O eu e o outro feminino em Hasta no verte Jesús mío, de Elena Poniatowska

Abstract

The work Hasta no Verte Jesús mío, published by Elena Poniatowska in 1969, is examined in this thesis, with a focus on how the narrator of the story, Jesusa Palancares, views herself and other women who cross her path in the narrated journey of her life. The first-person narration tells the life of Palancares, an Oaxacan, lower-class mestiza, who lived in Mexico in the first half of the 20th century and experienced the country under Porfírio Díaz's command, the 1910 Revolution and post-revolutionary Mexico and these, among other details of her own life, allows the reader to build a portrait of the narrator's country from an alternative point of view to the one propagated by the political official narrative, which, like other Latin American countries, was spread under the effect of constitution, were in power. This analysis, using decolonial feminism prominently, describes the woman in the analysis as someone who has had her perception of the world crossed not only by gender oppression, but also by racial and class oppression since the colonization process. Prior to that, we traced a line from Elena Poniatowska to Jesusa Palancares, situating our corpus as women's literature in Mexican literature. The consideration is that there is no consensus among critics about the relationship between the work and literature, which results in different nominalizations –- such as female Bildungsroman and novela testimonial — that classify the work from the point of view of literary analysis. Based on this examination, we situate the work as a text that does not establish clear boundaries between reality and fiction and that actually accompanies a multitude of writings of its time, for which it is no longer relevant to consider the autonomy of literature, orientated on the basis of Josefina Ludmer (2012), Pedrosa et al (2018), Florência Garramuño (2012), and Paloma Vidal (2004, 2006), to understand the text as a text striated by the real and as a narration of collective experience that contributes to reconstructing the official narrative of its nation in its historical time. Having delimited how we observe the text in the field of literary studies, we explain how we came to relate it with literary analysis and decolonial feminism and trace a path from considerations about the role of gender in Western society and of the fundamentals of feminism, through the claim of women's rights, through the development of the discussion presented by peripheral feminisms and, finally, detailing the theories presented by decolonial feminism. After completing this course, in which we used, among other feminist theorists, Simone de Beauvoir (2016 [1949]), Carla Cristina Garcia (2015), Silvia Federici (2018), Kimberlé Crenshaw (2020) Lélia Gonzalez (2020[1988]) and María Lugones (2005, 2014, and 2020 [2008]) is that, contextualizing Jesusa Palancares, we analyze her perception of herself and other women under a decolonial bias.