Crossings: Multiple Margins Meet on the Bridge

I did not get to feminist ideas easily. The story of my getting to them is like a long path, one that I feel is pertinent to this reflection on what it is to be a woman who studies literatures in Argentina, part of what the US government used to call its yard. When I chose a field for the tesis de doctorado, our equivalent to a dissertation, I began to be interested in the literatures of minorities. My list of authors grew from Hemingway and Faulkner to Momaday and Richard Wright, and in a second stage, to Leslie Silko and Alice Walker. Somewhere in the middle of this exploration, I began to realize that ethnic and women's issues were connected and that both were related to my in academy and the world. The word place is essential because what interests me in literatures (against everything I was taught, I now understand the importance of the plural) are the margins: the places from which it is possible to talk back to the center of power and challenge its assumptions, including its ideas about literature. I know now that my in what people call Americanism is also marginal. My perspective is --has to be-- and what is vital to ethnic and women studies is the otherness. Being in the margin, being --because of race, ethnicity, class or gender-- has consequences. One of my aims as a teacher of literature has been to make the consequences of marginalization evident, visible. It is not an easy task. The situation of teachers of US cultures in Latin America is full of contradictions: on the one hand, in our countries we are automatically considered supporters of the US as a country, and there is well founded ill will against US foreign policy. On the other hand, when we travel North to the US, we very frequently (not always: there are important exceptions of which the Women Task Force is one) find that what we have to say is at best listened to with patronizing interest, when not simply disregarded, because we are not Americans. And I do want to point out to a problem of vocabulary: we are Americans too. America is the whole continent. And we, Latin Americans don't use the word American when referring to US people only. It would mean we accept that we are only the of the continent. I would like to explain my concept of the complex relationship between center and with a story. Stories, in many Native literatures, my first field of research, are conceived as tools to understand the world. I want to use them that way. In 1993, I traveled to the MLA in Toronto, with USIS funding. The funding issue is important. In Argentina, we work in very different conditions from those of US scholars. Because we are in the margin, our universities can very seldom pay extra money for travelling and we cannot pay to travel ourselves. We Argentinian university teachers need much more than one job. Personally, I have two as a teacher, one as a literary critic in a newspaper, I translate novels and I get small sums of money from my books for kids. Therefore, the trip to Toronto was a great opportunity. When going back to the airport by bus, I started a conversation with an man about the need to protect national industries. He said he thought Argentina should open all commercial frontiers. I pointed out, as kindly as I could, that the US protects its own industry and that I believed we should do the same. He did not deny the protection (which was what I expected). He said in a kind, slow, voice, as when one talks to a child: But there is a difference. We have an industry to protect. You don't. I was astounded by the ignorance of the statement but more than that, by the innocence of the remark. He did not even realize what he had said was offensive: for him it was simple common sense. He was blind to his margin and from his center, my hometown, Buenos Aires, seemed (to him), not a big metropolis, but a preindustrial nineteenth-century village. …

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