Claudia Schaefer’s Textured Lives studies the work of four major figures of twentieth-century Mexican culture: Frida Kahlo, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, and Angeles Mastretta. Each is examined in detail according to the book’s overall project of delineating and exploring the “cracks in the national edifice of modern Mexico and the expression of artistic voices of opposition to institutional power. Schaefer argues that the challenge to power through artistic representation may be effectively seen in the works of women, discourses “inextricably linked to their historical and social context. . .not autonomously in isolation from it (p. xii). Thus Textured Lives contributes to the growing bibliography on Latin American women with an analysis of visual and narrative forms treated in a social context.
Schaefer’s four chapters are written in clear, academic prose for an interdisciplinary audience. Little is taken for granted here beyond a basic familiarity with the four female subjects; each text or painting is described carefully, though description never replaces critical discourse. In the case of Kahlo, the absence of any illustrations beyond that on the book’s cover is a potential problem. Many readers may need to refer to plates in other books to fully appreciate Schaefer’s suggestive “reading” of Kahlo’s painting through the aesthetic of magical realism.
Since Textured Lives aims to fill gaps in the critical bibliography on Castellanos and Poniatowska, Schaefer focuses on neglected aspects of each writer’s work. The chapter on Castellanos’ literary journalism is especially good, providing insights into the national project of the Instituto Indigenista and Castellanos’ own complicated relationship to the state during and after the Cárdenas regime. The reading of Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (Dear Diego) and Gaby Brimmer concentrates on the way Poniatowska transforms letters written by other women into a fictional-nonfictional testimonial narrative. Schaefer’s analysis of these texts in the framework of post-1968 Mexico is less convincing than her other chapters, and the social connection between life and art in the two texts at times seems rather forced.
A prior reading of Mastretta’s novel Arráncame la vida (Mexican Bolero) will greatly enhance the reader’s understanding of chapter 4. Schaefer makes a valuable contribution here, because Mastretta has become very well known in Mexico but remains almost unstudied in North America. The examination of the controversy aroused by Mastretta’s “appropriation and alteration of the concepts and genre of the historical novel” (p. xiv) provides a stimulating glimpse into the complicated politics of today’s Mexico and its relationship to the icons of the past.
According to Schaefer’s introduction, Jean Franco’s Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (1989) appeared just as Textured Lives was brought to completion. The coincidence of subject matter will force an inevitable and unfair comparison between two quite different books. Franco’s is a sweepingly ambitious text that covers many Mexican narratives, from the colonial period to the present. Schaefer’s project is more contained and modest, but it has the advantage of bringing the reader right up to the present moment of rapid change in Mexico, through a well-researched study of modern culture inclusive of women’s history and work.
