Going Home Again: Space and Place in Serrano's "El albergue de las mujeres tristes" y

"Lo que está en mi corazón"

Author(s): Susan Carvalho
Source: Letras Femeninas , VERANO 2007, Vol. 33, No. 1, Número especial: Global and
Local Geographies: The (Dis) locations of Contemporary Feminisms (VERANO 2007), pp.
97-118
Published by: Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades; Michigan State
University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23024232

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Asociación de Estudios de Género y Sexualidades and Michigan State University Press are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Letras Femeninas

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Going Home Again: Space and Place in Serrano's
El albergue de las mujeres tristes
y Lo que estd en mi corazon

Susan Carvalho

University of Kentucky

Contemporary spatial readings of texts foreground setting and

character over plot, viewing the construction of imaginary places as
a meaningful avenue for the representation of power and identity. To
paraphrase Chris Fitter, whose 1995 study Poetry, Space, Landscape:
Toward a New Theory offers useful paradigms for the analysis of liter
ary spaces, an examination of space and place invites readers to deci
pher the ideological via the optical (22). Or, as feminist geographer Liz
Bondi summarizes, the question of "Who am I?" can be discussed from
the starting point of "Where am I?" (98). In this sense, stories may be
read not as a sequence of events, but as an array of spaces within which
characters navigate, negotiate, and chart courses of either compliance or
resistance vis-a-vis the expected actions for that site. Many geographers
and philosophers—Lefebvre, Soja, Foucault, and Harvey, to name a
few—have convincingly articulated that while the individual does exert
some influence over place, place is constructed in order to shape behavior;
within literary texts, the characters choose either to conform to those
expectations or to seek options—or sites—for counter-actions. Foucault
postulated that history should be read in such three-dimensional terms,
thus creating a parallel discipline that he termed emplacement (22), and

Susan Carvalho is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Associate Dean of Col
lege Affairs at the University of Kentucky. She also serves as Director of the Middlebury
College Spanish School. Her book, Contemporary Spanish American Novels by Women:
Mapping the Narrative, was published by Tamesis in 2007; she has also authored several
articles that deal with travel fiction and geographic readings.

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
98 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

that Soja presents as geohistory.1 Along such lines, I propose that we read
novels not according to their plots, but to their geoplots: the discussion of
places, and of each character's literal situation in a given place. Th egeoplot
focuses not on what a character does or what happens to her, but on where
she is and where she goes, which places welcome her and where she forces
her way in, which places delimit her actions and which ones allow for
freer possibilities. A geoplot takes note of how power organizes place, and
how the individual navigates around and through those places. Where
each character is physically will tell us who she is; where she goes and
where she has been will tell us how she confronts power; and her spatial
practices of movement or stasis, autonomy or conformity, transgression
or compliance will expose the ideologies of assertion and resistance that
her story intends to explore.
In "The Journey and its Narratives" Tzvetan Todorov points out that
the journey—spiritual, material, or (often) both—is a constitutive ingre
dient of most stories, for "movement in space is the first sign, the easiest
sign, of change; in this sense journey and narrative imply one another"
(287). As regards contemporary literature by women, these journeys
should be read in relation to two central axes. One involves the question
of autonomy—to what degree women manage to choose their own path
within geographic structures that traditionally have been used to delimit
the movements of women.2 The second involves the concept of nomadism,
as articulated most clearly by Rosi Braidotti's recent studies. Braidotti
defines nomadism as the shedding of bonds, abandoning the constriction
of women's traditional roles as wife, mother, and supporter. She utilizes
the term symbolically, to represent "the kind of critical consciousness
that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior,"
not necessarily involving geographic movement (5). However, in most
novels by contemporary women writers, nomadism is simultaneously a
spatial and a symbolic practice. The issues of autonomy and of nomad
ism involve both the articulation of independence, and also a re-vision
ing of the concept of "home." These female wanderers have found the
home—traditionally a place of comfort and security—to be unfulfilling
and constraining; as a result, they tend to celebrate the freedom of move
ment that comes from abandoning, in Braidotti's words, "all idea, desire,
or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity
made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without
and against an essential unity" (22). Recent women novelists who have
embraced this model of female exploration and expansion include Isabel

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 99

Allende, Laura Restrepo, Sara Sefchovich, and Angeles Mastretta. In

all of these cases, the flight from the nest also included the rejection of
"nesting," of compulsory monogamy.
The novels of Chilean writer Marcela Serrano propose a spatial quest
ing that is somewhat more ambivalent. In both El albergue de las mujeres
tristes (1997) and Lo que estd en mi corazdn (2001) the female protago
nists experience crises that eject them from their traditional homes and
hearths, impelling them towards nomadism; yet they never shake loose
the nostalgia for home. Because this yearning to go back is ever present,
the story of their explorations of new places involves a greater degree of
introspection than we see in the novels of the aforementioned writers.
As the present discussion will demonstrate, the combination of internal
insecurities and external threats eventually drives the protagonists of
both novels back to traditional conceptualizations of home; Serrano thus
questions whether women can, or should, carve out a new kind of place
within a world that threatens them both personally and politically.
In both of Serrano's novels the nostalgia is conceptualized as orphan
hood. This motif appears in El albergue de las mujeres tristes and is more
fully developed in Lo que estd en mi corazdn. In the former work the
protagonist Floreana initially casts about in a quest of uncertain purpose.
Midway through the novel her more insightful sister Fernandina identifies
her as an orphan, articulating this idea in—not coincidentally—geo
graphic terms: "Su temor [...] siempre ha sido el no sentir pertenencia
a ningun lugar. Cuando esta en orbita es el unico momento en que no lo
percibe, y por eso bajar a la realidad la convierte en un naufrago que ha
extraviado los puntos cardinales. Y entonces palpa la orfandad" (212).
As we shall see, this idea of insecure rootlessness becomes a leitmotiv of
Lo que estd en mi corazdn, in which the loss of a child turns the mother
into an orphan and sends her wandering in search of home.
Marisa Pereyra has explored this phenomenon in her 2003 interview
with Serrano, "Sobre orfandad y Utopias," and in her subsequent article
(2005), focusing primarily on Serrano's Antigua vida mia. In those dis
cussions, Serrano speaks of her own nostalgia for the time when protest
against dictatorship had created a public space of solidarity and claims
that her recent novels explore the fragmentation of that idealized trans
national and transgender unity, a now-dissolved space of productive and
unified protest.3 Thus for Serrano the concept of orphanhood is firmly
linked to the situation of contemporary Chile and, in particular, to the
(lack of) women's place within this new reality. As Serrano observes

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
100 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

to Pereyra, again relating nostalgia to geographic disorientation, "La

orfandad del genero femenino tiene que ver con haber nacido en un lugar
que no te contempla" ("Sobre orfandad" 224).4 Further, in an interview
with Guillermo Garcia-Corrales, Serrano emphasizes that the recurrent
nostalgia in her novels is, in part, a counter-positioning to contemporary
Chile's preference for forgetting its own past: "no hubo espacio para la
memoria cuando empezo la democracia en Chile, nadie queria acordarse
de su pasado" ("Nostalgia versus modernidad" 229). From the standpoint
of feminist autonomy this focus on looking backward may in fact impede
the forward progress of Serrano's female protagonists. Both El albergue de
las mujeres tristes and Lo que esta en mi corazon explore the geographical
and spiritual journeys of women who find themselves between places,
and who, instead of creating new spaces there, surrender to the desire to
feel "at home" again.
During the time preceding the diegesis of both novels, the female
protagonists had made conventional choices, but at the novels' open
ings they face an acute nostalgia stemming from the fact that they find
themselves bereft of "home." Eventually, their happily-ever-afters involve
the recuperation of a nest, with space reserved for the anxiously awaited
(but not yet committed) lover. Neither protagonist actually lands her
man, and neither recommits to the idea of traditional marriage; yet the
embracing of monogamy, within the frame of traditional romantic and
sexual desire, and the fact that the self will not be content until the lover
completes the picture, leaves the questions of autonomy and nomadism
in a decidedly ambiguous terrain.
In their ties to the concept of home and the nostalgia for shared
security, these two protagonists may be seen as less revolutionary than
their counterparts in some other Spanish-American women's novels.
Interestingly, though, radically transgressive secondary characters sur
round the protagonists. These supporting casts of women present intrigu
ingly destabilizing models for reconfiguring space, asserting autonomy,
and shrugging off compulsory heterosexual monogamy. As they embrace
a more active and assertive self-direction—one that is often nomadic in
geographic as well as symbolic terms—these women serve as inspiration
and as healers for the protagonists-in-crisis. In the end, however, the pro
tagonists themselves settle for a more moderate positioning. New roads
may be exciting for other women, but not for them. Having experienced
the risks of transgression—the primary risk being solitude, occupying
a place alone—the women close their stories with the same image, that

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 101

of setting down the suitcases and unpacking, "settling down." These

protagonists thus do go home again—to a home that is changed, to be
sure, but that nonetheless re-establishes the male as the guide, who will
safeguard them from the instability of the nomad's terrain.
El albergue de las mujeres tristes tells the story of Floreana, who seeks
healing after a series of crises that have caused her to question her societal
and personal role. Envying her happily married sisters, she expects that
her own life will follow the established pattern for women—as a fulfilled
wife and a proud mother. However, she arrives at the spa-like albergue in
the south of Chile after a series of rejections that are progressively revealed
throughout the novel.5 She therefore retreats for a three-month stay at
the resort run by her sister Fernandina's friend Elena, to a gynocentric
world far from the demands of the heavily gendered metropolis and a
heterotopic place where damaged women find healing. Restless in spite
of the all-female environment, Floreana soon meets the handsome (and
also damaged) Dr. Flavian Barros. As a result of his ministries, alongside
those of Elena and the other residents of the albergue, Floreana overcomes
her fears and insecurities. In the end she opts to reject the metropolis of
Santiago to remain in the remote town, but outside the albergue, hoping
to nest with Flavian, "como si dos piezas perdidas de un rompecabezas
se encontraran por fin en un mismo tablero" (386-87).
In contrast, the secondary character who more interestingly blends the
personal journey with national issues is Floreana's sister Fernandina. The
more likely protagonist of a novel in the postfeminist vein, Fernandina
is a true nomad, unmarried but with an occasional lover, active, politi
cally committed. A kind of guiding spirit or feminist muse who never
actually appears in the novel, she sends a long letter to Elena in order to
pave the way for her sister's arrival, thus serving as the agent of the emo
tionally paralyzed Floreana. The image of Fernandina serves as security
for Floreana, not because she offers the possibility of freedom, but for
the opposite reason: her existence reminds Floreana that there once was
home, a place of shared origins and the security that traditional familial
relationships can offer.
Another more transgressive model of feminine spatial navigation
is Elena, the proprietor/hostess/therapist of the albergue. Again we rely
on Bondi's analogy between "who is she" and "where is she" in order to
understand her positioning. Elena was involved in Chile's political scene,
working subversively against Pinochet's dictatorship alongside her friend
Fernandina; but, tiring of the inhumanity of the city and the struggle, "mi

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
102 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

alma buscaba desesperadamente lugares todavia humanos" (42). Toward

that end, she appropriated the dwelling that her father had bought to
house his own mistress. In moving into that space Elena demonstrates
a kind of forgiveness of her father and a significant acceptance of the
fact that compulsory monogamy is not the only option for happiness.
She reconfigures the rambling old house into a place of refuge where no
societal norms of behavior apply. She thus turns one counter-space of
resistance—a patriarchal one—into another kind of counter-space—a
gynocentric one—via her creative appropriation and remodeling of the
father's purchased site.
Most of the residents (patients?) spend three months there, thus
establishing a community of fluidity rather than fixity—"un caos coher
ente" (152). Each has the freedom to reinvent herself, to experiment
with alternative identities and sexualities, since in this different place
she must also be different. Watching this tide of women who have been
in some way worn down or cast out by the metropolis of Santiago, Elena
grows wise to the spatial practices of the modern city. Ironically, she
blames feminism for contemporary women's loss of place. In her words,
"el sueno [. . .] era que, en la medida en que abarcaramos mas espacio
y tuvieramos mas reconocimiento, seriamos mas felices. Pero no me da
la impresion de que este siendo asi" (33-34). Instead, "la desconfianza
y la incomprension entre hombres y mujeres va agigantandose" (33).
Elena has attempted to change the world and has found that defeating.
However, within the counter-space of the albergue she gives women a space
in which to change themselves and to invent new weapons with which
they—if they choose, and Floreana does not—may return renewed to the
city. Like Floreana's sister Fernandina, Elena offers a model for complete
transgression, appropriating space on her own terms and using it as a
source of resistance for other women.

Finally, in the figure of the lesbian Tona Paris, a fellow guest in the
albergue, Serrano offers another image of radical transgression. A well
known actress, Tona was operating in the urban counter-spaces even
before her retreat to the albergue: "He vivido en todos los barrios de
Santiago, y con todo tipo de gente. A veces con una pareja, por no por
mucho tiempo" (62). She proudly describes her apartment in the marginal
area of San Camilo, "con travestis, putas y todo" (62), and reveals her
enjoyment of partners of both genders (65). Again we can define whom
she is by examining where she is. However, in this case the image of the
celebratory transgressive is rendered ambiguous; in spite of her apparent

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 103

openness about eroticism and lesbianism she reacts timidly to the observ
ing eye of society. First, when caught bathing her companion Angelita,
she tries to cover their intimacy with a lie about Angelita being cold. This
disclaimer is presented in spatial terms, as a trespass: "Perdonen ustedes.
Ocupamos la tina sin pedirla. Es que se demoraban mucho y Angelita
tenia frio" (120). And if they cannot admit the shared space within the
non-judgmental albergue, much less can they do so in Santiago. When
Tona and Angelita decide to return to the capital as a couple and to move
Tona into the space vacated by Angelita's absent husband, they plot about
how they will mask the reality of their cohabitation within the gaze of
the watchful family: "El tercer piso es una enorme mansarda, con bano
propio. Les diremos a los ninos que Tona arrienda esa pieza porque la
casa, y eso es cierto, nos queda un poco grande a nosotros. Sera la version
oficial, para mi mama y para toda la familia, especialmente para mi ex
marido [...] La idea es que yo sea su agente..." (347-48).
Henri Lefebvre, in exploring the dialectic between the power exerted
by space and the counter pressures of the inhabitants who resist that
control, notes that the spatial practice of a society "secretes that society's
space; [...] it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates
it" (Production 38). This conceptualization of spatial resistance implies
that, by living according to their own model, Tona and Angelita could have
an impact on the constrictive space of Santiago, could help to erode the
destructive pattern of compulsory heterosexual monogamy. They could
have secreted, or produced, their own space, instead of forcing themselves
into the ill-fitting space that was designed to enforce heterosexual pairing.
However, by yielding to the vigilance of the larger society, they instead
opt to resist in secret, to cover up the reality of their relationship, and to
huddle within the allotted spaces. As long as they feign that Tona has her
separate third floor room—with its own bathroom—they continue to
yield to, and thus to reinforce, the hegemony of mainstream metropolitan
space. They will only find "home" in the closet.
In sum, then, and in spite of the ultimate ambiguity of Tona's and
Angelita's spatial practice, the secondary female characters of El albergue
de las mujeres tristes are more the architects of their own sense of home
than is the protagonist Floreana. The key element that keeps Floreana
tied to traditional conceptualizations of home—conceptualizations that
are impossible in a postfeminist and postmodern world—is, as Braidotti
noted, nostalgia: the longing for a sense of fixity, a fundamental discom
fort with the notion of instability. The level of comfort found by Elena, by

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
104 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

Fernandina, and (to a lesser extent) by Tona is attained by their comfort

with either no home or a radically redefined one.
Lo que esta en mi corazon carries forward the archetype of female
questing found in El albergue de las mujeres tristes. Camila, like Floreana
in the earlier novel, has made traditional choices, marrying and having a
son—but the death of her infant son makes home intolerable and forces
her into a journey of geographic and personal exploration. Having spent
one year paralyzed in mourning, she follows her husband's advice to visit
San Cristobal de las Casas in the Chiapas region of Mexico in order to
write a magazine article about the aftermath of the Zapatista uprising.
She intends to stay only two weeks but distance and a return to emotional
life cause her to extend her tour. Additionally, her newfound friend and
hero, Reina Barcelona, a Zapatista sympathizer, is run down by a car and
is hospitalized. Camila opts to stay in San Cristobal in order to help care
for Reina and also to deepen her new friendships—primarily with the
handsome Italian activist, Luciano. From the hospital, Reina sends word
that Camila is to assume her duties as revolutionary messenger. Inept at
the task, Camila is soon found out. As she lives through the horrors of
being kidnapped, Reina dies in the hospital. Once freed, Camila flees
back to her native Chile and the home of her mother, and hopes that
Luciano will join her there.
lust as the narrative camera did not record Floreana's life before
arrival to the albergue in the earlier novel, Lo que esta en mi corazon does
not narrate Camila's life with her husband Gustavo in Maryland, except
as occasional flashbacks. Once again, viewing those flashbacks as geo
plot—reading spaces as both a reflection of and a constraint upon the
characters—is revealing. Camila's descriptions of their apartment serve
as a corollary to the general environment of sterility that surrounds the
couple:

Como si me la arrojaran encima, llego la vision de mi bianco departa

mento en Maryland, en el barrio de Chevy Chase, bianco y minima
lista, bianco y ordenado, bianco y despejado. Quise imaginarme en el,
desplazandome entre la delgadisima lampara de pie que siempre me
evoca a una escultura de Giacometti y el unico sofa de la casa, enorme,
de cuatro cuerpos, entre ellos yo, arrimandome a los muros desnudos.
Tambien desnudo el pequeno dormitorio de mi nino. (77-78)

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 105

Although Camila has physically escaped from the bondage of that confin
ing non-space, she remains tied to it by the communicative network that
defines global space: the cyber cafe and the telephone. On three different
occasions, her husband Gustavo reaches into her protected Mexican space
and, symbolically, pulls her back into his world through telephone calls.
The equation between Gustavo and the northern space is so complete
that Camila says, in making her decision to extend her stay in Chiapas,
"Debo hablar a Washington" instead of "a Gustavo" (76). However, once
she has the choice to speak to him or not, to send him an e-mail or not,
distance renders his ire impotent. In the final narrated telephone call,
Camila asserts her right to chart her own course (107).
Nonetheless, like Floreana in the earlier novel, Camila is now plagued
by a sense of non-belonging. Rather than celebrating her freedom and
fitting in comfortably with her new acquaintances, she agonizes that
"desconozco mi lugar" (88). She neither fits into this place ("quiero
arrancarme lejos" [88]) nor wishes to return to the home of her non
child. Yet still, placelessness pushes her not towards future adventures
but backwards, towards an evocation of "home" that, if it ever did exist,
has now dissipated.
El albergue de las mujeres tristes focused on the communal life within
the big house; the town, provincial and generic, served only for occasional
mention and as contrast to the metropolis, Santiago (also never viewed
directly within the novel). However, because of the socio-political aspect
of Lo que estd en mi corazon—the Zapatistas' fight for land, the racism
of Mexican society, the machismo that forced indigenous women into a
status of double marginality—the cityscape, in this case San Cristobal
de las Casas, figures prominently as a space of representation.
On several occasions, the narration views the city using strategies that
Michel de Certeau has insightfully identified in The Practice of Everyday
Life: the walking tour. As de Certeau notes, this way of verbalizing space
involves "transmuting communication into a visual journey" (xxi) from
the perspective of the wayfarer (Wandersmann). The walker ambles
through the city, describing her path piece by piece, and "the networks
of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has
neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and
alterations of spaces" (93). In Lo que estd en mi corazon the verbal town
scapes celebrate local specificity, vociferous regional identity, chaotic life
and movement and sounds and colors, in explicit contrast to the empty
homogeneity of the Maryland metropolis:

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
106 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

En comparacion a Washington, San Cristobal de las Casas, la antigua

Ciudad Real y sus calles estimulaban mis sentidos: caoticas, locas,
contaminadas de comercio callejero, de olores a comida, de indigenas
mezclados con alemanes, holandeses, espanoles, pieles de todos los
tonos, sonido de todas las lenguas, artesanias de todos los colores,
ninos pequenos mendigando dinero, joyerias con el ambar en sus
vitrinas y tiendas y hoteles por doquier contradiciendo a la miseria,
restaurantes vegetarianos, avisos esotericos, tigres de ceramica, mul
ticulturalismo ensamblado entre tamales y sarapes. En un muro, un
graffiti: "Vamos con Marcos."6
—De acuerdo—respondo con buen humor en voz alta, apurando
el paso—;Vamos! (80)

Regional identity, the uniqueness of the built and natural environment,

forms a very strong element of the novel's geoplot. As Reina observes,
San Cristobal "casi parece llamado a ser el espacio desde donde desafiar
el modo unico y global del vivir posmoderno" (37), to resist the endlessly
reproduced landscapes of industrialized (capitalist) places. Clearly, these
sites exert an energizing influence on Camila as she is beckoned back to
life.

However, as the final sentence of the above passage implies, any

idealization of the festive local scene is undermined by the constant and
ominous presence of the Zapatista struggle. At times Camila walks the
streets in fear, looking over her shoulder in case the mysterious white
car is following her, for it was during just such a city tour that her friend
Reina was run down:

Cada cuadra me parecio mas y mas larga que la anterior y, por vez
primera desde mi llegada, la soledad de las calles se me antojo aven
turada, expuesta, riesgosa. El mundo se me hacia mas hostil, mi
desamparo mas evidente; no en vano se alejaba de mi, esfumandose
caotica, la imagen mas proxima—mas cercana, mas familiar—de
este nuevo universo en el que yo habia aterrizado. (15)

The militarized city thus emphasizes both Camila's status as an outsider

and her vulnerability as a solitary woman. This picturesque town where
she has sought to enjoy her own personal albergue does eventually turn
against her when she is kidnapped and brutalized as the result of opening
the door of her apartment and letting the hostility invade the domestic
hearth.

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 107

The global nature of violence and militarization is also referenced

during the experience of the city tour. Until later in the novel, little ref
erence is made to Camila's Chilean heritage, but upon having her idyll
interrupted by a military checkpoint, she reacts with gut-level fear, with
an instinct "marcado por una memoria genetica y chilena" (32). With
this oblique reference, Serrano reminds the reader that the violence of
the Zapatista rebellion and its overlay onto everyday rural life is not a
Mexican phenomenon but a reality of Latin America.
In addition to the militarization and the threat of violence, the
landscape of poverty also mars the cityscape's potential appeal. Serrano's
image of this forgotten corner of global modernity implies that its poverty
is not only the legacy of its own history but also a by-product of a heed
less development process. Repeatedly the narrator combines notions of
place(lessness) and time(lessness) in depicting the underserved region,
as for example in the following passage:

Cuatro siglos y la misma realidad. ^Es posible que el devenir se frene,

se inmovilice, se empantane, se congele en un lugar especifico que
alguna vez alguien debio apuntar? Future transformado de antemano
en una estatua de sal. A1 cerrar la noche, lo linico que me quedaba era
una pequena verdad: el tiempo se detuvo en Chiapas y Dios siguio
de largo su camino. (103)

Within Serrano's geographical imagination, this region of Chiapas exhib

its a charm that results from its escape from modernity's homogenizing
effects and protection from "las exigencias del progreso" (99); but this
also means that the inhabitants, in a material sense, have been disadvan
taged: "como si la modernidad hubiese excluido a este pedazo de tierra
del privilegio de la civilizacion, la hubiese marcado con tinta indelible,
aislandola, marginandola, expoliandola" (101). Uneven development has
reinforced centuries of racial and gender-based inequity.7
San Cristobal de las Casas clearly lies on the periphery of moder
nity; but Serrano paints a series of concentric circles of modernity. The
more one travels "out," the farther one stands from the privileged cen
ter: "Chiapas y su mundo indigena: pobre entre los pobres. Ni siquiera
podriamos llamarlos ciudadanos marginados porque estaban fuera de la
misma marginacion" (101). Camila traveled to San Cristobal on a slow,
loud regional jet (29), then must take an even more provincial microbus
to visit the mountain town of Ocosingo (173) where she goes to drop off

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
108 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

a package as the agent of the hospitalized Reina. Ocosingo's remoteness

makes it an ideal meeting place for the Zapatistas; but instead of being
idealized either as a revolutionary site or a place of unadulterated indig
enous culture, it is depicted as trapped in a "feroz circulo de pobreza"
(174). Surrounded by astounding natural beauty (173-74), the town itself
is washed out, run down, neglected, stagnant (175,181-83). Once again,
Serrano levels her criticism not at the indigenous peoples themselves but
at the systems of corruption and exploitation that have crippled entire
swaths of the country. In two paragraphs of historical, political, and
economic commentary, she identifies the factors of poor educational
systems, multinational agricultural corporations, and the misdirection
of funding as the architects of this landscape of poverty (174).
As in El albergue de las mujeres tristes, Serrano's later novel offers
enticing female role models not in the protagonist, but in the women who
surround her. In this revolutionary environment the narrator encounters
women who are united by the desire to engage the landscape of poverty
and injustice and to alter it by fighting, either through campaigns of
awareness and literacy or by force of arms. Two facts are notable about this
constellation of women fighters. One is that they comprise a remarkably
multinational group. In this sense the narrator Camila joins a heterotopic
society within Chiapas and Chiapas becomes merely one more site in a
global fight for justice.8 The other related trait is that these women—with
the exception of Ninoska, who is of an older generation—are not moth
ers, daughters, or wives in the traditional senses of these terms. They are,
instead, nomadic figures, rootless and to some degree sharing Camila's
sense of orphanhood, but redefining family as they meet for this particular
struggle at the crossroads of San Cristobal de las Casas.
One of the strongest nomadic role models does not physically appear
in the story until near the end. Dolores, Camilas mother, is a continuation
of the character of Fernandina in El albergue de las mujeres tristes. Like
Fernandina, she floats just beyond the novel's diegetic space, appearing in
the text through letters and memories (and, in Lo que esta en mi corazon,
e-mail messages) in order to inspire and challenge the weaker and more
stationary protagonist. Dolores, through her non-presence, becomes an
archetypal figure, representing all of the Latin American women who
have fought for social justice under the illusion that the successful Marxist
revolution lay just around the corner. Dubbed "huerfanas de la Utopia"
by Reina and "huerfanas del apocalipsis" in the subtitle of this section of
the novel, these women are represented in one sense as having fought for

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 109

a lost cause, but in another sense they form a kind of ghostly backdrop
and a source of energy for the novel's primary action. For example, when
Camila is alone in Ocosingo carrying out her revolutionary mission she
feels her mother's presence as physical— "Dolores pulsa desde la distan
cia" (184)—helping her to overcome her fear. This transcendent presence
should be understood as a significant aspect of the novel's geoplot; if the
women are defined by where they are and where they can go, then this
disappointed mother of the earlier generation of idealists, even though
herself orphaned by her lost causes, is present in Chiapas and, by impli
cation, wherever the struggles continue. As Reina Barcelona notes, "Hay
miles de Dolores repartidas por America Latina" (151).
The ambivalence that Camila feels toward her mother forms an
undercurrent throughout the novel. Camila often states that she feels
torn between the strong and directive presences of her mother and her
husband and that next to her decisive and courageous mother, she herself
feels small, ordinary, and purposeless. However, at the end of the novel,
a broken and frightened Camila decides in the airport not to run home
to her role as Gustavo's wife and owner of the white, sterile apartment
but rather to go back to her roots, to her childhood home, and into the
presence of her protective and healing mother. She goes home again
because her mother—not in the genealogical sense but in the gynocen
tric sense—has become her home: "Dolores me recibio, volvio una vez
mas a ser la higuera hindu, el arbol madre, el arbol de todos los arboles,
como una casa" (263).'
Dolores' ideological heir is not Camila but Reina Barcelona. A true
nomad, Reina is attractive as Camila's polar opposite. In a sense, she
too is orphaned—chased away from home by an abusive mother and
an incestuous family—and seeks out battlegrounds first in Chile, then
in Guatamala, and finally in Chiapas. Her lack of ties to place are often
reiterated. For example, after the fall of Allende's Unidad Popular, which
she had left Uruguay to become part of, she joins the resistance, because
the cause matters more than the place in which it occurs: "A mi me impor
taba tanto derrocar a la dictadura como a los demas" (20). In contrast to
the repeated and agonized question of El albergue de las mujeres tristes,
"^donde esta la patria?" Reina asserts that "Se es ciudadana de donde uno
quiera [.. .]de donde una elija" (18). In sum, having abandoned the idea
of finding a home, "su casa era su mochila" (245).
Geoplot in this novel focuses not only on national and public land
scapes but on domestic ones as well; in both novels, an exploration of a

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
110 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

personage's home is a narrative strategy for communicating the character

of that figure. In this sense, Camila's exploration of Reina's home while
the latter lies in the hospital acquires particular significance. Camila
obtains the keys to Reina's apartment ostensibly to feed the cats; in real
ity, she explores the home like a voyeur. She tries on the apartment like
one might try on someone else's shoes. She strokes the cat imagining how
Reina might do it, she cleans the kitchen, she tries to occupy Reina's being
by occupying her space, "sin una conciencia cierta de lo que trataba de
hacer, si suprimirla, anularla o simplemente robar su estela" (85). She
also notes the conspicuous absence of a dinner table in Reina's home, an
element that would have anchored the nomad and given the apartment
"una sensacion de hogar" (84). For the nomad, home is not found in
the apartment but in activity; most of the evocations of Reina involve
action, purposefully striding through the city streets or plotting with her
revolutionary friends for, as Luciano later points out, "Nosotros somos
su familia" (74). In this sense, the narrative detailing of Reina's home
serves as a descriptor of her personality and her worldview, as the space
that she has secreted, as the reconfigured homescape from which she
aims to change the larger landscape for women and for the residents of
Chiapas. Camila's temporary occupation of Reina's home geographically
represents her first tentative moves toward following in her footsteps, a
moment in which she lives vicariously through Reina and finds that path
more fulfilling than her own. Ultimately, when she completes Reina's
subversive mission by carrying a package to Ocosingo, she has indeed
assumed that path.
However, it should be noted that the situation of Reina, spatially does
not map an entirely successful nomadism. A key image of Reina that
counterbalances all of the nomadic representations, twice evoked in the
novel, is that of Reina napping on Camila's bed in the hotel. In her sleep,
the otherwise confident Reina assumes a fetal position and cries as she
dreams (41, 89). This image is intertwined with the recurring motif of
orphanhood, as we discussed at the outset of this study; the sympathetic
Camila observes "esta cria que intentaba rememorar las aguas primige
nias, comprobando, aparentemente, que no hay pesar igual a ser expulsada
de ellas" (41). This image of nostalgia undermines the representation of
the nomadic archetype, as articulated by Braidotti and cited earlier, "The
nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement;
it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished all
idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity" (22). While the character of Reina is

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 111

a successful revolutionary who remains an inspiration for the struggle

even after her death, Serrano also represents her as a figure who longs
for the home she was denied. As Camila observes at the novel's end, "por
primera vez pienso en Reina como una persona cuyas opciones nacieron
de la carencia, y que escondio con la ideologia su desamparo" (249).10
According to Luciano, her fight served as a defense against the sense of
orphanhood that otherwise overwhelmed Latin America's leftist ideal
ists (114) and that drove even Dolores to take refuge in her own home.
Thus, Serrano does not embrace fully the image of autonomy as a free
choice; as in El albergue de las mujeres tristes, the archetypes of traditional
femininity continue to render ambiguous her character's supposedly
feminist journey.
Radical domestic reconfiguration is convincingly portrayed as well
in the architecture of the home of the lesbian couple Dun and Leslie
(37-39). In contrast to the couple of Tona and Angelita in El albergue de
las mujeres tristes, Dun and Leslie live not closeted but "out," for within
this unstable community of the revolution they are able to secrete their
own space, an openly lesbian home. Camila observes that in their home
they have removed most of the interior walls, creating a site of open
encounter: "Reina me llevo al fondo de la sala (Dun habia hecho botar los
muros; asi, comedor, cocina y sala eran todos un mismo espacio) y nos
introdujimos en medio de una conversacion, desordenada, ruidosa, pero
conversacion al fin" (39). It is significant that in this heterotopic space the
attraction between Camila and Luciano first develops, underscoring the
possibility of reconfiguring relationships by restructuring space.
Another revolutionary homespace is offered by Ninoska, the mother
of the Zapatista sympathizer Jean Jacques. The only mother who figures
prominently in the storyline (foregrounded, in contrast to the shadowy
but pervasive presence of Camila's mother Dolores), Ninoska too car
ries her past, and geographically distant, battles forward into today's
battleground of Chiapas. Ninoska fled Ukraine in the face of anti-Semitic
persecution only to find herself in France persecuted by the Nazis; graphi
cally, she bears their inscription in her flesh in the form of the tattooed
identification numbers." Ninoska's "home" is the restaurant she owns
and operates with her son, and La Normandie serves as a restructuring
of home on many levels. It is a site of conspiracy and revolution, as it is
the primary meeting place for the Zapatista sympathizers to plan their
next step. It is a heterotopic site that blends nationalities and social
classes, at the same time offering them the safety of a defined area. In

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
112 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

sum, Ninoska has created a free-flowing albergue, a protected site for

healing, but located at the dangerous center rather than in the protected
margins, and also, perhaps consequently, secreting space more actively
than occurred in the earlier novel; again evoking the geographic trope,
Camila calls La Normandie "un ungiiento magico para mi mapa de
cicatrices [...]. Aquellos muros de color rosa se transformaron en mi
espiritu protector, un refugio efectivo frente a la hostilidad, cualquiera
que fuese esta" (70).
Finally, the one indigenous woman who is given some protagonism
in the novel, the revolutionary Paulina, completes the supporting cast of
transgressive female figures. Outwardly she appears to be a traditional
ch'ol woman, with long braids and the rebozo typical of the region (72).
For this reason Camila is surprised to learn that she is not only a revolu
tionary sympathizer but also a guerrillera, who fights alongside the men
in the mountains and carries out subversive activities in the "horizontes
mas humanos" of the city (249). In her homelessness, Paulina represents
the nexus between the Zapatista fight for land rights and the deeper
struggle for gender equality within the indigenous community. As Camila
observes, in taking up arms Paulina "podia al fin eludir el destino de su
raza" (161). In geographic terms, she escapes the position of living in the
margins of her husband's space: "En su comunidad [...] las mujeres no
tienen donde ir, la falta de movilidad y los serios problemas economicos
las atan al marido para siempre" (160). In Paulina's case, these economic
restrictions on mobility are not attributed only, or even primarily, to the
consequences of capitalism unevenly applied, but rather to the centuries
of phallocentrism that undergird indigenous culture that lead Camila to
ask whether the gendered power structures will reproduce themselves in
the post-revolutionary space: "Quien se apropia de ese espacio, ^no puede,
acaso, repetir estructuras de poder, reiterandolas al infinito?" (164).
Paulina's transgressive position as a single woman within the indigenous
culture makes Camila's own separation from her husband seem mild by
comparison; her inclusion in the novel's interstices offers Serrano the
opportunity to connect the questions of racial and gender prejudice.
At the novel's end, Serrano leaves ambiguous the answer to the ques
tion of whether Camila survives her kidnapping intact. Instead of re
engaging the struggle, she immediately flees from San Cristobal. Instead
of standing alone in the wake of deciding not to return to her husband,
she longs for Luciano to join her in Chile, thus also leaving behind the
cause. And instead of finding or creating her own territory, she goes

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 113

home again, retreating to the security of her orphaned mother's refuge:

"Perdiendo la libertad, comprendi que solo la recuperaria volviendo al
lugar en que naci" (262). On the other hand, the final pages of the novel
involve her taking up the pencil—instead of the earlier laptop—in order
to re-engage via writing. From her place of security she will nonetheless
attempt to change the world, to secrete space, by telling Reina's (not her
own) story. Her mother's closing question remains that of the reader:
"^adonde se fueron tus ganas de escapar?" (263). The question of her
recovery of true autonomy remains an open one, as she waits, rests, and
hopes that Luciano will join her there.
Questions about home, its representation, and its potential in the
face of modernity pervade both El albergue de las mujeres tristes and Lo
que esta en mi corazdn in similar and mutually enlightening ways. In
both novels the female protagonists flee their homes in the metropo
lis; in both novels homes grew to seem confining and sterile, in part
due to the absence of an only son; and in both novels the protagonists
find themselves in a remote place surrounded by breathtaking natural
beauty—the sea in El albergue de las mujeres tristes, the mountains in Lo
que esta en mi corazdn—that exerts a healing green-space effect. Given
that the traditional place of work of the Latin American woman is the
reproductive space of the man's home, the fact that these two women seek
to "find themselves" far from the metropolis acquires greater significance
as they explore this contradictory space of refuge. If the women subse
quently returned to the metropolis, there to insert their changed selves
and thence to secrete a different kind of space, the interpretation of the
novels from a feminist vantage point would be less ambiguous and more
transformative in a collective sense. Instead, as Serrano observes about
the protagonist of her earlier novel Antigua vida mia, "intente insinuar
caminos de salvacion individual cuando lo colectivo ya no es respuesta"
(Garcia-Corales, "Nostalgia versus modernidad" 230); in both of the
subsequent novels the heroines at the end "nest" within the safe embrace
of a male guide, mentor and lover, the man who resolves their issues of
orphanhood.
In El albergue de las mujeres tristes and in Lo que esta en mi corazdn,
strikingly similar spatial images initially appear: that of a woman unpack
ing her belongings in a room of her own, a space of which she assumes
ownership with a sense of expansive relief. Both protagonists attempt to
create home, "un remedo de hogar" (Albergue 58). Yet in both cases, the
women immediately install physical vestiges of their former lives—pho

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
114 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

tos of her adolescent son and of her extended family in El albergue de las
mujeres tristes (19), a laptop computer in Lo que esta en mi corazon (34).
In this way, they immediately domesticate their new space. And in both
novels, although the women first contemplate with pleasure the bed
she will finally occupy alone, she soon longs for a man with whom to
share it. In the two stories, then, and in similar ways, one can question
whether the feminine protagonists ever do create their "cuarto propio"
(Albergue 23).12
Additionally, the geoplot exposes similarities between the two male
lovers—Flavian in El albergue de las mujeres tristes and Luciano in Lo
que esta en mi corazon—that reinforce traditional images of domesticity
and phallocentrism and undermine the notion of the woman's successful
quest for independence or her attempt to break the shackles that caused
her to leave the metropolis in the first place. In both novels life alone
is linked to a feeling of vulnerability, which is only resolved within the
male embrace.

In another geoplotting parallel, both novels close with the image of

the women waiting; Floreana descends from the bus and begins to walk,
with her suitcase, back to the town, rejecting the metropolis and taking
up permanent residence in the idyll (Albergue 393), and Camila sets out
the framed xylograph that Luciano had given her, hoping that her letter
will convince him to "cambiar el mar mexicano por el chileno" (Lo que...
266). Camila does reject the notion of permanent immobility, refusing
to nail her xylograph to the wall because "un clavo en el muro es siempre
un acto de esperanza sobre un lugar fisico determinado" (Lo que... 266),
and thus, in the sense of geoplot, the story remains unfinished, as she
contemplates the verb "caminar," "un verbo que supone movimiento"
(264). She considers movement, but she does so from the vantage point
of her return to her site of origin—of "la mesa del comedor de la casa de
mi madre, la mesa de mi ninez donde aprendi a escribir" (270), the fam
ily table which, as we have noted, was so conspicuously absent from the
apartment of the nomadic Reina Barcelona.
In this sense, as both protagonists drop anchor, they stabilize place.13
During their pilgrimages, they pass through Soja's Thirdspace of "resis
tance and transgression" (320), but they find it both risky and lonely.
Most importantly, and unlike the supporting casts of transgressive,
nomadic women friends and family, they never give up their nostalgia
for home. Near the end of El albergue de las mujeres tristes, Floreana frees
her memory to retrace her childhood path through the hallways of her

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho 115

paternal home, "su casa de toda la vida," and in comparing its sheltered
comfort to the unsatisfying homes of her adulthood, she protests, "No,
;no me lo digan, por favor, si fue [esa casa] la unica que tuve! Si he sido
incapaz de impregnar ningun otro espacio, prefiero no saberlo" (313). The
critical issue of the geoplot is thus crystallized: Floreana has been unable
to secrete, take control of, or in her words "impregnarse de," any of the
places she has been. This acknowledgement contributes to her ultimate
decision not to return to her "casas de adulta," which "nunca reprodujeron
el olor de un horno atildado, el sabor de las hierbas" (313), but rather to
take refuge within the figurative albergue of rural Chile.
In contrast to the more radical images of nomadism proffered by
some twenty-first-century women writers, Serrano postulates that this
freedom can in fact be found not by reconstructing, but rather via the
"vuelta atras," by defining "home" as, in Floreana's words, "aquel lugar
donde no se siente el frio" of solitude and orphanhood (Albergue 393)—in
sum, by responding willingly and even gratefully to immobility, sum
marized in a single word by Flavian: "Quedate" (Albergue 389).

NOTES

1 Foucault's geohistory is summarized by Soja as "an inseparable combination

of heterotopologies and heterochronies that explicitly focused on the spatio
temporal interpretation of the power-knowledge relation" (170).
2 For a thorough overview of emplacement as it relates to gendered power
relations, see Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender (1994).
3 Pereyra summarizes as follows Serrano's nostalgia for the past, a time when,
in her view, women could unite in protest; Serrano's use of the spatial metapho
is significant here: "Serrano sostiene que durante los anos de la represion habia
un cuerpo individual y uno social que permitian espacios colectivos desde donde
pelear por la dignidad. Cuando la modernidad [the 1990s, post-dictatorship]
caracterizada por el exito individual se instala en Chile, esos espacios desapare
cen y cada uno se queda solo, sin saber que hacer con la nostalgia ni que cauce
darle" ("Discursos utopicos" 36).
4 Guillermo Garria-Corales has also explored the concept of nostalgia in
Serrano's novels; in both his 1997 interview with Serrano ("Nostalgia versus
modernidad") and his 1999 study "Melancolia y nostalgia en El albergue de las
mujeres tristes") he underscores the critical links between nostalgia, the creatio

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

of "lugares sagrados," and the act of writing ("Nostalgia versus modernidad"

231).
5 Floreana's flight to the albergue is precipitated by a series of fractured
family ties: her unfaithful husband has left her, her 16-year-old son no longer
needs her and is growing increasingly close to his father, her sister Dulce died of
cancer, and she has been rejected by her married lover, el Academico. Her roles
as sister, mother, wife, and mistress disintegrate, leaving her to describe herself
not as independent but as bereft, "comun y corriente" (29).
6 The graffiti is in support of the Zapatista rebellion, led by the mysterious
Subcomandante Marcos.

7 In The Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre lays out the theory which proves
useful in understanding Serrano's mapping of Chiapas as a site of conflict: "The
remarkable way in which modern techniques have penetrated every day life
has thus introduced into this backward sector the uneven development which
characterizes every aspect of our era..." (8).
8 The narrator's best friend Reina Barcelona is from Uruguay; her friends
Dun and Leslie are from Holland and Australia, respectively; and the "uni
versal mother" figure Ninoska is from the Ukraine. The male members of the
group, Jesus, Luciano, and Jean-Jacques, are natives of Spain, Italy, and France,
respectively, thus extending the heterotopic nature of the Chiapas sympathizers.
Camila, a native of Chile, is an outsider in San Cristobal but is immediately "at
home" in this group of transients.
9 Camila returns to her mother in part because her experience as a kid
napped person brought her into solidarity with her; while imprisoned Camila
recognizes that she is in her mother's place: "Reconozcamoslo: una carcel es el
mejor lugar para recordar, asi lo escuche hace mucho de labios de mi madre"
(241). In this sense Camila's struggle is explicitly connected to the struggles
of the women before her and she has found that space of solidarity for which
Serrano has expressed her own nostalgia in the interviews cited earlier (Pereyra
"Sobre orfandad," Garda-Corales "Nostalgia versus modernidad").
10 These images of the fetal Reina (41, 89, 249) reverse the positionings
of these two main characters, for they bring out the maternal and protective
impulses in Camila, who has been orphaned in reverse by the loss of her infant
son and the risks involved in having more children (23).
11 The body should of course also be read as a mapped space, one which
Adrienne Rich calls the "geography closest in" (212).
12 From a mapping perspective, it is also worth noting that in the case of Lo
que estd en mi corazon, both the hotel and the room itself were preselected by
Gustavo in order that his wife might retrace the steps he had taken two years

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Carvalho

earlier (33). She then moves to Ninoska's bed, and finally to Luciano's, thus
never really staking out her own territory.
13 This term is borrowed from Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender, in
which she writes that "All attempts to institute horizons, to establish boundar
ies, to secure the identity of places, can.. .be seen to be attempts to stabilize the
meaning of particular envelopes of space-time" (5).

WORKS CITED

Bondi, Liz. "Locating Identity Politics." Place and the Politics of Identity.
Michael Keith and Steve Pile. London: Routledge, 1993. 84-101.

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Differenc

Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berk
U of California P, 1984.

Fitter, Chris. Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory. Cambr

Cambridge UP, 1995.

Foresti, Carlos. "Lo que esta en mi corazon de Marcela Serrano; Chiapas y

huerfanas del Apocalipsis." Moderna Sprak 96, 2 (2002): 214-20.

Foucault, Henri. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16 (1

22-27. (1st published in French 1984).

Garcla-Corales, Guillermo. "Melancolla y nostalgia en El albergue de las muj

tristes de Marcela Serrano." Hispanic Journal 20:2 (1999): 263-73.

■. "Nostalgia versus modernidad: Entrevista a Marcela Serrano." Confluen

Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura 13:1 (1997): 228-34.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Black
1996.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1. Trans. J. Moore. London: Verso,
1991. (1st published in French 1958).

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Letras Femeninas Volumen XXXIII Numero 1

. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1991. (1st published in French 1974).

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

1994.

Pereyra, Marisa. "Discursos utopicos en la narrativa de Marcela Serrano."

Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 34:2 (2005): 33-47.

. "Sobre orfandad y Utopias: Entrevista a Marcela Serrano." Hispanic Journal

24:1-2 (2003): 223-33.

Rich, Adrienne. "Notes toward a Politics of Location." Blood, Bread, and Poetry:
Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: Norton, 1986. 210-31.

Serrano, Marcela. El albergue de las mujeres tristes. Mexico: Alfaguara, 1997.

. Lo que estd en mi corazdn. Barcelona: Planeta, 2001.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and Imagined
Places. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Todorov, Tzvetan. "The Journey and Its Narratives." Trans. Alyson Waters.
Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600-1830. Ed.
Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. 287-96.

This content downloaded from

134.76.21.204 on Fri, 30 Apr 2021 16:15:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms