MEXICAN FEMALE PORTRAYALS IN RECOLLECTIONS OF THINGS TO COME AND WOMEN WITH BIG EYES

Novelist Elena Garro set her first novel Recollections of Things to Come in 1926 to 1929 during the first Cristero War while Angeles Mastretta had Women with Big Eyes, a collection of stories, set in the1930s and 1940s after the Mexican Revolution. Their works of magical realism illustrate different aspects of Mexican women and fill in the gap of Mexican female writers writing about women at important junctions of Mexican history considering that most novelas de la guerracristera (Cristero War novels) are most often written by male writers who take on either a pro or anti-government stance. This paper discusses how Mexican women are portrayed as major characters in the Cristero Rebellion in Garro’s novel and as individual characters in the post-Cristero Revolution era in Women With Big Eyes. Moreover, the comparative analysis of these two literary works shows that Mexican women of a traditionally oriented society are not only capable of assuming leadership in a violent enterprise but can return to old conservative patterns when situations return to normal. They are an interesting mix of Mexican women archetypes with their own agency when the situation calls for strong action. In many ways, Mastretta and Garro have succeeded in using the magical realism genre to present the Mexican woman as a prominent figure during important crossroads of Mexican history and as an “ordinary” woman who has agency in a post-war world.