33 - Afterword

Summary

From the beginning to the present, women writers and artists in Latin America have had to struggle against androcentric and misogynist establishments and institutions that curtail their access and subordinate, confine, devalue, and erase their achievements. Women writers face far more obstacles to achieving success and recognition, often including fierce aggression from male counterparts. Supportive infrastructure, sinecures, inheritances, family and state subsidies, have often sustained male writers and are far less available to women. In the 1980s, the communications theorist Jesus Martin Barbero introduced a powerful conceptual metaphor, the mapa nocturno. After 1900, lights on the mapa nocturno multiply rapidly, especially in cities, where working-class women increasingly gain access to education, literacy, paid work, political agency, social movements, democratic ideology. While the mapa nocturno describes a story of the democratization of writing and expanding access of women to textual and expressive agency, the mapa diurno reveals landscapes strewn with mutilated corpses.