She is a novelist with
Balún-Canán, translated as
The Nine Guardians, a novel (1967) that unveils salient/sordid/searing details of class-hate, and racialized-loathing particular to the Chiapas region of Mexico, and
Oficio de Tinieblas (
The Book of Lamentations), an elegiac masterwork set just a bit earlier, documenting
Tzotzil resistance to Mexican hegemony over indigenous Maya communities in the Chiapas highlands. And she is a poet, with collections like
Poesía no eres tú; Obra poética: 1948-1971 (1972), where her genius-mad dexterity with language and existentialism forces readers to rethink the notion of self and other; and, lastly (I won't have time or the space to parse her diplomatic work--think Hillary Clinton, 50 or so years removed--or her teatro, like her farce,
El Eterno Feminin, that would have Bahktin-fetishizing critics drool as they whipped out paragraphs drenched with the term carnivalesque) her essays, her brutally smart and engaging essays (like
Mujer que sabe latin, "Woman Who Knows Latin,"
La mujer y su imagen, "Woman and Her Image," where Castellanos emerges as a (better writing and oddly, at the same time, more complex and compelling)
hermana with the French psychoanlytic critical vanguard-matrix of Julie Kristeva and Juicy "Luce[y]" Irigaray, and where her sinewy mind unveils itself as a kind of Mexican analogue of Jean Paul Sartre, writing through and for Mexican women with a savage/savory rhetoric that tolerates no fools and leaves male writers from an august (misogynistic) philosophical tradition, like Schopenhauer, Weininger, and Simmel, emasculated and reeling. The best collection in English
A Rosario Castellanos Reader, published by the University of Texas Press (1988), edited and featuring translations by Maureen Ahern. Ahern is a key student of Castellanos, fusing an understanding of Mexican history, Latin American aesthetics, and more as she unlocks Castellanos's "mordant satire" and more. Rosario Castellanos wielded mad intellectual superpowers in a nation not always noted for nurturing progressive feminist
ambiente--this is as true of the nation's most august academies and boardrooms as it is their much more familiar (and in American cinema, ubiquitous)
cantinas. Univision and Televisa, media megaliths in Latin America should get into a bidding war to film a
telenovela based on Rosario Castellanos life--like some chimera-fusion of
Mad Men (for its portrayal of incipient 60s feminism),
Downton Abbey (for its intelligent ruminations on class), and
New Girl (I should have written
I Love Lucy, only madcap Zooey Deschanel, is so much more
now), Rosario Castellanos life would have viewers from Tijuana to Buenos Aires with mouthes agape, laughing at the adventures of the true Mexican bombshell of the 20th century.
