The Jewish Latin American Voice of
Marjorie Agosín: Some Thoughts on Her Work

It is difficult to research women’s writing from Latin America without running across the work of Marjorie Agosín. She is both a productive commentator and anthologist of women’s writing and a prolific author herself. Agosín was born in the United States but raised in Chile where, in the early twentieth century, her Jewish paternal and maternal grandparents had emigrated from Europe. Agosín received her early education at the Instituto Hebreo in Santiago, becoming proficient in Hebrew in addition to her native Spanish. With the imminent military takeover and rise to power of Augusto Pinochet in the early 1970s, Agosín’s parents moved the family to the United States. She earned a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Indiana University with a dissertation on Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal (1910-80). Agosin has been teaching at Wellesley College for some twenty years, and has established a considerable reputation as an academic and a creative writer.

One of Agosín’s overriding concerns throughout her work—particularly her nonfiction—involves issues of human rights, with special emphasis on women’s experience in Latin America. She has, for example, written extensively on the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Chilean arpilleristas, documenting the often heroic struggle of women against political repression in these two Southern Cone nations when they were ruled by neofascist military governments. Agosín has also been a tireless promoter of Latin American women’s writing in translation, compiling numerous anthologies that have made the works of many authors available to an English-language readership for the first time. One of her major achievements has been to showcase this body of writing as innovative, diverse, and exceptional by highlighting the erotic, fantastic, testimonial, feminist, and subaltern perspectives found in the works of Latin American women writers. Likewise, she has produced a number of volumes that provide a critical appraisal of Latin American women’s literature and cultural production.

As a literary author herself, Agosín began writing as a poet and concentrates her creative efforts mainly in that genre. Her poems comprise a vast geography of topics and subjects; but in general, they reveal a sensibility toward emotion and passion as essential to the human experience. One can identify in her poetry a need to express the power of love, empathy, and compassion as a means of survival and, ultimately, as sources of empowerment. While in her poems she often writes about other writers (Brujas y algo más – “Witches and Other Things,” 1984), historical figures (Dear Anne Frank, 1994), women’s political and social struggles (Circles of Madness, 1992), and even geographical spaces (Toward the Splendid City, 1994), Agosín’s approach is always a highly personal one as she shares with the reader her own intimate relationship with the subject.

Most recently, Agosín has begun to address the topic of the Jewish experience in Latin America. As with her previous work, she does so specifically within the context of how that experience has been lived out by women. She is the editor of both critical and literary compilations on the subject of Jewish women’s writing: Passion, Memory, and Identity: Twentieth-century Latin American Jewish Women Writers (1999), The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America (1999), and a forthcoming volume of poetry in translation titled In Myriam’s Words. Agosín’s own self-identification as a Jewish Latin American woman has been a constant in her writing, beginning with the collection of poems Conchalí (1980), named for the Jewish cemetery in Santiago. In subsequent volumes of poetry she has written rather poignantly on her relationship to such specifically Jewish-centered themes as the Holocaust, Jerusalem, Anne Frank, and more. In her volume of short stories, La felicidad (Happiness, 1991), she writes more openly and extensively on the Jewish presence and experience in her native Chile. Her two most recent works on this topic, A Cross and a Star: Memories of a Jewish Girl in Chile (1995) and Always from Somewhere Else: A Memoir of My Chilean Jewish Father (1998), are her attempt to recover and preserve the family history and memory. At the same time, these volumes serve as a broader record of the Jewish experience in Chile. Both volumes, written as memoirs, can be read as pseudo-novels that combine history, (auto)biography, anecdote, and visual archive (both contain photographs of Agosín’s family) in a style that is eloquent, intimate, and informative.

Marjorie Agosín’s contributions to Latin American literature are irrefutably valuable. Her untiring efforts to promote women’s writing, and her particularly feminist articulation of the issues that affect Latin American women in general, have made her a prominent figure and earned her a reputation in both academic and non-academic circles. Her own literary works, moreover, constitute a unique talent in women’s writing expressed through her lyrical, feminist, and always engaging voice.

Darrell B. Lockhart
Center for HGPS Board Member