A poetic notion of the Mexican homeland: Esther Tapia de Castellanos and the nineteenth-century nationalist poetry

Abstract

The poetic work of Esther Tapia de Castellanos is a key piece for the understanding of two fundamental cultural phenomena in the process of construction of the national project of the Mexican liberals; from the perspective of the political use of literature, it contributes to the configuration of one / another sense of Homeland, because his poems propose feminine images that endow the face of the nation with the idea of a nation that tried to settle down in those years; from the purely literary representation, his poetry is full of portraits of the must be of the Mexican woman. In the communion of both aspects Esther Tapia’s poetry  is, at the same time, an exercise of acceptance of the roles traditionally imposed on women and a subversive act against them, if we consider that the incursion of women in the field of the literary creation goes beyond the limits of the closed and intimate space of the home and appropriates the public scenarios reserved for the male. In this paper we propose an approach to the poems of Esther Tapia that were published in the nineteenth century press. We took as a starting point the notion of Homeland to analyze from the poetic mechanisms employees, the way in which the female subject is refracted in the texts of this author.