Mujeres en transito examines in detail the insightful
accounts of four prominent female writers who traveled to and from
Latin America in the nineteenth century: the French Peruvian
socialist and activist Flora Tristan (1803-44), the Argentines
Juana Manuela Gorriti (1816-92), Eduarda Mansilla (1834-92), and
the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909). Each author
traveled and wrote in different and significant moments in the
history of the Latin American nations, and their texts touch upon
the nature of hemispheric and European cross-cultural
relations.
Mujeres en transito revises the limited consideration that
women's travelogues have received within the Latin American
literary tradition. It demonstrates how women's commentaries on
their own and other nations speak to their own engagement in the
project of modern citizenship. More importantly, the act of
traveling often helps female authors challenge the strictly
political, legal, and geographic conceptions of nationhood and
national identity articulated in canonical texts. Their improved
yet marginal position in society as women, their particular reasons
to travel, and the personal and symbolic connections with more than
one nation or culture lead these four women to articulate a
"transnational imaginary" through which they revise the categories
of gender, class, modernity, and cultural homogeneity that shaped
nineteenth century Latin American societies.