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The Sepliardic Jewish community's contribution within Mexican society (as well as the female's within the Sephardic patriarchy) was overlooked in contemporary cultural portrayals until recently, when Rosa Nissan challenged the official story-both in Sephardic tradition and in the greater Mexican hegemonic system-with her recent stories that collect and portray the cultural memory of a people who are both Mexican and Jewish.
In Mexico, novelists Laura Esquivel and Angeles Mastretta soared to international fame during the late twentieth century, while other prolific women writers have remained largely unknown outside of Spanish-language readership, and this despite their creative work on collective identity and the female role in Mexican history. Recently, however, writers such as Elena Poniatowska, Carmen Boullosa, and Rosa Nissan are being discovered in English translation. Nissan is the newest; her texts not only restore a female perspective to the Mexican official story, but they also empower the female within a sub-ethnic/cultural group in Mexico: the Mexican-Sephardic. This author's creative strategy is to explore cultural representation by means of geographical site and a collective memory portrayed by telling a tale not previously represented. The viewpoint from which the representation emanates is as important as the site itself; thus, vision intersects with representation. Recent theory shows that such an endeavour is situated within an analysis of discourses about the other (Duncan 39).
Nissan's oeuvre creates a dual representation of the other: the contemporary SephardicMexican citizen whose parents immigrated to this hemisphere, and the female who has not been recognized as equal to her male counterpart. Thus, she explores "sites of memory" (Katriel 103) not previously documented for her gender, while also documenting her heritage within Mexican history. Nissan's physical presence and expertise as a Mexican of Sephardic heritage lay the groundwork for her discourse.
Nissan is a prolific writer: her first three books published since 1992 recuperate and document the story of the overlooked Jewish-Mexican of Sephardic tradition, whose language is an archaic Hebrew-Spanish. A book of short stories (No solo para dormir es la noche) and a recent novel (Los viajes de mi cuerpo) focus on women's lives in contemporary Mexico City. Other contemporary authors seek to reveal the Jewish Diaspora in Latin America; however, it is principally that of the Ashken-azim, those who speak...