of women in nature-based solutions lead to greater benefits for the environment and people
The singer, in an act of artistic freedom without a net, breaks down the boundaries between genres on her new album.
Some suggestions:
📸 A project
Gladys Serrano, photographer and videographer for EL PAÍS America, recommends Garita House, a self-managed project on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca, in the municipality of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, Mexico. This space, led by Alexia Zuniga and Víctor Morales, has hosted three initiatives since 2017: Garita-Ex, artistic residences and Editora T-Error. In this place, exhibitions are held, books are published and workshops are given, mainly aimed at women who live in the area. Casa Garita is located in a geographical point where different indigenous communities converge. The economic activities, concentrated in the city of Oaxaca, make Xoxocotlán a place with little cultural offer for its inhabitants.
👩👩 A collective
never mothers. It is a virtual space, which often has live conversations to talk about non-maternity, about women who decide to lead their lives without the experience of having children. Lead by Mexican Iran Sosa and the Colombian Isabella Firecracker, this project seeks to disprove the myths surrounding the decision not to be a mother and accompany those who choose this path. Both, who have studied the movement child free -so misunderstood and little debated in our region-, generate reflections on what life can be like for women beyond procreation. The members of Never mothers They share readings and give advice to face the typical questions about motherhood that haunt women, especially after a certain age.
Thank you very much for joining us and until next Sunday! (If you have been sent this newsletter and want to subscribe to receive it in your email, you can do so here).
#friends #care #novels #friendship #women