The linguistic value of Margarita Bustos’s anthology for Latin America

Claudia Vacca / Linguist and educator

Like many other subjects, literary history is written primarily by and for men, because they are considered citizens, legal subjects, with access to education and literacy, the right to vote and elect their authorities, or to choose themselves, if only they choose, as Adela Zamudio points out in her poem “Nacer hombre”. These men agreed to these and other rights before women and indigenous peoples, peasants, etc.

As has been the case for centuries, many women’s voices and ideas were relegated to the background, silenced by institutions that imposed their own language and norms. There were some privileged cases of women in the 19th century enjoying these rights. From the mid-20th century onwards, this changed significantly due to a series of political struggles, because writing is a political issue, as is access to reading, books, knowledge and the space to debate and express ideas.

One of the most powerful recent expressions of this resistance, politics, and poetic force in Latin America, is encapsulated in the anthology Nos Otras: Fugas y Resonances in Hispanic America, edited by the writer and scholar Margarita Bustos.

This book is a tribute to the courage, creativity and resistance of 20th century writers, and to 21st century writers who, through their words, reveal and express the complexity of the experience of being a woman in times of adversity and diversity, in the context of Hispanic Americans. The generations of artists since the 1970s, initially marked by the cultural and political enthusiasm that was unique to Latin America at the time, have seen the emergence of a wave of writers who challenge gender norms and explore themes such as patriarchy, sexuality, politics and identity.

In Latin America, especially during the dictatorships of the 70s and 80s, poets began to openly challenge established norms, creating new spaces for expression from their own experiences and perspectives. If this anthology had been created by 19th-century poets from Latin America, it would have been a difficult task to search archives and unearth the many women who wrote in secret, those who were given the right to learn to read and write, and those who were not. We had to look for other codes by which they expressed themselves, to recover their testimonies of what it was like for women in the 19th century to live without rights.

As we move toward the 90s and into the 21st century, Hispanic American women’s writing diversifies; new voices, new perspectives, and aesthetics emerge; they began questioning taboo topics then, and to this day, they continue to question established power structures and challenge gender expectations with bold and hyper-conscious originality.

On the other hand, there is the writing of historically marginalized and silenced trans women, as well as women from Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, and other underrepresented groups. In recent decades, these voices have emerged as prominent figures in the literary panorama, resisting traditional binaries between gender and sexuality and offering new perspectives on the human experience, delving into themes such as identity, marginality, and resistance with sensitive and moving depth.

In the 21st century, Latin American women’s poetry continues to be published, expanding the thematic and stylistic range of their work, reflecting on the relationship with technology and identity in this context, or delving deeper into violence in all its forms, immigration, activism, transphobia, fatphobia, femicide, infanticide, racism, ecocide and ecology.

Furthermore, there has been an increase in performativity and proximities experiments in literary events. Many confront traditional poetic conventions, emphasizing syntax and grammatical structures as a mechanism to deconstruct, disrupt and protest hierarchical and patriarchal communication, violence generated by omissions or secrecy that dominate the family, very subtle but when one looks deeper into what is revealed, at the basis of a gesture, a word, a thought, one can’t help but question the same linguistic norms and the complexity of the subject, straining them and allowing other forms of poetic communication to emerge.

The process of selecting the poets for this anthology was a complex and challenging task, according to Margarita Bustos C. herself. The author chose to prioritize depth over quantity, allowing each poet to present an important sample of their work, as a product of a historical period, and the political challenges that each piece faces in undertaking a serious commitment to writing as a way of life and a complete exercise of freedom.

The rigor and literary, philosophical, and aesthetic standards of Margarita Bustos (2024) allow the reader to delve into the aesthetic experiences embodied in each of the textual voices that make up this anthology, NosOtras: Fugas and the Poetic Resonance of Spanish Americans, an anthology of research in literature, politics, semiotics, linguistics, and history, in short: linguistics.