13 - Rewriting the Colonial Past: Spanish Women Intellectuals as Agents of Cross-Cultural Literacy in the Mexican Press

Summary

Many methodological as well as historical questions arise when talking about teaching and researching the transatlantic. The transatlantic is very complex, as it moves in many different directions and encompasses South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the Canary Islands, the Philippines, as well as other territories, and implies connections that are not only those of East to West but of North to South as well, and vice versa. The image that best acknowledges what the transatlantic really implies is the marteloio, which, as Jesus R. Velasco has explained, suggests a labyrinth of lines, a wind rose. The image of the marteloio implies a movement that is anything but static, that responds to impulses that come from all the cardinal points. That is, the marteloio represents the lack of directionality and the crossroads that one can find in the transatlantic.

One of the debates about a specific transatlantic relationship—that between the Iberian Peninsula and South America—usually originates in the fact that it is framed by the violence that took place between the two continents from the conquest until the wars of independence. It is almost impossible, nowadays, to talk about the intellectual relationships of women and men of letters across the Atlantic without feeling the weight of the historical past as a stone over our academic heads. One of the central questions of this debate is how to recognize and, at the same time, go beyond the relationships of cultural, historical, and political domination.

But what if our contemporary anxieties were, in fact, also a subject of discussion long ago? What if, in the nineteenth century, groups marginalized in the public sphere such as women of letters were already discussing the possibility of finding a way to establish a different cultural dialogue that would permit the exchange of ideas, texts, and cultural reports on both sides of the Atlantic?

This essay considers one specific relationship of the transatlantic, Mexico and Spain, and proposes the study of the press as a possible research method that allows us to avoid the monopoly of the historical eye that has imposed on us a unilateral view of the exchanges between the two countries and, by extension, between their two continents. The identification of journalistic networks can illuminate some of the intellectual projects in the construction of a transatlantic network and of a Transatlantic Republic of Letters.