Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

oom goes the literature 271
critical to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. From
that perspective, the Spanish victory occurred for many complex reasons.
Garro’s story revolves around the character of Laura, an upper-class,
twentieth-century woman who tells her experiences to her indigenous servant,
Nacha. During the course of the story, Laura travels back to Tenochtitlán
three times in 1520, during the fall of the Aztec empire. There she
visits a man (actually, her cousin and her husband) whom she loves. With
each visit she grows more and more resentful of her twentieth-century husband,
Pablo, a well-established mestizo. The theme of betrayal is present
throughout the story, and in the end Laura fl ees the present to return to her
indigenous past. Laura symbolizes La Malinche as she tries to determine
who is responsible for the problems each respective era is facing.
Just as Laura has to navigate a complicated web of gender expectations,
so did Garro herself. Boom authors were almost universally male, and they
did not regard her as a peer, even though she befriended many of them,
including Jorge Luis Borges and César Vallejo, during her time in Paris. Octavio
Paz articulated the ideological foundations for their disregard in The
Labyrinth of Solitude:
Women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves
up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex,
their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals. . . . Like
almost all other people, the Mexican considers women to be an instrument,
sometimes of masculine desires, sometimes of the ends assigned
to her by her morality, society, and the law. It must be admitted that she
never has been asked to consent to these ends and that she participates
in their realization only passively as a “repository” for certain values. 3
Garro at once challenged and surrendered to these gender norms. She was
known for referring to her own writing as a hobby while calling Paz’s works
masterpieces. Yet, she also challenged the male-dominated realm of Boom
literature and the tradition in which the interpretation of La Malinche—as
either the mother of Mexico or a traitor to the nation—rests with vocal
males. In “It’s the Fault of the Tlaxcaltecas” Garro allows her female protagonist
to choose her own cultural identities. Whereas Paz insists that
Mexican men believe that they cannot share their secrets without risking
a “lessening of manliness,” Laura tells her entire story to Nacha with an
openness that directly defi es Paz’s warning. 4 Showing a more liberal sense
of women’s sexuality, Garro fi lls her story with erotic descriptions of the
cousin-husband.