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Abstract: During the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848), Mexican women published poems that tested the boundaries of conventional definitions of female subjectivity and domesticity. Central to the construction of female authorship was the idea of a collective women's voice, a "lyrical sisterhood" that situated the individual poetic voice within a broader historical tradition and a contemporaneous coalition of women writers. In speaking out about the war, women poets foregrounded their symbolic authority to exalt Mexican resistance to the invader, to decry Mexico's political and military failures, or to measure the horrors of war. In doing so, they self-consciously used gender to blur the distinction between the public and domestic spheres.
One of the most promising areas of future research into literature and national identity in early Republican Mexico is the literature of the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848. Mexican literary responses to the U.S. invasion of its territory, and to Mexico's continued defeats on the battlefield, constitute an invaluable archive for examining the emergence of Mexican nationalism. Indeed, during the war and its aftermath, Mexican writers recognized the value of national unity as they never had before, because they saw their defeat on the battlefield as a function of their political disunity. "A nation is nothing but a large family," wrote the distinguished moderado writer Mariano Otero (1848/2010, 139) in his 1848 assessment of Mexico's defeat, "and for this to be strong and powerful, it is necessary for all its members to be intimately joined by common interest and other feelings of the heart."1 Such fraternal bonds did not take root between 1821 and 1848, when pronunciamientos and struggles between centralists and federalists, as well as puro and moderado federalists, destabilized the state (see Santoni 1995; Costeloe 2002). Yet the outbreak of the war, and the threat posed by the invading U.S. Army, afforded Mexican writers with a nationalist vision that transcended sectarianism. Literature, particularly poetry, gave writers an alternative to the highly partisan political tracts that populated Mexico's newspapers. As the stuffof individual feeling and sensibility, poetry enabled Mexicans to engage with their mythological or historical forefathers, imagine a collective victory against the northern aggressor, and evoke images of their nation's greatness.
In the largely forgotten corpus of Mexican poetry published during the war, women's poetry...