Lágrimas andinas: sentimentalismo, género y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner (Serie Nuevo Siglo)

Whether criticized from certain factions of indigenism for the sentimental way in which it represents the indigenous or idealized from feminism for the way in which it politicizes alliances between women, Matto de Turner's work is rarely read with indifference. More than a hundred years after the publication of Aves sin nido, the themes that its author dared to raise with courage at the end of the 19th century (sexual harassment in churches, racism, misogyny, poverty, the dangers of modernity) are still valid as topics of debate in Latin American culture. It is between these two discursive spaces; indigenism and feminism, where the reflections of this volume are found. It explores a plural and elusive work where the figure of the suffering indigenous is used by the intellectual woman to question the ideology of the spheres and to gain a foothold in the masculine debate on national construction. Implicit in this project is the idea that literary criticism should not always be laudatory and that pointing out limitations and ideological conflicts in the work of an author does not necessarily imply that it must be returned to anonymity and oblivion. Quite the opposite. Many times these ideological knots can help us to approach the complex negotiation processes that marginal groups establish at a certain historical moment with the dominant culture.