Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942

Description

“Occupying Our Space” sheds new light on the contributions of Mexican women journalists and writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, marked as the zenith of Mexican journalism. Journalists played a significant role in transforming Mexican social and political life before and after the Revolution (1910 1920), and women were a part of this movement as publishers, writers, public speakers, and political activists. However, their contributions to the broad historical changes associated with the Revolution, as well as the pre- and post-revolutionary eras, are often excluded or overlooked.
“Occupying our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists, 1875 1942,” fills a gap in feminine rhetorical history by providing an in-depth look at several important journalists who claimed rhetorical” puestos,” or public speaking spaces. This book closely examines the writings of Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1842 1896), Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza (1875 1942), the political group Las mujeres de Zitacuaro (1900), Hermila Galindo (1896 1954), and others. Grounded in the overarching theoretical lens of mestiza rhetoric, “Occupying Our Space” considers the ways in which Mexican women journalists negotiated shifting feminine identities and the emerging national politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With full length Spanish primary documents along with their translations, this scholarship reframes the conversation about the rhetorical and intellectual role women played in the ever-changing political and identity culture in Mexico.”