“La Patria es impecable y diamantina”: Performing Diamantina in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Fiction

• In Event: A genealogy of women’s writing in Northern Mexico and the United States

Abstract

Cristina Rivera Garza is a writer, a professor, an academic, and a journalist, whose contemporary fiction is particularly noted for its representations of Mexican migration to the U.S. from the perspective of women and translation. This discussion is central to my analysis of “La alienación también tiene su belleza” (Ningún reloj cuenta esto, 2002) and its main character: Diamantina. In this short story, through the figure of a Mexican woman who is hired to translate love letters, the author explores contemporary Mexican migration from the perspective of language and nation; the translation into English of an epistolary archive in Spanish of one of the first Mexican women to get a divorce in Texas, I propose, positions translation at a crossroads by offering a contemporary discussion on the dialectic of language and nation in the U.S. In this short story, Rivera Garza also evokes the other “Diamantinas” in her own fictional work – characters who in different contexts redefine post-revolutionary ideals of mexicanidad. Through the name, the author offers an intertextual reference to Ramón López Velarde poem, “Suave Patria” (1921) and its definition of women and nation as “impeccable and glittering”. Rivera Garza, in “La alienación también tiene su belleza”, takes this discourse across the border to emphasize cultural and ideological conflicts of national discourses for Mexican migrant women in the U.S. in the twenty first century.

Author

• Thania Munoz Davaslioglu, University of Maryland, Baltimore County