SOURCE: “The Transformation of Privilege in the Work of Elena Poniatowska,” in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 13, No. 26, July, 1985, pp. 49–62.

In the following essay, Chevigny examines the effect wealth and social standing have on the women in Poniatowska's stories.

“We write in Latin America to reclaim a space to discover ourselves in the presence of others, of human community—so that they may see us, so that they may love us—to form the vision of the world, to acquire some dimension—so they can't erase us so easily. We write so as not to disappear.”

These remarks of Elena Poniatowska at a conference at Wellesley College in the spring of 1980 drew their coloration from her anguish over the “disappearance” of Latin Americans by political forces, but they aptly characterize her most important work as well. The evanescent or invisible, the silent or the silenced, those who elude...