La construcción neocolonial de lo indígena en la conciencia feminista de Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer y Laureana Wright de Kleinhans

Abstract:This essay analyzes the transatlantic resignifying process of the pre-Hispanic Mexican past in Civilización de los antiguos pueblos mexicanos (1890) by Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer and Mujeres notables mexicanas (1910) by Laureana Wright de Kleinhans. I argue that these two indianista texts carry out a negotiation and destabilization of normative dichotomies (irrational/Indigenous vs. rational/white race) in order to subvert them and construct the superiority of pre-Columbian civilizations. This narrative strategy enables not only the restoration of the Nahua episteme based on the complementarity of opposite sexes, but also the legitimization of the transoceanic proto-feminist project with which these two authors, halfway between Spain and Mexico, are responding to the symbolic violence that excludes them from their own modern national projects. My analysis concludes that the resemantization of the Indigenous past and gender relations develops an alternative symbolic order across the Atlantic or, as Walter Mignolo calls it, an "act of liberation," "a project of de-linking" from the colonial matrix of thinking the sexes as hierarchical and binary ("Delinking").