UC Santa Barbara

“Mujeres bravas: respresentaciones de agencia femenina y heroicidad en épicas inversas de la literatura fronteriza entre México y los Estados Unidos” examines critical feminist interventions and the representation of women’s historical function through an analysis of female characters in historical novels from the northern Mexican border and southwestern United States. This study brings together a literary corpus to create a genealogy of inverted epics (épicas inversas) by Mexican and Chicana writers a response to the invisibility of the historical function of border women as active agents. I argue that the novels of Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory (2009) by Emma Pérez, La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora (1990) by Brianda Domecq and Las rebeldes (2011) by Mónica Lavín, constitute a feminist intervention, or what Assia Mossihne calls “épica inversa” from the traditional epic, as the characters’ female agency question the official history of both countries to make visible the quotidian heroism of women. Therefore, this study identifies a series of strategies that women writers use to re-signify and articulate the idea of heroism in alternative histories that claim the epic potential of anonymous heroines who have gone unnoticed by history. The study offers a new approach to border studies and Latino/Chicana literature in the United States since it aims to recover the heroines of other bi-borderlands historical episodes besides the Mexican Revolution, such as the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 and the Tomóchic Rebellions in the 1890s.

The structure of this study is divided into two parts. The first part presents three chapters which document the literary historical context in which the épica inversa was developed, as well as the key concepts of the theoretical framework that enables the analysis of our literary corpus, to culminate with a brief literary genealogy. Chapter one focuses on the heroic ideal of the epic genre from its classical origin to the present feminist intervention of an épica inversa to demonstrate the metamorphosis it has endured. The chapter two, identifies the bi-referential and bi-borderlands theoretical framework to understand the analysis of the novels chosen through three key concepts: épica inversa, female agency and the border. Chapter three serves as a map and guide to a bi-borderlands literary genealogy documenting the postcolonial strategies of an inverted epic. The second part consists of the literary analysis of three novels most representative of our genealogy. Chapters four, five and six are individual studies that focus on three novels and the female characters who serve as protagonists: Micaela Campos in Forgetting the Alamo or Blood Memory, Teresa Urrea in La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora; and Leonor Villegas in Las rebeldes. Through the study of the three texts, the analysis shows how the constant negotiation of female agency in inverted epics can function as historical accounts to understand the patriarchal structures as a binary project of domination, subordination and exclusion.