Latin American and US Latina women writers have represented mothers at many levels of the socio-economic spectrum.[1] With the impetus of feminism in the 1970s and increased publishing opportunities in the 1980s, liberated female characters – including those who deviate from the sacrosanct expectations of motherhood – became popular in women’s fiction. Most often, though, contemporary writers appropriate the patriarchal mother figure to defy tradition and publicly critique mothers as promoters of orthodox gender indoctrination. In my research on the topic, daughter narratives tend to use the mother figure as platform for re-educating mothers in a feminist vein and, through them, teaching the next generation to interrogate masculinist values, including compulsory reproduction. Despite the proliferation of Latin American and US Latina literary production and the popularity of the mother figure in women’s writings since the 1980s, the biological aspects of motherhood are seldom documented in this literature.[2] To recognize the work of Hispanic feminist writers who explicitly subvert the gag order on the female reproductive body, this discussion focuses on the plays Baby boom en el paraíso (Baby boom in paradise) (1996)[3] by Costa Rican Ana Istarú and Una guerra que no se pelea (An unfought war) (2002)[4] by Peruvian Sara Joffré, the novel Los trabajadores de la muerte (Workers of death) (1998) by Chilean Diamela Eltit, and the journal-based memoir Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood (1997) by Mexican-American Cherríe Moraga. These texts, which are radical in their sustained depiction of pregnancy, and others that tangentially bring up experiences associated with maternity suggest a new direction for writing the biological body into Hispanic women’s literature.[5] These writers are contributing to a discourse of pregnancy in fiction, an inscription that is currently recorded only in sociological and clinical studies on the reproductive lives of Latin American women (Hanson 5).

The gap between the depiction of motherhood as social construct and the physiology of maternity is not confined to the literature of developing countries or non-mainstream groups within industrialized economies. Suzette A. Henke laments the dearth of women’s fiction writings – American as well as European – that “articulate the problem of reproductive reality” and “woman’s reproductive vulnerability” (46–47). Why, she asks, do even bold feminist writers shy away from concerns about contraception, venereal disease, and pregnancy (46)?[6] To attempt to answer Henke’s question within a Latin American historical framework, it is of vital importance to consider the overwhelming significance of the Virgin Mary as a model and cultural icon for Hispanic women.

In Latin America the Spanish Conquest and the colonialism that ensued imposed the Catholic faith and its veneration of the Virgin Mary to evangelize the indigenous populations and wipe out their gods, whose worship the Spanish considered idolatry (Ruether, Goddesses 190). Throughout the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors and the Conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth century, the Spanish relied on the Virgin’s power to protect them from harm and to legitimize their violence, as warriors in battle on the homeland peninsula and as conquistadors of foreign territories (Hall 4). The Virgin’s image on religious paraphernalia such as banners, scapulars, medals, and statues assured the sincerely pious that she was looking over them (Hall 4–6). Mother Mary has been portrayed to generations of Catholics as obedient, humble, and pure, but also powerful in her capacity to protect, heal, and help conquer adversity.[7] An oxymoron in the flesh – at once both virgin and mother – Mary is held up as the mirror of all the virtues women should emulate. Exalted for her respectability and as an inimitable exemplar of procreativity, Mother Mary has ruled over Catholic girls’ and women’s lives with an iron fist (Morgan 210).

Linda Hall, who for decades has studied the veneration of Mary and its manifestations in the lives of Latin Americans as well as Latinos in the United States, observes that “Mary presents an impossible ideal for living women, a mother without sexuality,” and, “in fact, it is to this impossible model that women turn for comfort in their failings and sorrows and for help in their necessities” (2). Mary’s popular “Virgin Mother” title highlights patriarchy’s mandates for female sexuality and reproduction.[8] Given Mary’s widespread and centuries-long stronghold in the Hispanic world as the veiled Madonna, the very embodiment of female modesty, it is not surprising that Latin American and US Latina women writers refrained from overt depictions of mothers birthing (Morgan 209). Commonly regarded as the leading mother figure within Catholic tradition, Mary incarnates the erasure of women’s reproductive concerns (Ruether, Mary 31–36). The Bible would have women believe that Mary readily accepted the unusual circumstance of her son’s conception and did not worry about sexuality or fear pregnancy.[9] And while God’s injunction against Eve to bear children in pain fell on all women, Mary, it seems, did not manifest pain when delivering Jesus in that barn. As gleaned from the Bible , even when allusions to pregnancy appear in print, it is the product (the child), and not the process (childbirth) that has historically mattered to humankind.[10]

Veering sharply from the safe zone of Catholic mores and masculinist values in Costa Rican society, Ana Istarú dared to prioritize pregnancy as process in Baby boom en el paraíso because women of her generation had benefitted from advances and reform within a long constitutionally rooted democracy (Lavrin 248).[11] Couched in humour for easier consumption, the play focuses on Ariana, a middle-class working woman in a stable marriage, whose experience of motherhood begins with the fear of infertility. This guilt-ridden and anxiety-filled period experienced by those who postpone child-bearing reflects a trend that both female and male readers or audiences can relate to as more contemporary dual-career couples delay the arrival of their first child. In the play Istarú explores a myriad of gender biases related to both the pre- and post-conception periods, as well as to pregnancy and birthing, all the while subverting the idealization of motherhood through Ariana’s sarcasm. From blaming women for infertility, to the sexual marathons that couples engage in to conceive, to the social pressures of producing a boy or the stress of dealing with relatives (not to mention coping with the degradations that the medical establishment proffers the pregnant female), Ariana’s acerbic observations about her condition and how others react to it highlight attitudes about motherhood that normally remain unexamined. With medical accuracy, Ariana registers prenatal care, such as the fetal ultrasound procedure, as well as bodily changes and obstetric interventions that could well serve to instruct a population lacking access to maternity literature (Istarú 34, 47–48, 53, 57). The protagonist also raises awareness about feelings of indignity and vulnerability at a time in a woman’s life that remains, for the most part, veiled in silence and isolation. Hence, Istarú shares insights on the state of both mind and body of the expectant mother.

In her biographical work The Country Under My Skin (2002) award-winning Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli recounts complaints similar to those fictionalized by Isratú. Belli records her angry reaction to a male medical system that infantilizes pregnant women: “Please, do me the favour of treating me like a human being,” she tells the doctor in charge of the maternity ward in which she was hospitalized during her third pregnancy. “I’m not stupid. I went to school. I know my body. I don’t need you to simplify things. The way you treat women here is an insult” (189). Belli then proceeds to describe her physical and emotional experience with an emergency caesarean section and the ensuing torment of receiving contradictory reports from medical staff about her baby’s survival.

Perhaps because the physical and emotional wounds suffered during pregnancy and birthing are specifically female experiences, Istarú uses humour to soften the public airing of the topic. In her study of stand-up comedy, Joanne Gilbert notes that although women hardly ever joke about rape, when it comes to performing marginality, “gynaecological humour may serve as a means to address and express women’s feelings of anger and victimization in a public context” (91). She argues further that “the violation a woman experiences in a gynaecologist’s office (particularly if the doctor is male) – the sense of powerlessness combined with anxiety, fear, humiliation, at times of physical pain, and always total objectification – may serve as a symbolic representation of the way in which women feel victimized by patriarchal culture” (91). For a female playwright like Istarú, whose staging opportunities are very limited, humour is a critical devise for drawing audiences to a performance that will expose them to an act of resistance that challenges and proposes change to Costa Rican constructions of gender. The term ‘critical’ accepts different but complementary connotations. Laughing at their own predicament is critical in the sense of crucial for the psychological well-being of women as subordinated people and critical as a practice involving risk, one that turns into a vehicle for fault finding and judging unfavourably those in authority. In this sense, the subordinated group shows itself to be “skilful at or engaged in criticism.”[12]

In Istarú’s Baby boom en el paraíso, Ariana registers embarrassment throughout her pregnancy, but labour presents the ultimate humiliation to feminine propriety:

Baby boom en el paraíso ends with Ariana giving birth to a girl who will potentially experience birthing with similar dehumanization in a life continuum or the “bridge between generations” that Jungian analyst Naomi Lowinsky calls the motherline (287). Whenever and wherever women gather in pairs or groups, they tell one another stories about women’s physical, psychological, and historical experiences. Lowinsky observes that these tales

Lowinsky’s argument about the segregated, private nature of women’s talk about intimate, physical matters is exemplified in Angeles Mastretta’s Tear This Heart Out (1997)/Arráncame la vida (1985), a novel about upper-middle-class political brokers in Mexico. Mastretta has her protagonist comment on the nature and segregation of women’s talk. The female protagonist notes that at social gatherings “the dinners always split like that, the men on one side and us on the other, talking about births, servants, and hairdos” (75). However brief the recording of the protagonist’s experience, Mastretta has a hand in offering a female perspective in print and, thus, helps to redress the dearth of recorded women’s talk that critics such as Lowinsky bemoan. For example, in the novel the protagonist recalls pregnancy as a dreadful time in her life:

The gender-laden aspect ascribed to the terms ‘history’ and ‘herstory’ in feminist-centred discussions of the exclusion or silence of women in dominant cultural narratives finds a similar paradigm in the Spanish concepts of machismo and marianismo. For Hispanics, ‘machismo’ (from the Spanish word for male, ‘macho’) popularly denotes male dominance, the imposition of men’s will (often by force) in the world in general and on women in particular. Hence ‘machismo’ has come to be used interchangeably with ‘sexism’ or male chauvinism in common parlance. Its counterpart, ‘marianismo,’ coined in 1973 by political scientist Evelyn P. Stevens, encapsulates Hispanic culture’s pattern of expectations for women – acceptable female behaviour linked to the ideal of the Virgin Mary prevalent in Latin America (90). Stevens defined ‘marianismo’ as “the cult of feminine superiority,” which attributes to women a moral and spiritual strength manifested as abnegation, silent suffering, and an “infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice” (94). Just as Istarú portrays in her play, Stevens observed that a Latin American or Latina woman is expected to “be complaisant toward her own mother and her mother-in-law for they, too, are reincarnations of the great mother. She is also submissive to the demands of the men: husbands, sons, fathers, brothers” (95).

Although Stevens’s notion of marianismo has been complicated by scholars since her initial articulation of the concept, the term has nonetheless survived, as the gender biases and feminine traits that Stevens identified continue to reflect the oppressive and self-repressive aspects of women’s daily lives within patriarchal Hispanic communities.[13] Because of the continued prevalence of marianismo within many Latin American and Latina women’s lives, psychotherapists Rosa María Gil and Carmen Inoa Vázquez brought Stevens’s academic discussion of the concept before the general public in the United States with their 1996 book, The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-Esteem,

The Maria Paradox connects the Virgin Mother (Maria) to Hispanic women’s predicaments in modern society. In their work, the authors articulate (in decidedly biblical language) “The Ten Commandments of Marianismo,” the top ten cultural directives Latinas must learn to recognize and modify if they wish to possess both a sense of community and self-esteem in American society. Motherhood as a patriarchal edict lies at the core of the behavioural traits that Stevens, Gil, Vázquez, and other researchers identify with respect to Hispanic women. For, despite the alterations in gender roles and increasing career options that contemporary Latina women have experienced, the socialization of the next generation still falls chiefly on mothers. Hispanic mothers are still charged with raising girls who will conduct themselves in a manner that upholds their reputation, honours the family, and makes them a desirable candidate for marriage and, ultimately, motherhood.

Prevalent attitudes among many Hispanic populations about a woman’s inherent reproductive role and the central importance of women’s roles as mothers mirror those once commonly espoused by European women before the widespread acceptance of feminism. First-wave feminist Simone de Beauvoir began her 1949 groundbreaking book The Second Sex with a one word question: “Woman?” Donning a male point of view, she answered: “Very simple [...] she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female – this word is sufficient to define her” (3). In one way or another, the four authors studied here all voice a similar discontent with this oppressively limited definition of women as wombs. These authors also seek to reinvent notions about women, reproduction, and motherhood by rejecting the imposition of marianismo. In Baby boom en el paraíso, Ariana is desperate to become pregnant because, after five years of marriage and equal time in therapy to overcome her fear of giving birth, family, friends, and neighbours expect her to have her first baby. Istarú represents and decries the woman/womb paradigm still common in Costa Rica’s historically agrarian culture, where the progeny-prosperity dichotomy has been traditionally linked to the number of hands available in a family to work the land.

In her play Una guerra que no se pelea, Peruvian dramatist Sara Joffré, in turn, focuses on the high incidence of abortion to showcase Peruvian women’s refusal to be defined as womb and forced to procreate against their will. Author Diamela Eltit presents another manifestation of women’s wish to recuperate procreative control in her novel Los trabajadores de la muerte when a Chilean mother’s inability to prevent her pregnancies and postpartum trauma drive her to contemplate infanticide as a way to take charge of her life. At its core, Cherríe Moraga’s autobiographical writing about her experience as a Mexican-American lesbian mother defies heterosexual society’s monopoly on procreation, an injunction so ingrained in Hispanic women that Moraga must revise her initial thinking that giving birth is at odds with her self-identity as a butch (20). Ultimately, these Hispanic writers’ objective also coincides with the intent of first-wave, and even some second-wave, feminists, who agreed with de Beauvoir’s call to shift the perception of women from limited beings associated to nature and domesticity to that of whole persons capable of contributing to the realm of culture and public enterprise privileged by men.[14]

As critic Iris Marion Young explains, according to de Beauvoir, women’s oppression is rooted in a patriarchal culture that heavily identifies women with biology and their feminine nature, by which it justifies their servility and exclusion from participation in economic and cultural production in the public sphere (“Humanism” 232). Although by the mid-1970s many middle-class Latin American women were reading North American and European feminist works such as The Second Sex that allied them with the struggles of their Anglo counterparts, the imported strategies and objectives produced much ambivalence because Hispanic women found it difficult to reconcile feminism with femininity (Lavrin 249). After all, de Beauvoir espoused liberation from femininity because it enforced behaviours in women to ensure that they pleased, cared for, sexually serviced, and reproduced for men, acts that stunted women’s self-development as human subjects and reduced them to embodied objects of the male gaze, male needs, and male desire (Young, “Humanism” 233). Moraga’s self-identification as butch corroborates de Beauvoir’s rejection of femininity as a liability to women. However, in Latin America this stance was at odds with marianismo and, thus, kept feminism at bay for many women wary of “an ideology responsible for fostering antagonism between the genders while robbing women of their special ‘feminine’ nature and masculinizing them” (Lavrin 251). An unfeminine woman, a macha or marimacha, was looked upon with suspicion. Moreover, the fear of being tagged a lesbian crippled the pace of the dissemination, adoption, and legitimation of feminism across ethno-socio-economic spheres in Latin America (Kaminsky xiv). Feminism was unsettling for Hispanic women. While they recognized de Beauvoir’s humanist feminist position that “defines gender difference as accidental to humanity” and could agree with her argument for gender liberation on the basis that women have been kept from developing their full human potential by a patriarchal society that allows the self-development of men, what feminists were proposing was culturally problematic in Latin America because it followed that if women wanted to be taken seriously, the intellect would have to overshadow the feminine (Young, “Humanism” 231, 233).

In her 1980 study of women’s autobiographies in France, Nancy K. Miller found that “autobiology is not the subtext of auto-bio-graphy” (263). In keeping with de Beauvoir’s theoretical stance on suppressing the feminine, the autobiographers that Miller analyzed downplayed the maternal and emphasized the intellectual. The dearth of women’s fiction recording female reproduction that Henke has noted is a response to the long struggle within the ‘white euro-centric’ feminist movement to disassociate women from their biology and focus, instead, on their full participation in society. In the case of Hispanic women writers, the silence surrounding women’s birthing experiences has been twofold. On the one hand, the Virgin Mother, as symbol of female morality, embodies patriarchy’s attempt to dictate women’s modesty and, thus, inhibit their self-expressions about the female body and its functions (Morgan 209–10). On the other hand, while Hispanic women have resisted aspects of white, middle-class women’s feminism that tout the suppression of femininity, the market realities of the publishing industry exacted erasure of the biological body in literature. Despite their roles as mothers, women writers had to keep in mind that men typically ruled as acquisitions editors, publishing house owners, and literary contest judges. Hence, Hispanic women writers too have long practised the “mothers by accident of nature, writers by design” paradigm that Miller identifies (265).

Hispanic foremothers, some who published as early as the 1930s and were models of the craft, wrote about women’s lives and even ventured to include nonconformist female characters, but they kept quiet about the intimacies of female bodily functions.[15] Even among those who inscribed feminist ideas into their fiction, literary depictions of childbirth would have violated expectations about female propriety in a cultural tradition in which discretion about everything connected with the female body is inculcated with rigor in girls from a young age. If published, such topics would have made for shocking reading and would likely not have been marketable. During the surge of women’s liberation and feminism in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, female authors who managed to publish their work did not overstep the tacit gag order on female reproduction.[16] Each generation of writers since these decades has learned from the example of their published predecessors that making it into print required attending to “the body of her writing and not the writing of her body” (Miller 271).

On the political front, the body was literally catapulted to centre stage and page across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, when military attempts to suppress opposition in Central and South America unwittingly caused numerous regular citizens and writers to document the disappeared, maimed, and tortured bodies of those who had fallen victim to brutal repression.[17] During those decades, and in keeping with their socially acceptable roles as concerned mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, and citizens, many Latin American feminist writers exposed the viciousness of dictatorial rule in their homelands and patriarchal oppression from their men folk at home. Eventually, reports of the physical brutalities routinely committed against Latin Americans seeped into international news reports, as did coverage of the courageous public outcry organized by mothers of the disappeared, mostly housewives turned activists who demanded to know the whereabouts of their secretly incarcerated or slain children.[18] I posit that this connection between a progeny’s tortured body and a mother’s public manifestation of anguish – Jesus crucified and Mater Dolorosa, the iconography of the Madonna and child – provided the precedent and public sensibility that paved the way for Hispanic women writers to inscribe the physicality of pregnancy and birthing, with all of its deformation and torment. As marginal groups are bound to do in their push for inclusion in mainstream society and its modes of production, Latin American and US Latina women writers had by the 1990s stretched the parameters of acceptable canonical topics enough to open up public space for the inclusion of intimate female bodily experiences.

Besides the social exigency to focus on the Latin American persecuted body en masse in the 1970s and 1980s, in my estimation, the recording of female bodily experiences in women’s texts would not have been possible without the parallel Eurocentric theorizing produced by a shift in feminist criticism “from revisionary readings [of men’s texts from a feminist perspective] to a sustained investigation of literature by women,” which Elaine Showalter articulated in her influential essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” (184). Among other feminist scholars that contributed to this new direction in critical focus, Showalter credits Patricia Meyer Spacks, Ellen Moers, Nina Baym, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.[19] To describe the specialized critical discourse needed to make women’s writing the primary subject of feminist criticism, Showalter coined the term ‘gynocritics’ (185).[20] Her questions, How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group? and What is the difference of women’s writing? pointed to biology as essential difference. Certainly for Hispanic women writers, including pregnancy as a viable topic of literature ascribes to a bold practice of gynocentrism within a literary tradition in which the mother figure is often both fundamental and problematic.

Notably, critics point out how “a history of feminist thought [ ...] has argued that seeing the mother as subject, a person with her own needs, feelings, and interests, is critical to fighting against the dread and the devaluation of women” (Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan 2). Such an observation befits the pregnant woman whose experience is rarely talked about in mixed company or represented in literary texts or theatrical performance, especially in Hispanic communities. Given expectations for Hispanic women’s modesty, capacity for silent suffering, and self-denial in service to others, focusing on themselves and on their bodies breaks with tradition. This is why a woman’s ability to reflect on and speak about her bodily experience is vital in altering myths and changing social realities specific to her sex, including those pertaining to pregnancy and birth (Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan 3). Despite the public forum taken up by the abortion rights and right to life movements in the United States, which would pertain to US Latinas, for most Latin American women, the displacement of pregnancy and birthing to the private realm persists because within their highly patriarchal communities the male perspective is still typically taken as the norm and viewed as universal (Gilbert 94).[21]

In her 1976 work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, award- winning poet, essayist, and feminist literary critic Adrienne Rich espoused a gynocentric shift in literary interpretation, and publicly recognized the many issues surrounding women’s experiences in, and perceptions of, the female body. “I know no woman – virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate – whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves – for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings” (284). Pointing to the failings of humanist feminism, Rich noted that “the fear and hatred of our bodies has often crippled our brains. Some of the most brilliant women of our time are still trying to think from somewhere outside their female bodies” (284). As legacy to the political circumstances in Latin America and the spread of feminist views such as Rich’s, some Hispanic women writers took charge of narrating the lived experience of the silenced, devalued, and marginalized female body.

Almost three decades after the publication of Rich’s seminal work, Lynday Birke asserted in her work on women and physicality that “bodies [...] are troublesome. Despite their (re)discovery by social theorists in the last two decades, they remain problematic” (25). When asking “how do we begin to think about ‘the body’ as having an inside – moreover, as having an inside that does things, all by itself? What kind of language do we have to talk about it?” Birke posits that “we might speak of interiority by considering the ‘lived experience’ of the body” (25–26). In their literary work, many contemporary Hispanic women writers draw upon the phenomenological approach that Birke suggests. Their texts present what a particular pregnant woman feels about pregnancy and birth, both mentally and physically. Given the Catholic and patriarchal traditions embedded in the practice of marianismo, broaching pregnancy, as authors such as Istarú do in their writings, constitutes a wilful transgression of literary tradition.

In her work, Mexican-American playwright Cherríe Moraga also writes to transgress tradition. She defies heterosexual reproduction by inscribing her perspective as lesbian woman and mother. In Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood, Moraga journals the intimacies of conception, pregnancy, birth, and its aftermath. The poignant entries document her artificial insemination and the bodily changes that occur over the period of twenty-eight weeks, culminating in a harrowing fight for the life of her premature baby. Moraga articulates the pregnant body as a procreative wonder but also as ailing flesh and psyche, the type of complex and candid reflection that seldom makes it into print:

Drawing from examples in literature, mythology, and history, Nancy Houston concludes that the “social contract requires that every member of each sex pay his or her tithe of suffering: women are required to breed, just as men are required to brawl” (134). Although nature has assigned women the exclusive task of bringing forth life and, until recent history, cultures socialized only men to kill in war, both gender-laden experiences share common ground. As Houston’s fitting choice of terminology makes clear, there is a definite connection between the pain and chaos of birth and of battle. ‘To brawl,’ after all, means “to bray, to quarrel or fight noisily; wrangle, to drive or force down, out, by clamouring, quarrelling, etc.” (emphasis added).[22] Without epidural anaesthesia, the pain of “driving or forcing down and out” a baby during childbirth makes a woman’s holler as deafening as any war cry. As Moraga journals, “I had heard my neighbor-laborers screaming at the top of their lungs. ‘Ay, Mamacita!’ ‘Give me some damn drugs!’ [...] So I figure that whatever pain I got going (which was the most fierce physical pain I had ever experienced), it has to get worse” (52).

A woman’s fear of birthing is no different from a soldier’s dread of combat. Both soldiers and birthing women inevitably risk both harm and death. But whereas a man, if lucky, may return from war physically unscathed, there is no chance of this in birthing. In modern Western society, the episiotomy – the cut inflicted on the female body in preparation for the child’s birth – has no equivalent for the male soldier. There is no maternity without a wound. Feminist critics recognize that while men’s military feats have been made the subject of canonical literature and history, the ravages of women’s brawling have gone undocumented. Hence, it is important to note Hispanic women’s expressions of pregnancy and motherhood that do not romanticize the ordeal but rather focus on its physical dangers and difficulties.

Houston reminds us that “if women’s ‘wars’ generate less discourse than men’s [...] it is partly because the latter is a planned, organized, collective phenomenon, whereas the former is experienced in solitude. But discourse plays a large part in determining the way in which we see the world” (133). In this respect, Moraga’s unabashed journalling of her biological labour contributes to reversing the dearth of discourse on women’s reproductive experiences:

In addition to vividly detailing both the joy and fear she experienced during the birthing process, Moraga also documents the prejudices that lesbian mothers encounter in a heterosexual society by discussing the negative reactions that she received, even from some members of her own family.[24] Her writing about the lesbian maternal body makes a unique contribution to a much-needed corpus of body-centred writing by Hispanic women. By helping to shatter the double silence on the experiences of pregnancy and lesbian motherhood, Moraga’s voice reaches out to a large number of women not represented in mainstream literature.

A year after Waiting in the Wings appeared on the market in the United States, Chilean author Diamela Eltit published her seventh book, Los trabajadores de la muerte, in a country that was runner up only to Peru in the number of clandestine abortions performed in Latin America (“An Overview” para. 8, Table1).[25] The author’s intentional portrayal of a mother’s experiences as a subject of multiple subjugations is not new in Eltit’s long writing career, but her focus on pregnancy in Los trabajadores de la muerte purposefully corresponds to women’s reproductive realities in Chile.

In a chapter titled “La cigüeña” (The stork), the protagonist recalls at length the physical changes and ailments of her pregnant body: “El primer parto se prolongó por horas y en esas horas casi me mató. Casi me mataron los dolores tantísimos que nadie lo podría creer” (35) (The first baby’s labour took forever, it almost killed me. Nobody can imagine the excruciating pain that almost killed me). Details leading to the actual labour reveal the protagonist’s feelings of vertigo, the nausea from the pain, the vagina’s capacity to dilate to incredible proportions, the chills up and down the spine, the sensation of bones shifting, and the body splitting open. The protagonist remembers her resolve the day after giving birth that “No lo haré más, me dije” (39) (I won’t do this again, I told myself). Immediately, the new mother describes her life turned into a postpartum hell by the unceasing cries of a colicky baby. “Si me lo propongo puedo dejar de pensar, tengo que dejar de pensar y cuando mire por la ventana [...] se va a ir este dolor espantoso, este espantoso dolor de cabeza que desde hace tres días me está volviendo loca. Me voy a volver loca, totalmente loca con este dolor” (38–39) (If I set my mind to it, I’ll manage to stop thinking, I have to stop thinking and when I look out the window [...] this throbbing pain will go away, this throbbing headache that has been driving me crazy for three days now. I’m going to go mad, totally raving mad with this pain).

Eltit’s use of stream of consciousness to narrate the protagonist’s reproductive reality captures the intimate nature of her female character’s self-reflections and at the same time textually suggests that such experiences are seldom made the subject of public discourse. In keeping with the untidiness of memory, without transitions, the protagonist of Los trabajadores de la muerte recalls the ravages of her second pregnancy, which occurred shortly after her first. It becomes clear to the reader that although the years have blurred her recollection of which baby caused her which particular ailments, she has not forgotten the physical toll of the pregnancies:

In her fiction Eltit makes sure that the reproductive toll on the female body and psyche are not ignored. The nameless mother in the novel has been scarred for life by her experiences of pregnancy, birth, and child rearing, both physically and psychologically. For example, she bitterly laments her aching back, for which medical treatment is not possible: “Y ahora aquí estoy, torcida, medio curca, porque ya me [...] notificaron que ninguna medicina me puede ahora enderezar los huesos. Es muy tarde, se ha vuelto un mal irreversible. No puedo dormir pensando en mi espalda. ¿Qué fue lo que pasó con mi espalda? Daría dos años de lo que me queda de vida si mi espalda se enderezara. Daría hasta tres años” (41) (And now here I am, contorted, a bit hunchbacked, because I’ve already been told that there is no medicine to straighten out my bones. It’s too late. It has turned into an irreversible ill. I can’t sleep thinking about my back. What went wrong with my back? I would give two years of my life for a healed back. I would even give three years).

Besides the permanence of physical deformity, mental trauma is also evident in this mother’s ruminations. She thinks about her nerves being destroyed by howling babies and has feelings of dejection and angst at being caught between exhaustion and an obligatory love. Bone-weary from sleep deprivation, the protagonist recalls desperately wishing for one night of uninterrupted sleep, but she is also afraid of deep sleep, because her unconscious mind is plagued by recurring nightmares about infanticide. Repeatedly during the night, the mother would dream that she allowed her two babies to fall from a pier and then watched them wailing, struggling, and drowning until the sea swallowed them completely. In her dream her horrified husband demanded that she save the babies, but, instead, and without budging from the pier, she would let out uncontrollable guffaws.

As the novel progresses, the protagonist’s reflections on her experiences of motherhood continue to be quite bleak and despairing, as witnessed by the title of the first chapter of the novel’s second half, “Ahogar a la guagua” (Drown the baby). In it, the protagonist’s stream-of-consciousness narration rehashes ad nauseum all of her previous complaints. To an incessant litany about her chronic back pain and her babies’ colic, non-stop crying, ear infections, allergies, fevers, eye infections, teething, and skin irritations, the mother elaborates on her role as wife to an insensitive, abusive husband who unrelentingly exacts sexual services from her exhausted, even menstruating, body.[26] Through the perspective of a postpartum mother, Eltit portrays one Latin American family’s extreme dysfunction to critique a society in which gender construction economically disenfranchises women, impairs their self-autonomy, and condones reducing them to reproductive machines.

Much as the authors discussed so far tackle the sensitive issues of pregnancy and birth in their writing, dramatist Sara Joffré focuses on the yet more controversial subject of abortion in Una guerra que no se pelea. The play captures intimate stories about women’s procreative bodies, and, by centering abortion, thus undermines the patriarchal dictate of, as the biblical book of Genesis phrases it, “giving birth to your children in pain” (Gen 3:16). Originally written in 1979, the play’s audacious theme was more likely to appear in Peruvian or Mexican literature, because these nations became literary centres during the proliferation of dictatorships in other areas of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s (Lavrin 248).[27] In 1980 Peru held democratic elections and emerged from a twelve-year-long military regime that left a legacy of huge social and economic problems for the country (Kruijt 42). The nation’s disarray, however, “acted as catalyst for women in search of economic and gender equality and greater participation in nation rebuilding” (Lavrin 248). Tapping a cross-section of the population of Lima, Peru – touted as the ‘Abortion Capital of the World’ – Joffre’s play explores the magnitude of the country’s social problems, the lack of an adequate public policy to provide poor women with affordable contraceptive alternatives, and the experiences of pregnant women in society.[28] During this time period, his bloody ‘unfought war’ went largely overlooked because it affected women and children, the population’s most disfranchised citizens.

Far from the comedic relief that Costa Rican dramatist Istarú offers her audience about women’s transforming experiences in pregnancy, Joffré’s play depicts the proliferation of abortion in an avant-garde yet profoundly telling fashion, which offers a stark presentation of individual and social devastation. The female characters in Una guerra que no se pelea are called simply “she,” “wife,” “girlfriend,” “woman” or “worker.” In the play’s short vignettes, women – single, married, poor, middle-class, indigenous, and white – remain anonymous in their common anguish over unwanted pregnancy. Without demarcating scenes or acts, the play’s series of sketches portrays the torment of the female psyche and body in fragmented narratives that symbolize the truncated lives of the fetus, and sometimes the mother as well.

Although Joffré’s play is radical in its sole focus on the topic, abortion as a solution for unwanted pregnancy is present in many other Latin American texts. In the two-page short story “Opción,” Dominican writer Carmen Imbert (1986) glimpses the psychological impact on women who choose abortion as a solution to unwanted pregnancy. Using the same technique as Eltit does in her novel, Imbert’s stream-of-consciousness narrative allows the nameless protagonist to admit her sense of guilt after having had an abortion. “La cabeza te da vueltas sientes miles de deditios a tu alrededor y escuchas una voz que dice ‘mama’ y gritas, quieres irte con tu grito. Has vomitado, parece que quieres botar la angustia” (15) (Your head spins, you feel thousands of little fingers around you, and you hear a voice say “mommy” and you scream, you want to escape through your scream. You have vomited as if you wanted to pitch your anguish).

Women’s experiences of abortion also arise in Cuban novelist Teresa Dovalpage’s 2004 novel, Posesas de La Habana (Possessed by Havana). Despite the accessibility and legality of abortion in Cuba, in her stream-of-consciousness narrative, Dovalpage depicts her female protagonist’s humiliation at the hands of a male gynaecologist during her efforts to seek an abortion. The physical pain she experiences during the botched gynecological examination is compounded by her subsequent despair at being denied an abortion, which forces her into having the baby and dropping out of college.

As the following passage from the novel exemplifies, calling his patient ‘mamita’ and addressing her with the informal second person pronoun ‘tú,’ which is used in Cuban popular speech, further represents the doctor’s extremely unprofessional and disrespectful behaviour. Moreover, his escalating vulgarity suggests a total disregard for the proprieties that ought to be observed between patient and doctor:

Issues affecting women’s reproductive lives cut across ethnic, racial, political, and class lines.. In the novel Tear This Heart Out, Angeles Mastretta discusses abortion purely in terms of its impact on poor, working-class women. The hushed gossip of the women who employ domestic workers suggests the silence surrounding this issue. The narrator informs the reader that the wealthy female character Marilú “was right in the middle of the sala in her fox furs, as if there were no fire in the fireplace, telling all the other women how she’d fired a servant who had been with her ten years because she found out the girl was pregnant and had tried to get rid of the baby with a broomstick. ‘Frankly, I was horrified’” (72). Marilú’s disparagement of her long-time servant typifies the lack of commiseration the upper class in the novel generally shows the working poor. Moreover, the secrecy surrounding the abortion incident suggests that this female issue is left for women to resolve without involving their husbands, who have more important things to do. Yet, as political power brokers, the men would be the ones with the clout to institute social change to protect pregnant workers and their unborn children.

In contrast to Mastretta’s mute treatment of abortion, Joffré makes it the subject of public interjections from various segments of society, including doctors, a judge, journalists, employers, newscasters, medical students, and policy-makers who ponder the issue, albeit without finding a practical alternative or solution to the often distressing experiences of women seeking abortions, because, in the final analysis, patriarchy disavows the problem:

By denying the problem of procreative alternatives, patriarchy in Joffré’s play continues to propagate the ongoing, uncritical veneration of motherhood as institution. Moreover, as literary scholar Margo Milleret points out, such idealization “rewards mothers for their sacrifice of self but not for their attempts to become their own person” (90). Joffré’s staging of women’s unwillingness to carry pregnancy to term undermines masculinist values not only by representing an issue outside the scope of male experience but also in defying the traditional image of sacrificial and nurturing mother essential for keeping patriarchy afloat. In Latin America, too, “the loving respect paid to mothers,” as Milleret observes, “hides the fact that their power is authorized through men and the Roman Catholic Church” (92). By offering the meek and humble Virgin Mary as the primary representative of virtuous womanhood, the Catholic Church helps to support a rigidly patriarchal social structure in many Latin American countries.

The feminine voices at the end of Joffré’s play both recognize and protest the mandate of compulsory motherhood and the punitive consequences of not abiding by the pre-scripted gender contract:

The hostility that surrounds the issue of abortion in many Hispanic communities correlates in intensity to the negativity that critic Emily Martin attributes to notions of menstruation as a failed production – the womb as “disused factory, failed business, idle machine” (75). Joffré and Dovalpage depict women who are humiliated and punished for seeking abortions because, as Martin interprets the social injunction against them, these women “are not reproducing, not continuing the species, not preparing to stay at home with the baby, not providing a safe, warm womb to nurture a man’s sperm” (75). In Una guerra que no se pelea, Joffré portrays women determined to take ownership of their bodies, even at the risk of endangering their lives. Her play asks social institutions to address female-specific issues such as abortion with conviction and to rapidly and forcefully implement change. On the Peruvian battleground of reproductive rights and alternatives, abortion remains a bloody field strewn with women’s maimed and dead bodies, a graphic reminder of the difficulties surrounding women’s challenges to the masculinist value of compulsory procreation.

Throughout their fiction and their non-fiction, contemporary Hispanic feminist writers bring public attention to the physical, emotional, and social issues of pregnant women. In a phenomenology of reproduction, they inscribe the physical and emotional consciousnesses of women as they perceive pregnancy and birth, in all of their many manifestations. The authors analyzed in this study record experiences seldom voiced in public. By providing a gynocentric reading of these important texts, this study aims to further the recognition of pregnancy as a female biological function worthy of being inscribed further into the female Hispanic literary tradition. Although there remains a dearth of such texts, the achievement of these authors in publishing candid, thoughtful considerations of these subjects provides evidence that they have, at least in part, overcome the injunctions of humanist feminism and its well-intentioned proponents, who call on women to disassociate from their bodies to liberate themselves from patriarchal oppression (Spelman 126). Whether inscribing pregnancy taken to term or terminated, the Latin American and US Latina authors analyzed here manage to undermine masculinist values that privilege the literary representation of the dominant group’s experiences. On the page or on the stage, the works in this study make significant headway towards raising consciousness about issues related to a primal experience shared by a significant percentage of the world’s population.