Recovering the Voices of Understudied Nineteenth-Century Latin American Women Writers

The focus of the following chapter is Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It, in which the Cdifornian author combines sentimentdism and sarcasm to critique both U.S. expansionist policies in Latin America and the margindization of Mexican Americans during the period of the Civil War. The find chapter, in turn, focuses on the hybrid texts of Leonor Villegas de Magnón; like New Mexicans Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, Nina Otero Warren, and Cleofás Jaramillo, the Texan author combines autobiographicd writing with socioanthropologicd observations that document a way of life threatened as a result of Anglo intervention in the Southwest. Perhaps the most sdient contribution of Torres-Pou's book is the affirmation that genres often ignored by critics who considered them as pertdning to the private rather than the public sphere, especidly when produced by women-melodrama, intimate biography, autobiographical mémoires, travel writing, so-called "domestic" fiction-can and do have important socid and political ideologicd content.