The article proposes a feminist approach to Nepantla which is a spatial figuration
that emerges from the poetry book La tierra de en medio (1972) by Rosario
Castellanos. Nepantla is the geography of the so-called “la tierra de en medio”,
and thus it can be also its map; that is to say, a fiction that aims to visualise
a unique space. Furthermore, it is a precolumbian place name, and a part of
our indigenous heritage; finally, it refers to the non-feminine space linked to the
language and the writing. From the latter, this poetry book builds up a border
space (a suspended one), which raises a zone where women, who are in a situation
of symbolic privilege, move pendularly and ambiguously. Nevertheless, for
women this lack of location can come to represent a liberating potential; this, as poetic awareness and understanding are able to deconstruct, through a variety of
poetic strategies, what was previously established as the female normativity. And,
in this way, it can arise a constant movement, named as a mass (“un amasijo”).
Luongo, G. (2017). A mass. ‘La tierra de en medio’ or Nepantla in Rosario Castellanos’s poetry. Nomadías, (22). Retrieved from https://revistateoriadelarte.uchile.cl/index.php/NO/article/view/45136