Blackwell Reference Online

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The history of women and gender has proven one of the most dynamic fields of Latin American history in recent years. Taking stock of this explosion of scholarship, Gilbert Joseph (2001: 445-6) commented, “gender analysis not only invites us to bring new questions to our data and explore new or woefully understudied problems … but also compels us to rewrite the history of more commonly studied issues and institutions …” Yet in spite of this intellectual promise, women and gender have been unevenly incorporated into standard narratives of modern Latin American social, political, and economic development.Textbooks are diagnostic in this regard. One popular survey of modern Latin America (Chasteen 2001) peppers the narrative with “women worthies.” The pageant of Latin American history is graced by La Malinche and Sor Juana; various independence-era heroines, nineteenth-century intellectuals, and twentieth-century feminists; Frida Kahlo, Carmen Miranda, Rigoberta Menchú. The dramatis personae are brave and feisty during their brief forays onto the public stage. But they are also starkly one-dimensional and, other than refracting a familiar tale of oppression and rebellion, they do not tell us much about historical change in Latin America and women's relationship to that process. They tell us even less about gender. Other texts (Burns & Charlip 2002; Keen & Haynes 2004) devote ... log in or subscribe to read full text