Delivered by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the legacy of the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) was deposited in letter box number 1,165 of the Cervantes Institute, a leading author of feminism, equality and defense of the indigenous world.
It consists of an album of 24 photographs donated by his son, Gabriel Guerra Castellanos. In one she appears in her office in Ciudad Universitaria, flanked by Carlos Vélez, Juan Rulfo, José Emilio Pacheco or Juan García Ponce.
Includes the first editions of the novel “‘Balún Canán”, the book of short stories “Ciudad Real”; the essay “Woman who knows Latin”, the posthumously published work “The sea and its little fish” and “Letters to Ricardo”, with a prologue by Elena Poniatowska.
In addition, a set of new editions (2025) of her work as a poet, playwright, novelist and essayist are donated for the legacy and dissemination.
“Rosario Castellanos has a lot to teach all of us who are supporters of critical and dissident thinking about adocenamiento, and I say that we have a lot to learn from her because she is a reference for feminism,” said the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero.
And also literature about the indigenous world, he added. “It has taught us that, many times, power establishes the discourses of its victims and has a certain way of defining what is feminine, or a certain way, for example, of defining what is indigenous.”
Her lesson, García Montero explained, was “to dismantle the established discourses from within to truly explain what there was of history in the experience of a Mexican woman and what there was of experience and history in the reality of the indigenous communities with which she grew up.”
With the deposit of her legacy, “today the value of Rosario Castellanos’ work for the richness of universal literature written in Spanish is confirmed,” highlighted, in turn, Ciro Murayama, director of the Center for Mexican Studies UNAM Spain.
He appreciated Cervantes’ enthusiasm for incorporating in memory this legacy and thanked the author’s son for allowing this university, where she studied and taught, to spread her work.
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The UMAM honored her on the centenary of her birth with exhibitions, new editions of her writings, publications of books about her figure, work and career, talks and film series.
Murayama related his career with the UNAM in the sense of the search for equality, justice, culture in the broadest sense for a coexistence in society that is the result of harmony, tolerance and respect for rights, and never a product of discrimination against indigenous people, women, those dispossessed of the land, nor a result of the violence of the obtuse exercise of political economic power.
Thus, he evoked the poem “Memorial of Tlatelolco” to demonstrate his “ethical and aesthetic commitment” to freedom after the harsh repression of the student movement of 1968.
In a video, Gabriel Guerra Castellanos, moved and grateful, recalled the time his mother spent on a training scholarship in Madrid in the 1950s with a friend who was also a poet.
“She was a woman – she summarized – who worked not only for culture, not only for literature, but also for the great causes of her life, the cause of the native peoples of Mexico, the cause of women, the cause of equality, of attention to the discriminated against, to the unprotected.”
With information from EFE
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