In a memoir of Buenos Aires literary activity in the 1920s and 1930s, Alberto Pineta described his nervous, stammering debut in 1929 as a young lecturer for the prestigious cultural institution Amigos del Arte. Highlighting his recollection of the event is the intimidating impact on his demeanor every time he glanced up at the audience and encountered the imposing figure of Victoria Ocampo. Pineta also detailed a gathering of the vanguard Martín Fierro group and the arresting presence of Norah Lange. Her "grace, sensibility, and creative talent," he noted, caused those present to accept "without protest the fatal fact of the woman writer." Succumbing to this fate, Pineta reported having been flattered by the bestowal of her "personal poetry" when she accepted his invitation to dance (69, 89-90; my emphasis). Weaving through an account of the cultural activity of male writers, these anecdotes showcase the eclectic character of a literary world remapping its boundaries. A small but increasing number of women writers inhabited the Latin American literary landscape, but as these stories reveal, their presence was still sufficiently novel to provoke mixed reviews.

Pineta was not alone. In their equation of a woman's talent with her performative presence, his remarks typify their time. Contemporary accounts, literary memoirs, and reviews of women's writing in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Havana, Lima, São Paulo, and other Latin American cities highlight the growing but still anomalous participation of women writers, artists, and journalists in artistic circles of the 1920s and 1930s. This tumultuous era represents a key period in Latin America's social and cultural history. Literary groups aimed to revolutionize artistic expression, while nascent feminist movements sought civic reforms that paralleled women's increased presence in the workplace and public sphere. Although the rhetoric of cultural modernization and political feminism periodically intertwined in the public conversation, women received radically mixed messages about their changing roles. Popular middlebrow periodicals—Caras y caretas in Buenos Aires, Mexico City's El universal ilustrado, Havana's Carteles and Bohemia, Lima's Variedades, and Brazil's Para todos or Kosmos—celebrated flappers, movie stars, women athletes and aviators, and the New Woman as consumer of modern goods, leisure activities, and incipient media culture. At the same time, Latin America's reformist upper- and middle-class feminists lobbied for civil rights and imagined a useful woman citizen as the guardian of national family values through the concept of social motherhood. For their part, young male writers celebrated a dynamic new Eve as the muse for their artistic modernity: to name a few, the chronometric Señorita Etc. of Arqueles Vela's estridentista novel in Mexico, Oliverio Girondo's flying woman in Espantapájaros (al alcance de todos), Paulo Menotti del Picchia's active and tango-dancing new Brazilian Eve, "useful at home and on the streets" (291), or the Peruvian journal Amauta's New Woman of the barricades who would incite Peru's new men to action (Delafuente, 102).

But where did women who wanted to be writers rather than muses build their intellectual homes? In a cultural arena that still regarded their presence as uncommon or even forbidding, how did they fashion their writing personas, and what did they understand their artistic missions to be? For the women in this book, one answer lies in the striking fact that their access to the artistic world derived in part from public performance: theatre, poetry declamation, song, dance, oration, witty display, or bold journalistic self-portraiture. This performance experience provides decisive common ground in the dissimilar intellectual odysseys of women from remarkably different backgrounds: Venezuela's Teresa de la Parra; Argentina's Alfonsina Storni, Victoria Ocampo, and Norah Lange; Mexico's Nellie Campobello and Antonieta Rivas Mercado; Cuba's Mariblanca Sabas Alomá and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta; Peru's Magda Portal and María Wiesse; and Brazil's Patrícia Galvão. Moreover, an encounter with the modern literary culture of the artistic avant-gardes, through a literary circle, a prominent male figure, or the adoption of an innovative style, constituted a pivotal moment in these women's development as writers. As self-construed modern women, they channeled their experience with performance into their own intellectual undertakings. Thus their performance training or experience not only provided an avenue to negotiate their public identity as writers but also shaped their distinct conceptions of writing and its purpose. Not surprisingly, images of dislocation pepper the self-portraits of Latin American literary women of the early twentieth century. But notwithstanding their frustrated search for an intellectual home, the women in this book in fact viewed themselves as part of the action and their writing as an assertive intervention in public cultural life. Many undertook a critical dialogue with modern male writers or embraced a vanguard conception of artistic work as a dynamic cultural engagement. But as these women imagined themselves as instigators for change rather than its muses, they unleashed penetrating critiques of projects for social or artistic modernization, including—but by no means exclusively—their casting of women.

Performance, Inquiry, and the "Art of Living" as a Writer

A multilayered concept of performance shapes my readings of these women's intellectual careers in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1996, Bert States made the timely observation that the word performance had assumed a life of its own in critical discourse and become a "keyword," in Raymond Williams's sense of the term (Williams, 11-26), or as States put it, a word that suddenly moves from "normal semantic practice" and takes rhetorical flight: "a word you are hearing, say, a dozen times a week, and you can bet . . . is a proto-keyword spreading on the wings of metaphor" (1). As diverse disciplinary approaches converged in a theoretical fascination with performance, they produced what Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick aptly term "a carnivalesque echolalia of . . . extraordinarily productive cross-purposes" (1). While many scholars (I include myself) find such mixing it up fruitful, a well-founded complaint that accompanies such keywords in their transdisciplinary chain reactions is that they can mean just about anything. In a constructive response to this problem, in Performance: A Critical Introduction (also from 1996 and now in its second edition), Marvin Carlson executed a masterful mapping of the term's disciplinary roots and evolution in theatre, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and linguistics, as well as its historical and contemporary reinterpretations through various types of performance art. Carlson's work reminds us that, even if we tap into the productive cross-purposes of a word's diverse disciplinary connotations, our critical practice is grounded in our specific deployment of the concepts we choose.

Although I have noted convergences, States on the one hand and Parker and Sedgwick on the other actually come to performance theory from different conceptual lines that are related but not always harmonious: one that sees theatrical activity itself as the primary source for ideas about performance and another that draws on J. L. Austin's concept of "performatives," that is, speech acts that "perform" by actually doing what they embody as they are emitted, to focus on the "performativity" of discourse itself and its consequent (re)iteration. Judith Butler's work is among the most widely disseminated in this line. But Austin's oft-cited prototype of a "performative sentence"—the "I do" of a wedding (4-11)—constitutes a ceremonial exchange that is both profoundly theatrical in the aesthetic sense and shot through with cultural hierarchies and thus highlights the actual close ties between the dramatic and the discursive veins of performance theory. Richard Schechner's work exemplifies a third major line of performance theory focused on performance and culture. In dialogue with the late anthropologist Victor Turner, Schechner showcases the correspondences between certain features of aesthetic theatre—the dynamic between actors and roles, the rehearsal, the repetitions of things done before, and the search for transformation—and community-based, cultural rituals. Schechner's definition of performance as "restored behavior" underlies this analogy between aesthetic theatre and ritual, a comparison that foregrounds the choices among available options that theatre practitioners or cultural communities make in executing their performances, as well as the common ground of these two types of activity as sites of repetition or "restoration" and of potential change (Between Theater and Anthropology, 36-37).

My own approach to performance brings together these three theoretical lines—the theatrical, the cultural, and the discursive—to argue that the women in this book transformed their concrete experience with performance not only into self-castings as participants in a literary culture that did not welcome them with open arms, but also, and most important, into an analytical tool in the subject matter and the singular literary qualities of their own writing. As a point of departure, I highlight the fact that cultural expectations for women or their actual formal training led the writers I study to perform in the most basic, theatrical sense of the word: reiterating specific scripts, written or implicit, they executed before an audience self-conscious bodily, musical, or verbal acts. Drawing first of all on theatre-based theories of performance, I also argue that these women's writing exhibits a heightened alertness to the epistemological power of performance itself, a more theoretical kind of knowledge and a tool for their analysis that derives from their concrete experience either through actual performing or as women named by their culture—"hailed" or "interpellated," in Althusser's sense (173-174)—as performers.

Although I tease out these women's reflective inclination to theorize their own experience through writing, I am far from proposing that they were poststructuralist performance theorists. For one thing, their subscription to gender or race essentialism—occasional but startling—precludes such anachronistic readings, even though their work was markedly investigative. Rather I hold that performing in the theatrical sense is a practice that generates critical thought in the performer. Contemporary theatre practitioners who are also performance theorists share this view. In conceiving performance as a cognitive process—a way of figuring things out—these theorists privilege the rehearsal phase of performance activity rather than finished products. Thus Herbert Blau, who has long showcased the "doing" substance of performance, casts it as a "speculative procedure" and a "taking on and putting off of ideas" (To All Appearances, 41). Blau draws here on Harold Pinter's description of the dramatic rehearsal as an undertaking whereby "facts are lost, collided with, found again" (quoted in Blau, To All Appearances, 43). On the interface of theatre and anthropology, Schechner theorizes performance through the group-based, dramatic rehearsal, conceived as a "hunt" or a series of actions with "high information potential" (Performance Theory, 182). Drawing on both Schechner and Blau, and showcasing the bodily aspect of performance, Joseph Roach uses the concept of the "kinesthetic imagination" as a rich location for cultural memory, transmission, and change (26).

Drawing on the theatre-based concept of performance as cognitive inquiry, then, this book highlights the arresting role of theatre or performance strategies and metaphors in these women's singular intellectual mode as manifested in their literary investigations into art, politics, gender, and social experience. Although some—Storni, Ocampo, Rivas Mercado, Wiesse, Campobello—did actually compose plays or performance pieces (such as ballets), moreover, underlying my analysis is the premise that theatricality—and its propensity for performative inquiry—can mark any literary genre. This emerges not simply in the thematic focus on performance that characterized many of these women's writing—they sometimes talked directly about performance—but also in their strategic literary-technical choices or in the intricate construction in their work of a speaking or perceiving persona whose performative identity is not always straightforward. Bakhtin highlighted the performative qualities of narrative through the interactive speech acts of dialogism (Dialogic Imagination), a quality that can also mark poetry. Bakhtin also brought into view the theatrical substance of narrative constructions of subjectivity whereby an authorial persona invents itself through sometimes subtle, reciprocal acts of seeing and being seen by an other (Art and Answerability, 27-61).

In this vein, my analysis of these women's work draws not just on the performance pieces some of them composed for theatre or dance but also on their investment of stories, novels, essays, or poems with the critical malleability—the movement—of theatre-based performance. On the most obvious level, narrative can shift toward the theatrical, for example, in a studied preponderance of scene over summary or in descriptions marked by a clipped stage-direction style, features we find in prose by Ocampo, Lange, Campobello, Rivas Mercado, Rodríguez Acosta, Wiesse, and Galvão. More interesting is the frequent deployment of synecdoche—the embodied replacement of one figure or part by another, which calls to mind Roach's definition of performance as "surrogation" (2). Lange, Campobello, and Galvão in particular bring out the performative quality of synecdoche, especially when used for body parts or fashion. This verbal strategy resembles the visual caricaturist's exaggeration of a key element of a face or body, as well as the more malleable ostension of a single feature through posing, gesture, and movement in theatrical performance. As in theatre, such synecdoche-based choices in narrative or poetry underscore the interplay of what will be shown and what will not and the movement between the two. Similar to theatre, the narrative, lyrical, or essayistic construction of subjectivity undertaken by all of the women in this book, moreover, offers a performative dynamic between seeing and being seen, between the flow of movement and the stylization of a pose, between what will be shown off and what will be hidden. In the chapters that follow, for example, Storni's frenetically declaiming poetisas or Sabas Alomá's hyperbolic femininity as the woman intellectual's defense maximize the showing-off, whereas the spying artists created by Lange, Rivas Mercado, and Galvão or the multiple masks of authorial persona assumed by Rivas Mercado, Portal, Rodríguez Acosta, or Galvão all lay claim to concealment.

The performative quality of Latin America's early twentieth-century literary culture offers a conceptual bridge between these women's public activity and the investigative itineraries of their writing. Thus I draw also on the cultural dimensions of performance. I consider the literary world itself as a kind of culture marked not only by evolving habits of the mind but also by shared repertoires of activity, both in art and in everyday life. Closely akin to my own larger view of culture here is the performance-based definition crafted by the social historian Robert Hymes, who proposes that culture is a repertoire from which people choose to "show themselves as cultural actors, as constant makers and remakers of culture, not simply as middlemen through whom culture somehow does its inexorable work" (5; emphasis in original). This "repertoire," Hymes elaborates, is "not a smoothly coherent system but a lumpy and varied historical accumulation of models, systems, rules, and other symbolic resources, differing and unevenly distributed, upon which people draw and through which they negotiate life with one another" (5; emphasis in original). As I consider the early twentieth-century literary or artistic world as a kind of culture in which women writers made use of unevenly distributed repertoires to negotiate their roles as writers, moreover, Pierre Bourdieu's performative conception of modern literary groups is especially germane. Grounded in a conception of cultural practice as both embodied and improvisational—a way of learning by doing—Bourdieu coined the term "the art of living" to describe the intricate, group-based forging of new artistic personae in late-nineteenth-century European literary culture. A "fundamental dimension of the enterprise of artistic creation," Bourdieu argued, was the invention of the "style of an artist's life." Thus writers introduced audacities or innovations not only into their written works "but also into their existence," which, Bourdieu argued, was itself conceived as a work of art (58; my emphasis). Similarly, I myself have argued elsewhere that the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes in Latin America are best understood not as a series of canonical works or experiments in a single genre, but rather as a form of multifaceted activity that coalesced around the quest for a particular, if varied, style. Modern literary artists, in Europe and the Americas, sought a style of acting in the public sphere as much as of writing, and thus I make repeated reference in this book to women's "art of living" in relationship to literary culture.

Given the intricate ties between cultures and their languages, I also often allude to cultural dialogues, debates, or conversations within the literary or intellectual field. Although numerous theorists have explored the social or philosophical aspects of dialogue, my own use of this terminology is grounded specifically in Danny Anderson's formulation, drawing on Steven Mailloux and Kenneth Burke, that literary works (and by extension, multifaceted literary or artistic activity, I would argue) constitute "acts" of participation in a "cultural conversation" and that "the appearance of a text is like a person's entrance into a room where a conversation was already in progress before the text entered . . . and . . . remains unfinished after the text has left the scene, much like the boundless quality of context" (Anderson, 15). But Anderson, like Hymes, emphasizes the uneven distribution of resources in such conversations, noting that Mailloux highlights the "variety of positions or voices" and "rhetorical struggles for power" that constitute them (Anderson, 15). That the women studied here actively chose to intervene in such conversations with their writing—and this book showcases choice—does not imply, then, that their entries were smooth or that all participants (human or textual) joined on anything approximating equal footing. The notion of a textual intervention in a cultural conversation also emphasizes that beyond whatever theatrical qualities they may possess, literary works (not only their authors) "perform" as actors in that exchange.

For investigating women writers' work in particular, the concept of a multifaceted, performative art of living—within a contextually specific literary-cultural world and marked by historically specific cultural conversations, dialogues, or debates—offers an alternative to readings that highlight strategies of oppositional resistance or that characterize women's work as the embodiment of polarized margin-center relations. Such models can impoverish how we read women's writing and obscure their de facto intellectual mobility—again, their choices—in the cultural conversations they join. The art-of-living concept, by contrast, brings into focus the degree to which literary activity and the enactment of an artistic persona constitute not a preconceived project but rather, to use Bourdieu's words, the "taking up" of a "position to be made" (76; emphasis in original). In reading these women's writing and self-portraits, then, I trace the multiple cultural sites and genres through which they moved in taking up specific artistic or intellectual positions in the making.

At the same time, grounding this improvisational art of living in a specific time and place necessarily underscores the qualified autonomy that it embodied, and here I draw on the discursive vein of performance theory. For all its capacity for cognitive discovery, a rehearsal-based notion of performance as individual or collective speculation through practice must also contend with the inseparability of experience from the discourse that frames it, to recall Joan Scott's work (33). Here I draw on Judith Butler's concept of the "compulsory citationality" of cultural discourse that forces one to "quote" or repeat it, even as these reiterations can generate change through new, unexpected meanings, or what she calls the "unanticipated resignifications" of "highly contested terms" ("Critically Queer," 23, 28). Although unlike Butler I underscore the active choices women writers made and the periodic new meanings with which they invested the discourses framing their experience, like Butler I show that their options were not unencumbered as to which public identity from the available repertoire they might perform in any given setting. Rather I locate them in a web of competing debates about literature, politics, and gender, cultural scripts with which they could negotiate but that they could not fully escape. The women in this book executed their intellectual choices, for example, in the heart of a literary culture whose gendered discourse of modernity conceptualized them either outside of the modern or as its muses rather than its agents. That the collective art of living and cultural conversations marking early-twentieth-century literary culture in Latin America were enacted primarily by groups of creative young men underscores the challenges women writers faced. If literary culture was the ostensible habitat of men, women were allocated their dwelling place in what I often refer to as a performance culture, a multifaceted conglomerate of media imagery and performative leisure activity, upon which the women in this book invariably cast a discerning, critical eye, even as they embraced their roles as performers. Thus, although they were in no way immune to gender scripting of their time, these women's writing and public personae reveal their razor-sharp awareness of themselves, their defining contexts, and their own historicity. Moreover, their simultaneous negotiation of a supposedly male literary world and an ostensibly female cultural world of performance and modern consumption enacted a more androgynous conception of art, social roles, and culture itself. This androgyny—a repeated motif in the chapters that follow—reverberates throughout these women's serial enactments of mobile artistic personae and in the multiple critical moves of their writing.

A Habitat for Fraternity and the Women Who Wrote There

In the realm of feminist civic movements in Latin America, a network of women activists emerged by the 1920s. But although some women in this book actually met one another and some forged real or imagined liaisons with other women, all negotiated their intellectual lives among men. Even as women's presence in public life grew, literary culture throughout Latin America, irrespective of aesthetic or political orientation, conceived itself as a habitat for fraternity. Thus aestheticist Florida and politicized Boedo writers alike embraced the Argentine novel Don Segundo Sombra (1926), and writers as diverse as Borges and Roberto Arlt regarded its author, Ricardo Güiraldes, as their mentor. In this nationalist epic, published the same year that the new Argentine Civil Code granted limited civil rights to women, masculine plenitude derives from bodily feats executed in a world without them. Fabio Cáceres, a gentleman-writer-to-be whose mixed origins pose a fusion of old money with populist autochthony, advances toward manhood, reclaims his patrimony, and assumes his lettered avocation only when he flees immigrants, bourgeois values, and, above all, authoritarian women to join a band of pampa-wandering men. Comparable homosocial male bonding and rites of passage mark novels pivotal for other artistic projects. Alejo Carpentier's vanguard novel ¡Ecué-Yamba-O! (written in 1927 and published in 1933) locates the emergent Afro-Cuban aesthetic of the Havana vanguard in its black protagonist's initiations, first into a mostly male ñáñigo subculture and then into a gang in Havana. Most notoriously, Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo (1916), whose roving band of revolutionaries forms the novel's collective protagonist, became the centerpiece in the mid-1920s for an acrimonious, gendered Mexican debate about nationalist (masculine) or Europeanized (effeminate) writing modes.

As Robert Irwin has detailed for Mexico, such male bonding abounded in nineteenth-century Latin American fiction. Literary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, however, linked such imagery not only to national projects but also to innovative artistic "positions to be made." Self-consciously modern writers constituted their art of living in their fiction, first-person-plural manifestos, staged polemics, performance events, group nocturnal wanderings, or gatherings at favorite watering holes. Vanguard literary culture in particular was profoundly performative, as writers openly courted or rejected audiences, real or imagined. Graciela Montaldo ties such activity to the democratization of the cultural field, particularly to writers' keen awareness of a growing readership addressed by journalism and a consequent autobiographical impulse to constitute themselves as public figures (26, 53-56). Similarly, Francine Masiello notes that the vanguard writing persona of the 1920s forged a "coherent ego" through a "complex countenance of extra-literary activities" (Lenguaje e ideología, 52). But this pursuit of coherence often assumed the collective countenance of an "everlasting club," to borrow Roach's term for the serial performance of group identity (17-25). Anchoring the self-stories of these literary assemblages was their fraternal group habitat, as in the "Cafe de Nadie" for Mexico's estridentistas, the Mariátegui house on Lima's Washington Street for the Amauta circle, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring's Havana office for the Grupo Minorista's "sabbatical luncheons," or the oft-named Lange house on Calle Tronador for the emergent Martín Fierro group.

The tropes of cultural modernism were as gendered as its group affiliations. In European modernist writing, as Rita Felski observes, the modernity of the New Woman provided the "bold imagining of an alternative future," but the "modern" also often embodied "crisis" (14). Thus, she argues, the prostitute, the actress, the mechanical woman, the nostalgia-ridden prehistoric woman, and the voracious modern consumer woman all manifested art's ambivalent response to capitalism, technology, and social change. In Latin America, where more uneven, frustrated modernization marked neocolonialist national projects, or where, as Carlos Alonso has argued, modernity itself was often as much trope as reality, gender anxiety flourished. Linking an embodied art of living—say competitions in physical dexterity at a Palermo sweets shop—to their writing, Argentine vanguard writers, for example, aggressively affirmed the masculinity of their modern experiments. In the preface to his prose collection Aquelarre, Florida group writer Eduardo González Lanuza proclaimed that his was a "masculine book" of "vigorous" art without the "affectations" of the "confectionery" (8). Today's reader is struck not by the vigor of his prose but rather by its ephemeral language. But González Lanuza's preface betrays qualms that the studied lyricism of his modern prose—a quality ascribed at the time to the work of (women) poetisas—might impugn his masculinity (7). Similarly, ironic play notwithstanding, a Martín Fierro review of Girondo's experimental verse portrays these lyric, urban snapshots as manly exploits of "gaucho frankness" that "hurl words" like hunting slings (Sarlo, Martín Fierro, 21). In postrevolutionary Mexico, on the other hand, the defenders of mexicanidad claimed masculinity for realist art with nationalist themes such as Los de abajo and dismissed the lyricism of the Contemporáneos writers, and the writers themselves, as effeminate. Always gendered, then, comparable experimental writing was masculine for its creators in Argentina and effeminate for its detractors in Mexico.

As male writers celebrated the modern Eve as an artistic muse, an intricate public dialogue evinced the unwritten rules for real women's writing. Like the modern civic woman imagined by emergent feminist political reformers, the woman writer was to forge her artistic identity through the "special" qualities of her sex. Just as civic feminists argued that a woman's ostensible moral superiority guaranteed her public usefulness, particularly the creation of healthy (national) families, so did the public conversation about writing affirm that women should be more chaste than men in art as in life. Numerous reviews of women's poetry and prose in mass media and forums self-identified as more literary reinforced them for writing in self-abnegating modes and chastised those who did otherwise for writing like men. A favorable review in a March 1926 Caras y caretas of the poetry collection Rama frágil by María Luisa Carnelli exemplifies these standards: "The verses of this distinguished poetess possess the eminent quality that all poetry should have, and especially those by women: they create emotion softly and deeply. They have no passionate violence whatsoever; rather a sweet resignation translated in always harmonious, well made, and diaphanous verse. Not even love itself can take the poetess out of the atmosphere of tender serenity to which her select spirit has risen" ("Rama frágil," n.pag.; my emphasis). The response to a Carnelli contemporary who did otherwise is instructive. Four years after Don Segundo Sombra appeared, Victoria Gukovsky, a founding member of the Argentine socialist party and an educational reformer, published El santo de la higuera, a collection of gaucho tales. While applauding her continuation of the gauchesque tradition, a review in the prestigious journal Nosotros took Gucovsky to task for giving short shrift to female characters, for using "manly motifs," and above all for writing like a man. "Even the form is masculine," the reviewer complained, adding that had he not known the author, he would have suspected the "indirect hand of a man" in the exacting descriptions of scenes among men; the collection's stories about proletarian children, by contrast, manifested the author's "exquisite feminine soul" (Montesano Delchi, 92-93). This gendered conversation about writing permeated artistic culture throughout Latin America, and the women in this book negotiated their literary personae and writing projects through intricate rejoinders.

See Beba Buy Books: The New Woman Consumes and Performs

Clearly these debates on the gender of writing were "about" many things. In Mexico, for one, they signaled the presence of openly gay men in postrevolutionary cultural institutions. Although change was less extensive in some countries (Peru, for example) than others (Argentina or Brazil), historians document the expanded presence of working- and middle-class women in the workforces of Latin American cities, and, as Beatriz Sarlo points out, modern urban leisure activities incorporated upper- and middle-class women into public life in new ways (Una modernidad periférica, 21-25). But efforts to reconstitute traditional roles through the gendered division of literary labor manifested not only anxiety about real social change but also the diversification of the cultural field in which closed clubs were actually more open than they appeared at first glance. Membership in literary groups of the period was a moving target and ideological mix. Rarely was there a single leader or authorial group voice. As the Contemporáneos gathering's designation by one member as the "group without a group" exemplifies (Irwin, 160), determining just who was in or out of any of these groups has generated endless accounting by participant-memoirists and vanguard scholarship. While men were certainly more "in" than women and the latter's presence more vulnerable to historical amnesia, a few women—not only those in this book—participated in or moved through most of the major literary groups in Latin America of this period. Women's vanishing presence in Don Segundo Sombra notwithstanding, moreover, Latin American fiction of the period was deeply engaged with—if often corrective toward—the subject of women's changing social roles, as in Manuel Gálvez's flighty Argentine protagonist of Una mujer muy moderna, the trendy Miss Annie Doll of Martín Adán's La casa de cartón in Lima, the cinematographic women of Jaime Torres Bodet's vanguard novellas, the feminist Isabel Machado of Cuban novelist Carlos Loveira's La última lección, and the cosmopolitan prostitutes who initiate the eponymous hero, Macunaíma, into modern São Paulo in Mário de Andrade's classic. Notably absent from much fiction by men was the new woman writer or intellectual, notwithstanding her growing presence in actual literary culture.

Debates about literature and gender intersected most palpably in the eclectic, high-circulation journalism in which literary writers throughout Latin America collaborated. Angel Rama highlighted the role of Latin American journalism in creating the professional writer, and Aníbal González illuminates the ambivalent liaison between journalism and self-conscious literary practice in the 1920s and 1930s, as writers embraced this source of livelihood and access to audiences while simultaneously distancing themselves from media culture through more rarified concepts of the literary. During this time, in fact, two new social actors—the professional writer and the performing modern woman—cohabited in the cultural imaginary of widely read journalism. The cautionary tale of the fictional Beba, signed by "Roxana" and serialized from October 1927 until March 1928 in Caras y caretas, dramatizes this encounter. Here in narrative and sketches, the short-haired, flapper-styled Beba shops, smokes, attends theatre and films, dances, sings tangos, performs in a tableau vivant for a charity ball, disguises herself for carnival, models a risqué bathing suit at Mar de Plata, and eventually marries upward into affluent porteño society. Although the fun-loving Beba throws herself into this social masquerade, the final installment forecasts the disintegration of her marriage and dire consequences for national life generated by the unfettered freedom and ambiguous moral code she practices. Beba's counterparts populate comparable media in Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, in fictional offerings and a plethora of photographic images in the society pages. Women, too, including all of the writers in this book, wrote for popular periodicals. But the popular weeklies devoted far more space to modern women as performers than to commentary on their writing. Beyond numerous features on movie stars and actresses from Latin America, Hollywood, and Europe, these magazines also depicted ordinary middle- and upper-class women—in stances from decorative to seductive—declaiming poetry, posing in tableaux vivants, or representing Greek muses, flappers, Mexican folkloric dancers, Hawaiian hula girls, gypsies, eighteenth-century Parisians, or veiled, quasi-Asian figures.

A defining trait of the modern Latin American woman portrayed by Beba is her equivocal relationship to literary culture. Thus in the first installment, Beba goes to buy books. Although romance novels are her favorites, she also purchases poetry by Mexico's sentimental modernista Amado Nervo, the prescribed model of the day for aspiring poetisas. This portrayal of the New Woman as a reader whose choices warrant regulation juxtaposes an anxiety toward women's changing roles with the literary world's ambivalent relationship to media culture. As Andreas Huyssen argues, European modernists projected such an equivocal stance through portraits of women (say, Madame Bovary) as readers of modernity's mass-produced fare and cast their male counterparts as more reflective readers of artistically superior writing (46). Similarly, Felski highlights the modernist representational link between a woman's indiscriminate appetites as a middlebrow reader and her portrayal as a voracious consumer through shopping (61-63). Gustavo Pérez Firmat notes the gendering of reading itself—"masculine readers and feminine texts"—posed by the fictions of the Hispanic vanguards (59). Within a nascent culture industry, Beba's story stages a virtual encounter between the new professional writer and the New Woman in a bookstore, a locale of growing social importance. Those who write books, the series intimates, might imagine performing New Women like Beba among their readers, as her eclectic tastes test the boundaries of elite literary culture. The Beba bookstore episode manifests a lack of consensus on what kind of material contemporary writers should produce and for whom. But it also showcases related mixed views on modern women's role in cultural life. Given that women poets of the 1920s were sometimes aficionados of Nervo's work, Beba's key reading choice, the series also implicitly casts the new porteña as a potential writer herself.

Most important, Beba's story signals the dynamics between liberation and regulation encompassed in the idea that the role of modern Latin American women in artistic culture was to perform. Neither the designation of women as performers nor the acting-out of societal gender tensions and regulations through theatrical modes (whether on traditional stages or in the alternative public spheres of growing cities) were new phenomena in Latin America or in international Western culture. In late-nineteenth-century Latin America, private performances by upper-class Latin American women for select, family-based audiences displayed a limited education in literature, poetry declamation, music, and the plastic arts. But in the twentieth century's early decades, expanding leisure activities increased the more public venues where upper- or middle-class women could perform—chaperoned social events or clubs, charity functions, or service organization fund-raisers—and still maintain the respectability denied women who did so for a living. In the context of these events' social usefulness, moreover, journalistic images of the modern woman as a performer synthesized the concept of women's "special" social role embodied in feminist campaigns for the new civic woman with the mobility implicit in the New Woman as a dynamic consumer of leisure activities.

This imagery of constant body movement and urban mobility through multiple cultural sites—Beba, we should recall, is everywhere—evokes the futuristic dynamism of the avant-gardes. It also encapsulates the difference between the performing woman as object of contemplation or inspiration that populated late-nineteenth-century Spanish American modernismo (or Brazilian symbolism) and her New Woman heir of the 1920s and 1930s. If the static tableau vivant, which persisted in the Latin America's middlebrow print media of the 1920s, reiterated earlier gender scripts, photojournalism on Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Amelia Earhart, and on local and international women dancers and athletes advanced more porous, androgynous notions of gender and striking imagery of bodies in motion as a signifier of change. But this media iconography of the New Woman appeared side by side with cautionary pieces that plumbed in sensationalist or satirical modes the potential nefarious consequences of too much public mobility—and resulting androgyny—for women and in reaction to more hybrid social gatherings, for example chaperoned dance clubs or días de recibo (open-house days) in Mexico City (Collado, 111) or the growing multiclass practice in Rio de Janeiro of fazendo a avenida, in Portuguese literally "making the avenue," making the scene (Hahner, 80).

That women's performances provoked the regulatory impulse underlying Beba's story and comparable fare throughout Latin America testifies to the recognition of their (potentially threatening) transformational power. In 1923 Enrique García Velloso, an Argentine playwright and author of popular fiction that cast women's changing mores as a problem, published Piedras preciosas, a manual of poetry declamation dedicated to his daughter. The contrast between the guide's normative dictionary of gestures and intonations and its cover art of a declaiming woman—a cross between a genie and a flapper—signals the era's deep-seated ambivalence toward women's performances. Their potential for upending gender norms and for autonomous creative expression unfolded in the rising star of Argentina's Berta Singerman, which also underscored the renewed penchant for modern male writers to recast performing women as their muses. Singerman, who synthesized a songlike declamation mode and gestures into a personal performance style, recited in packed halls throughout Latin America and Europe and elicited hyperbolic praise from male writers as diverse as Mexico's Salvador Novo and Spain's Unamuno or Valle Inclán. Journalistic accounts throughout Latin America underscored the power of her voice and body in motion and her transfiguration of a lyrical repertoire by others into her own aesthetic form.

Casting a woman on display as the muse for male creativity was nothing new. But as a more dynamic and independent figure than her immediate predecessor—the decorative, often immobile femme fatal of Spanish America's literary modernistas—the New Woman model of musedom signaled change. Much as the classical muses synthesized the capacity for inspiration with their own artistic talent, the performing woman as portrayed in Latin American literary culture of the time offered a bridge from representations of women as art objects or catalysts to their conception as cultural actors. The women in this book all underwent, to varying degrees, the performance training that marked the education of Latin American women. They all also performed before an artistic or intellectual audience at some moment in their careers and in a specific cultural circle. Several—Ocampo, Lange, Campobello, Rivas Mercado, Portal, and Galvão—were at some point explicitly invoked as sources of artistic inspiration. Most of these writers evidenced acute insight into the role of contemporary performance culture in women's experience or into a penchant to render women as performers. Most also criticized what they saw. Thus Singerman as a performing New Woman more often served as their target than as their role model. But to expand on a central proposition of this book, performance activity—even when it shored up gender norms in the face of change—provided these women a far richer repertoire and more malleable site for negotiating their art of living as intellectuals than did reigning models of women's writing, embodied for example in the poetisa. These women's experience with performance was pivotal for their choices as writers and their conception of writing as a critical move in cultural life.

The Art of the Getaway: Teresa de la Parra's Warning

In her fiction and essays, Venezuela's Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936) identified the challenges facing women writers in literary culture, particularly of the vanguards, and she highlighted key issues also explored by the ten women in the following eight chapters. But she ultimately imagined her own intellectual home outside the dominant literary culture that surrounded her. Her work, therefore, in particular her 1928 novel Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (translated as Mamá Blanca's Memoirs, 1993), provides an illuminating counterexample to the acts of cultural intervention undertaken by the women in the eight chapters that follow. The novel opens with an advertencia or warning. Here an editor-narrator invokes the Cervantine device of an inherited manuscript to introduce an old woman's memoirs into the literary world of the 1920s. Praising the manuscript's style, she contrasts it with the vanguards' "hermetic school" and notes that although she has always approached cubist expositions and dada anthologies with a will to believe, they have offered only "darkness and silence" (12-13; HOFHF, 13). The editor claims Mamá Blanca as her mentor, and the old woman in turn praises her own mother's verbal talent, contrasting it with the vanguards' "futuristic flashiness" and "esotericism" (24). It is tempting to take these fictional voices at their word when we consider that in 1926 Parra claimed that she herself was almost impermeable to the "pseudo-new sensibilities" of the new art (Obra escogida, 3:219).

Parra, however, repeatedly cautioned critics against mistaking her characters' views for her own, and the innovations of her own fiction are unquestionable. Nelson Osorio credits her with rejuvenating Venezuelan prose (143); Louis Lemaître notes the "vanguard tendency" (83) of her first novel, Ifigenia: Diario de una señorita que escribió porque se fastidiaba (Ifigenia: The diary of a young lady who wrote because she was bored; published in 1924); Doris Sommer notes the "representational disencounters" and "verbal misfires" that characterize Memorias ("Mirror, Mirror," 166-172); and I have argued that Memorias is, in fact, a vanguard novel. But as a Küntslerroman or portrait of the artist, the work also illuminates Parra's search for a public identity as a woman writer. The resulting tensions suggest that Parra found the available role models deficient and that in contrast to the other women in this book, she ultimately chose to turn away from public literary culture. The prefatory remarks of the novel's adult editor-narrator recount clandestine childhood meetings with the elderly Mamá Blanca that served as an apprenticeship in life and art. Now the editor has inherited the five hundred handwritten pages of the old woman's memoirs and, counter to her wish that they remain secret, has decided to edit and publish the first one hundred pages. In the memoir itself, Mamá Blanca offers sketches of her mid-nineteenth-century childhood on the family hacienda, Piedra Azul. In this predominantly female community, Blanca Nieves (Snow White, the young Mamá Blanca), her mother, five sisters, and governess live an apparently idyllic existence of freedom and proximity to nature, because the hacienda's supreme authority, the father, is seldom there. Other men inhabit this women's world—the displaced intellectual and failed politician Primo Juancho, the mulatto laborer Vicente Cochocho, and the mestizo cowhand Daniel. But they, too, function outside the hacienda's center of power with, Mamá Blanca would have us believe, significant room for maneuver. The idyll ends abruptly with the family's move to Caracas, where schools, class conventions for women's behavior, and physical restrictions of urban life radically curtail the autonomy the sisters have enjoyed in the vanishing world of Piedra Azul.

In Parra's first novel, Ifigenia, the young protagonist rails against the oppression of women but for economic reasons succumbs to a loveless marriage. This work's critique of women's situation has always seemed clear. By contrast, Memorias has provoked critical indecision. While Masiello ("Women, State, and Family") and Doris Sommer ("Mirror, Mirror") argue for its feminist critique through narrative subversions, Elizabeth Garrels calls it an "anachronistic colonial fantasy" ("Piedra Azul," 136), and Juan Liscano describes it as a reaction against modernity ("Testimony," 125). Through its vanguard construction of an ostensibly outmoded women's world, the work in fact addresses profoundly modern artistic concerns and—through the very strategies she ostensibly rejected—enacts Parra's own search for viability as a woman writer. Memorias possesses the genre indeterminacy that characterized stylistically diverse Latin American vanguard fiction of the period. Parra herself observed this feature of Memorias, as not quite a novel because of its disconnected sketches (Obra escogida, 2:234). The work is vanguard as well in the impious appropriation by its storytelling characters of a hodgepodge of literary traditions. Thus Mamá Blanca reveals that her mother embodied a hyperbolic romanticism bordering on kitsch, and the stories she told while curling her daughter's hair formed a mélange from other sources. And although Mamá Blanca explains that it was her job to bestow unity on her mother's tales, the child was equally irreverent in her juxtapositions of heroes of chivalric, romantic, and biblical sources. Another role model, Primo Juancho, is a "man of the Enlightenment" possessed of encyclopedic knowledge and from whom we might expect a classical style. But as in a vanguard experiment, his discourse is marked by "the lightninglike transitions" and the "delightful incoherence" of a dictionary's illogical sequencing or an "unbound Larousse" (Memorias, 51; HOFHF, 46). The novel's nostalgic tone, if one ignores lurking ironies, gives Piedra Azul the air of a beatus ille. Thus in her opening description of Mamá Blanca, the editor forges metonymies between the old woman and nature, orality, authenticity, and the roots of tradition, all of which she contrasts with urban culture, the artifice of writing, and modern life's frivolity. But the characters' nonchalance toward their literary ancestors links the editor's modern world of enigmatic cubist expositions and Mamá Blanca's childhood utopia.

The work records not one but two artistic apprenticeships, and we must ask what the connections between them might be. The first is the story of Blanca Nieves, who grows into the memoir-writer Mamá Blanca with the tutelage of her Piedra Azul mentors. The second, which in the novel frames the first, is the tale of the advertencia's narrator-editor and the elderly Mamá Blanca, a tie also rooted in childhood that culminates when the narrator edits her mentor's private memoirs for public consumption. The advertencia casts these two women as opposites, as the editor denigrates herself as somebody who exercises "the profession of letters" (Memorias, 12; HOFHF, 13) and praises Mamá Blanca as an "artist without a profession" (8). Thus Parra's novel paints a composite portrait of the artist as both a cosmopolitan woman immersed in the public world of professional writing and an eccentric grandmother who lives alone, talks to children, animals, and flowers, and writes a private memoir for an audience of one: her editor-protégé. But the work blurs the boundaries between the two figures as the grandmother produces a text as modern as the editor's public life. The editor tells us, moreover, that she has altered Mamá Blanca's manuscript, and the shared style and irony of the advertencia and the memoir elide the novel's opposition between the two women. Their most striking similarity is the emphatic attack on modern literary culture from two artists portrayed—each in her domain—as aesthetically modern.

To understand the apparent contradiction, one must distinguish—as Parra evidently did—between innovative aesthetic strategies that challenged literary conventions and the public literary culture in which individual women negotiated their place among groups of men. The tensions mobilized by Memorias encapsulate the complex relationship of women writers to Latin American literary culture that constitutes a central focus of this book, and Parra spelled out the same ambivalence enacted by the women in this study toward the culture of performance that they alternately embraced and challenged. The adult Parra spent as much time in Europe as in Caracas, but although she was older than the vanguard generation, she maintained contact with innovative circles on both sides of the Atlantic. She was a professional writer by the terms of the times, as she published early stories and parts of Ifigenia in the Caracas periodical La lectura semanal, and the Memorias appeared in the Parisian Revue de l'Amerique Latine. But beyond the material details of publishing a work, a process to which the Memorias editor alludes, Parra clearly saw writing as a public role, an identity assumed, she said, through the "miracle of doubling" (Obra escogida, 2:196). She reflected on this role in opening her 1930 Bogota lectures on women's influence in a Latin American "spirit," events to which she was welcomed as a public celebrity: "How to assume the role of an author present before an audience?" she wondered (Obra, 472).

This question underlies the dynamic in the advertencia of Memorias between the professional editor and the grandmother without an artistic profession. Parra made clear in assuming the role of "an author present before an audience" that she found the personae of professional writer and New Woman deficient because of their common frivolity and artifice. She was known for her stylish, modern persona (complete on occasion with silk pajamas and cigarette holder), her love of the Charleston, her ease in the world of Parisian fashion, and the linguistic and musical talents acquired through the training typical for a woman of her class. But she also cast aspersions on the "happy vanity" of fashion, the "avalanche of momentary pleasures" (Obra escogida, 2:202, 2:119), and "empty mundane flitting about" (Obra, 474). She argued that for Latin American women of the privileged classes, cloistered by overprotected childhoods and repressive educations, this role combined false promises of liberation and inadequate preparation for real autonomy. Parra's critique of the New Woman weaves through all her work. She assumed the pseudonym "Fru-Fru" in early journalism, ironically embracing the designation "la señorita Frivolidad" ascribed to Caracas society types (Lemaître, 60-62). Parra's version of such a woman, María Eugenia Alonso, the protagonist of Ifigenia, possessed cultured refinement that was as much clothing-based as intellectual, Parra argued, her vast reading notwithstanding (Obra escogida, 2:212). Similarly, we learn in Memorias that Mamá Blanca's daughters-in-law, whom the old woman rejects as heirs to her memoirs, are kindred in New Woman façades and vacuous spirit to their predecessor in Ifigenia.

For Parra, then, public literary culture, or "the printing carnival," as she called it in 1930 (Obras completas, 787), and the role of professional writer—"that very intermittent and fragile literary vocation" (Obra, 472)—were of a piece with the "happy vanity" of the New Woman role. Gabriela Mistral's depiction of Parra as a Parisian tertulia participant documents her performance as a modern woman in the literary milieu. Mistral portrays her as elegant and cosmopolitan, with the verbal agility to change the subject in these gatherings primarily of men (Mistral, 40). But in 1926 Parra summarily dismissed both her "noisy and oblivious" female contemporaries and the literary culture of the tertulia: "the masculine groups, congregated in clubs or scattered on the corners" that, she argued, destroyed audience interest their monotonous stories (Obra escogida, 2:209). The focus of Parra's 1930 Bogota lectures on the historical influence of Latin American women provides a context for the alliance in Memorias between a modern literary woman and a grandmotherly "artist without a profession" as an antidote to a public literary culture in which Parra ultimately declined to locate her intellectual home. Just as the narrating editor in Memorias aligns herself with her artistic foremother, so does Parra trace a genealogy of influential women that begins in the colonial era.

Some see Memorias as a reactionary retreat from modernization, and a patronizing nostalgia and racialist stereotyping do pepper the idealized portrayals of people of color or from lower classes inhabiting Piedra Azul. But these markers of her class elitism notwithstanding, Parra searched through Mamá Blanca's mentors in Piedra Azul and through the women of Latin America's past for "modern" strategies of "disorder" as tools for negotiation within oppressive situations. As did the other writers in this book, Parra worried about the consequences specifically for women of state modernization, as when the novel admonishes that, as Doris Sommer has put it, "the marches of progress might take note of where and on whom they step" ("Mirror, Mirror," 180). But as a self-described "moderate feminist," Parra unequivocally supported the modernization of women's roles. For woman to be strong, she argued, she should not be "subjugated" by the changing ways of life but instead should be "free before herself, conscious of the dangers and responsibilities, useful in society even if she is not a mother, and financially independent through her work and her collaboration with man," who would not be "her owner, enemy, or candidate for exploitation, but rather a comrade and friend" (Obra, 474). This change, she implied in proposing a new history of Latin American women, could be accelerated by drawing on the forces of the past, that is, by enacting a "genealogy" of "counter-memory" to borrow Roach's term (26). Parra, like countless women writers internationally, sought literary foremothers in the past, but we must not mistake art for life, as she warned, and believe that she actually imagined returning to a colonized world. Thus, although the city of Tunja, Colombia, "a city that [had] not budged from the 19th century," enchanted her, she was unimpressed by the state of its cloistered women, who possessed the sadness of those "who have not lived nor suspect what life is" (Obra escogida, 2:262). Change, then, Parra argued, did not respect hermetic worlds like Piedra Azul: The crisis of change lived by modern women, she observed, could not be "cured by preaching submission," as when women lived "behind house doors." Rather, she continued, the modern life of travel and technology did not "respect closed doors" and could "pass through walls" (Obra, 474).

Even as Parra herself defied convention, though, evasion persists as an enduring motif of her literary persona, not only in the nostalgic alliance between the modern literary woman and Mamá Blanca in a bygone community of marginalized women and eccentric men, but also in Parra's self-imposed exile from the literary fray and Latin America itself. Countless critics have cited the "homelessness" of the woman intellectual, and Francine Masiello uses the term specifically in reference to Parra and other women of the avant-gardes ("Women, State, and Family," 37). Sylvia Molloy argues that a "dislocation in order to be" marks women's writing in Latin America (introduction, 107-108; emphasis in original) and argues that for Parra textual relocations and the choice to live abroad provided a "place to write (however obliquely) one's difference" ("Disappearing Acts," 248). The ten women whose work of the 1920s and 1930s I examine in the following chapters experienced challenges comparable to those articulated by Parra. They, too, criticized the literary culture through which they moved, the representations of women grounding the discourse of modernity, and the consequences for ordinary women of the continent's fits and starts of modernization. With the possible exception of Ocampo, whose elite background provided the economic and cultural capital to build her own, none found an enduring intellectual home. But even as they shared Parra's frustration, the women in this book immersed themselves in the cultural world that she ultimately rejected. Thus are their stories—as I tell them—tales less of escape than of artful arbitration and willful intervention.

The Tangled Paths to a Woman Writer's Place

A challenge for a feminist weaned in the late twentieth century is the inescapable fact that the women in this book all negotiated their intellectual identities in the cultural worlds of artistic or political men. Although some crossed paths, corresponded, or read one another's work, they did not constitute the kind of sisterhood of intellectual women that Parra imagined constructing a women's genealogy. Storni, Sabas Alomá, Rodríguez Acosta, and Portal participated in women's groups of various kinds, but these did not constitute the primary sites of their art of living as writers. Those who did interact more extensively with other women, moreover, sometimes assumed a tutorial stance, a role consistent with the ties between early Latin American feminism and the rise of Normal Schools to train women teachers and with the commitment to social usefulness that typified feminist projects. The women in this book also sometimes reinforced gender stereotypes as they criticized other women, and even when they assumed a clearly feminist political stance, they periodically reiterated prejudices of class, race, and sexual orientation typical for their milieu.

Irrespective of their relationship to women's movements, all of these women manifested an emergent feminism for its time: a distinct self-consciousness about gender, a recognition that the rhetoric or realities of modernity posed singular challenges for women, and keen attention to their own anomalous status as women writers. With the exception of Storni, Sabas Alomá, and Rodríguez Acosta (whom historians of political feminism include in their work), during the 1920s and 1930s, these women did not explicitly or fully embrace political feminism. The fact that historians describe Galvão as an alternative or non-mainstream feminist and Portal as an antifeminist underscores the term's instability and historicity. In her studies of Brazilian women's movements, Susan Besse highlights this semantic porosity. As Besse, Francesca Miller, Asunción Lavrin, June Hahner, Anna Macías, and Lynn Stoner demonstrate, moreover, the women's movements of the period were predominantly reformist and sought to integrate women into civic life without profoundly challenging patriarchal structures. The title of Besse's book, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940, captures this quality of early political feminism in Latin America. Similarly, the title of Kathleen Newman's "The Modernization of Femininity: Argentina, 1916-1926" (my emphasis) underscores the comparable "patriarchal reconfiguration" she documents in Buenos Aires in response to the threat of changing women's roles (79). Writing from the left, in fact, Portal and Galvão, respectively, attacked official feminism in Peru and Brazil as too conservative.

The women in this book inhabited a range of locations on the spectrum of political feminism, and some had little contact with women's movements at all. Some drew on the work of such international feminists as the Soviet Union's Alexandra Kollontai or Spain's María de Maeztu and Margarita Nelken. They also varied significantly in their social origins and contact or identification with women from other backgrounds. But irrespective of their politics, these writers shared with political feminists their negotiation of an active role in public life. As Lavrin documents for the Southern Cone, women's movements manifested the "rise of women's self-consciousness as actors in the body politic" (13; my emphasis). The public artistic careers of the women I study here aligned them with political feminists who enacted this awareness through public performances, as skillful orators or even in direct theatrical incursions. Susan Glenn argues persuasively that the enactment of new women's roles constituted the "theatrical roots" of modern European and U.S. feminism and links the diverse careers of Sarah Bernhardt, Emma Goldman, and modern chorus girls. In Latin America, too, theatricality often constituted the common terrain for women's political and artistic activism. Political feminists in Havana created the Lyceum, a cultural institution where women were as apt to declaim or lecture as men, and some of Mexico's notable feminists also gained renown as performers. The playwright, actress, and drama critic Catalina D'Erzell, for example, executed her feminist politics through plays that were widely performed in Mexico, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles and a regular column for the newspaper Excelsior, "Digo yo como mujer" (I speak as a woman).

The circuitous roads followed by the women in this book to participate in literary culture manifest not only their range of responses to mainstream feminism but also the specific circumstances shaping public life in the cities where their careers unfolded. The central role of performance in their intellectual inquiry, pivotal encounters with modern male literary culture embodied in the avant-gardes, and self-conscious fashioning of an intellectual persona constitute key selection criteria for inclusion in this book. As I explain below, geographical region is an important organizing principle, but not the only one. Grouping the women by region underscores defining local, historical contexts and differences in their public lives and individual trajectories. Argentina's literary culture of the 1920s and 1930s, where Storni, Ocampo, and Lange mapped out strikingly distinct roles from one another, for example, was the most extensive, institutionalized, and heterogeneous among the regions represented in this book, a diversity that marked the country's feminism as well. Buenos Aires had experienced dramatic urban growth, technological development, and changing class and ethnic demographics resulting from massive immigration. In response to that change, vanguard literary culture, in particular the somewhat conservative Martín Fierro group associated with a journal of the same name (1924-1927), manifested what Sarlo aptly terms the "urban criollismo" of a "peripheral modernity" (Una modernidad periférica, 27). Male writers in this milieu displayed a simultaneous impulse to be as European as possible and to reinvent a "real" Argentina in the face of such enormous change.

In Mexico the careers of Campobello and Rivas Mercado, on the other hand, dramatize the profound impact of postrevolutionary politics on proliferating cultural institutions and artistic life. Here literary alliances grew polemical, with a self-claimed loyalty to mexicanidad cultivated by state-affiliated cultural leaders and the vanguard estridentistas (with whom Campobello enjoyed significant ties) on one side and a stronger interest in European and U.S. artistic developments pursued by the Contemporáneos writers, among whom Rivas Mercado carried out much of her cultural activity. Although the presence of women in Mexico City public life had increased to some degree and although accounts of soldaderas who had fought in the revolution forged a growing cultural iconography, real change for Mexican women was less extensive than in Buenos Aires or São Paulo, and Mexican political feminism was less developed. In part because of the ties between many Mexican women and the Catholic Church and their consequent supportive stance toward the Cristero rebellion, postrevolutionary leadership saw women as a potential counterrevolutionary force (Miller, 91). But women painters, journalists, photographers, dancers, and writers participated actively in the rich cultural and artistic life of Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s. The proximity of the United States, moreover, manifested itself strongly in Mexico's media culture and intensified the love-hate ambivalence of Mexican women writers and intellectuals toward U.S. models of the New Woman.

As the careers of Sabas Alomá and Rodríguez Acosta embody, the ties between vanguard literary culture and feminism of the left were strongest in Havana, where women obtained the vote in 1934, as compared to 1947 in Buenos Aires, 1953 in Mexico City, and 1955 in Lima. Among the countries represented in this study, only Brazil, in 1932, preceded Cuba in letting women vote. Active political feminists, Sabas Alomá and Rodríguez Acosta participated energetically in Havana's literary world. A central factor in this distinctive alliance was the heterogeneous coalition of intellectuals and artists who rallied to support cultural and political reform and to challenge the repressive governments of Alfredo Zayas (1921-1925) and especially Gerardo Machado (1925-1933). Havana's cultural innovators—the Grupo Minorista (roughly 1923 to 1928-1929) and those from its ranks who constituted the smaller but more literary Revista de avance circle (1927-1930)—were among the most eclectic vanguard groups of Latin America. Here, as in Mexico, proximity to the United States was key both in political reaction and in literary and media culture. In addition, due to geography and political alliances, Havana sometimes served as a cultural way station not only for such notables as Lorca or Langston Hughes, but also for Campobello, Parra, Portal, and Wiesse among the non-Cubans in this book.

As in Havana, in Lima a political regime—the reformist dictatorship of Augusto B. Leguía (1919-1930)—generated strong reaction among intellectuals. But the status of women in Lima had changed the least compared to what we find in the other four cities, and Lima's official feminists, who generally supported Leguía, were among the most conservative on the continent. Women joining anti-oligarchic movements, including the nascent Peruvian communist party and the emerging populist APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana), of which Portal was a founder, were pressured to subsume gender concerns to remedying class inequities. Moreover, ethnicity and class—not gender—dominated the revolutionary cultural politics of the intellectual circle coalescing around Latin America's first major Marxist thinker, José Carlos Mariátegui, and his influential avant-garde journal, Amauta (1926-1930). But over time Mariátegui grew more interested in the revolutionary potential of feminism, his own views of women became less stereotypical, and the Amauta circle offered a provisional, if not ideal, intellectual home for a few literary women, most notably Portal and Wiesse.

During these years, São Paulo as well as Rio de Janeiro witnessed marked changes in women's lives and active, diverse political feminism. The innovative artistic culture of the Brazilian avant-gardes known as modernismo, moreover, particularly in São Paulo but also in Rio and other cities, was as dynamic and productive as any vanguard movement in Latin America and, some would argue, more enduring in its impact on the nation's twentieth-century literature. Although historians consistently incorporate Galvão into the history of Brazilian feminism and contemporary Brazilian feminist scholars regard her as a foremother, the two movements did not generally intersect, and Galvão herself attacked official Brazilian feminism as elitist and frivolous. As in Mexico, however, artistic and literary women played central roles in the public cultural activities of São Paulo-based Brazilian modernism, as salon catalysts, artistic innovators, or muses for particular artistic agendas. As in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, innovative literary activity bore the strong mark of cultural nationalism, as vanguard writers forged strong ties with the European avant-gardes while constructing an explicitly Brazilian cultural imaginary and rendition of international vanguard primitivism. The radical circle of the Revista de antropofagia (1928-1929) embraced Galvão as the primitivist New Woman muse of this project, a role that she by turns embraced and jettisoned with disdain.

Intervening Acts: The Movement of Writing

Beyond regional contexts, the following chapters reveal shifting facets in the impact of performance on women writers' arbitration of literary culture and on their writing. With the exception of María Wiesse (b. 1892), I begin with those born first—Ocampo (1890) and Storni (1892)—and end with Galvão (1910), born last. In between I treat the women whose turn-of-the-century dates of birth align them most closely with Latin America's male vanguard generation and who, adding Wiesse, had closer or longer-lasting ties with male vanguard groups or writers: Lange (1906), Campobello (1900), Rivas Mercado (1900), Sabas Alomá (1901), Rodríguez Acosta (1902), and Portal (1903). Roughly paralleling these mid-generational shifts we find an increasingly intricate critique of performance culture, paralleled by more inventive stylizations, exaggerations, and perversions of the performing woman role. Already in Storni we find criticism of fashion practices and lightweight cultural fare for women, but Sabas Alomá, Rodríguez Acosta, Portal, and Wiesse subjected performance culture to more extensive or rigorous scrutiny, and Wiesse and Galvão dedicated scathing novels to the subject.

The unfolding chapters also present more intricate, sometimes unresolved, rejoinders to the gender trouble in the air. In response to the cultural conversation that allocated distinct habitats, genres, or writing styles to women and men, androgyny constitutes a recurrent motif. Already in Storni and Ocampo we find the assumption of an androgynous position as an imagined more fluid, in-between locale, free of what Ocampo called the "most bothersome discipline" of gender (Obras escogidas: Teatro, 2:30). But in the younger women, this embrace of androgyny grows both more intense and more complex. At times ostending an explicitly androgynous authorial persona, Campobello, Rivas Mercado, Rodríguez Acosta, Portal, and Galvão also executed temporary identity shifts in masked or ventriloquist enactments of male characters, narrators, or poetic speakers. Rodríguez Acosta and, with ambivalence, Galvão also staged homosexual characters or encounters in their work, while Sabas Alomá crafted an overblown femininity and displayed intermittent homophobia as defenses against the denigration of women intellectuals as masculine.

Throughout the book we also witness—in fits and starts, indecisions and revisions—a gathering refusal to perform. Interestingly, Parra and Galvão, twenty-one years apart in age and the bookends for this account, executed the most adamant negations, though different in kind. Parra walked away from modern, certainly vanguard, literary culture itself, signaling the pitfalls for women of its frivolity, and assumed a more reclusive intellectual life than undertaken by the ten women in the following chapters. The writers closest to Parra's age here engaged performance directly, through theatre. Ocampo trained to be an actor; Storni worked as an actor, taught drama, and wrote and declaimed her own plays; and Wiesse launched her literary career writing plays about women. Their younger contemporaries alternately assumed and critically deformed conventional performance modes. Thus Lange's uncanny rendition of the performing woman, like her prose, turned a dissecting stare onto her audience, while Campobello challenged the cultural correctness of her successful dance career in the choreographies of her experimental prose and alternations in her narrative persona between reclusive poses and the mobile precision of bullets. Galvão, who, along with Lange, unleashed the most extravagant performance, also executed the most intricate refusal. Through the complex fictive personae of her prose, she effectively repudiated the performing woman mode of her adolescent initiation and claimed a critical zone of reserve, radical in its privacy.

Whether by active choice or, as in Ocampo's case some would argue, compensatory default, all the women in this book at some point privileged writing—particularly literature—over more literal performance, even as they mined repertoires of performance culture to assert their status as cultural actors. Thus Campobello affirmed that literature provided an intellectual refuge from her dance career; Sabas Alomá, while contesting its boundaries with mass culture, argued that literature constituted a form of mental calisthenics for women; and Portal chose poetry over political oratory to cultivate a more autonomous, labile voice. At the same time, as literary practitioners, many imbued their writing and their artistic personae with the movement and plasticity of performance. A striking feature of their intellectual careers is, in fact, their dynamic mobility through multiple cultural sites, even countries: like the mythical Beba, these women were everywhere. Similarly, their deployment of multiple genres and irreverence toward genre boundaries and their stylistic strategies—mercurial lyric or narrative voices that refuse fixed positions or mine gaps between them, narrative or lyrical fragments, distorting ostensions through synecdoche, hyperbolized accumulations of imagery, essays vacillating between conversational flow and interruptions—channel into their writing the critical power of movement gleaned from their performative turns. None of these strategies is exclusive to women, but their cumulative deployment by women writers in the literary culture of the 1920s and 1930s constitutes a potent, imaginative recasting of the repertoires available to women as interventionist players in a gendered literary field.

While this book encompasses five regions and the cultural projects of ten women, it does not pretend to be exhaustive. Others might have been included from the countries represented here—Argentina's Nydia Lamarque or Sara de Etcheverts; Mexico's Lupe Marín, Catalina D'Erzell, or Amalia Castillo de Leon; Cuba's Lydia Cabrera or Dulce María Loynaz; Peru's Angela Ramos; or Brazil's Cecília Meireles, Ercília Nogueira Cobra, or Aldazira Bittencourt—or from other countries: Blanca Luz Brum (Uruguay), Maria Luisa Bombal (Chile), Clementina Suárez (Honduras), or Clara Lair (Puerto Rico). Performance experience, motifs, or critiques also figured in many of these women's negotiations with literary culture and artistic experiments. But the chapters that follow demonstrate through an exemplary rather than exhaustive selection the rich variety of circuitous paths chosen by Latin American women writers of the 1920s and 1930s as they faced the considerable challenge of finding a viable place from which to write.