The supposed aridity of Northern Mexico has reinforced the notion that it is a sterile territory. The discursive patriarchy that marked the narratives of the 20th century contributed to keeping women’s literary production on the margins of the canonized narratives, not only in this region but throughout the continent, revealing a double exclusion regarding the sex and socio-geographic location of its authors: an exclusion that this symposium proposes to examine.
The starting point is two writers from the North. In the short stories of Irma Sabina Sepúlveda (1930-1988), strategies of identity creation can be observed through irony and humor, resources that place her narrative as part of the literary canon. In the short stories of Inés Arredondo (1928-1989), eroticism is presented in an opposition between perversion and purity that results in a transgression laden with guilt, revealing the darkest desires of the human being. Both authors have been read from the margins, although the mechanisms of exclusion-resistance differ as much as their poetics.
The UANL Young Literature Competition, first held in 1991, is a creative-development program that has shaped the training of hundreds of students. Since Hélène Cixous, women’s writing can be examined as laceration and conquest, and as an articulation of symbolic voices that reproduce a generational and territorial testimony. The competition thus becomes a laboratory where historical exclusion is transformed into genealogy, reaching the present in authors who rewrite violence, the body, and memory as resistance: the notion of poetics of the unsettling allows us to think of an aesthetic movement in which horror is linked not only to supernatural beings but to situated experiences –deteriorated homes, oppressive spaces, bodies marked by violence–, as evidenced by narrators from the northeast in Chicalotas (2024). Along the same lines, Donde termina el verano (2026) [Where Summer Ends] by Elma Correa explores how structural violence affects life on the northern border, while solidarity among the protagonists traces a path of hope.
Facing this violence embedded in bodies, Cristina Rivera Garza responds from another register: La muerte me da (2008) [Death Gives Me] blurs the boundaries between the detective novel, the essay, and poetry through the abject; violence ceases to be located in the represented bodies to settle instead in language. This inscription expands in the proposal that closes the symposium: the body becomes the surface on which violence is inscribed and from which the experience of abuse, fear, loss, desire, or resistance can be read; the wound, the scar, or bodily silence acquire narrative value that reveals power relations and forms of resistance, understanding the body as the map from which to reconstruct a geography of the wound.
This symposium proposes a critical genealogy of women’s writing in northern Mexico: from the authors excluded from the canon to the voices that rewrite violence, the body, and memory as resistance.
