Each of the book's five chapters evokes a colonial Mexican cultural and intellectual sphere: the library, anatomy and medicine, spirituality, classical learning, and publishing and printing. Using an array of literary texts and historical documents and alongside secondary historical and critical materials, the author Stephanie Kirk demonstrates how Sor Juana used her poetry and other works to inscribe herself within the discourses associated with these cultural institutions and discursive spheres and thus challenge the male exclusivity of their precepts and precincts. Kirk illustrates how Sor Juana subverted the masculine character of erudition, writing herself into an all-male community of scholars. From there, Sor Juana clearly questions the gender politics at play in her exclusion, and undermines what seems to be the inextricable link previously forged between masculinity and institutional knowledge. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico opens up new readings of her texts through the lens of cultural and intellectual history and material culture in order to shed light on the production of knowledge in the seventeenth-century colonial Mexican society of which she was both a product and an anomaly.

"A valuable and logical step in the progression of critical studies on convent writing. . . . We have moved from seeing women writers as working at the margins to seeing them as writing subjects."—Latin American Research Review "Consider[s] nuns not as merely secular or religious writers, but through the lens of interdisciplinary study, as multifaceted historical agents. . . . The importance of the kind of innovative theoretical work undertaken by this text . . . cannot be over-emphasized, and will offer a both provocative and illuminating read to scholars in a broad range of disciplines."—Journal of International Women’s Studies "Kirk reconstructs aspects of the lives of colonial nuns through close-up readings of select manuscripts and, additionally, of published primary sources. . . . A lively and provocative addition to the literature on colonial Mexico that offers new insights into the dynamics of religious community."—Bulletin of Latin American Research "A thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of community-building among colonial Latin American women."—A Contracorriente "A timely scholarly contribution to the field of gender and religion. . . . Presents a fresh look at convent literature by specifically analyzing alliances, friendships, and communities."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review "An interesting and ambitious study of the discourses associated with convent life in Mexico."—Catholic Historical Review

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women’s and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.

Margaret Sayers Peden, who is well known and respected for her translations of Fuentes, Neruda, Quiroga, and Paz, has made an admirable selection of poems that includes romances, redondillas, epigrams, decimas, sonnets, silvas, villancicos, and two excerpts from Sor Juana's theater. The introduction and notes provide the necessary context for those unfamiliar with the poet's life and times.

“This collection, because of its exceptional theoretical coherence and sophistication, is qualitatively superior to the most frequently consulted anthologies on Latin American women’s history and literature . . . [and] represents a new, more theoretically rigorous stage in the feminist debate on Latin American women.”—Elizabeth Garrels, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz: Feminist Reconstruction of Biography and Text, Yugar invites you to accompany Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century protofeminist and ecofeminist, on her lifelong journey within three communities of women in the Americas. Sor Juana's goal was to reconcile inequalities between men and women in central Mexico and between the Spaniards and the indigenous Nahua population of New Spain. Yugar reconstructs a her-story narrative through analysis of two primary texts Sor Juana wrote en sus propias palabras (in her own words), El Sueno (The Dream) and La Respuesta (The Answer). Yugar creates a historically-based narrative in which Sor Juana's sueno of a more just world becomes a living nightmare haunted by misogyny in the form of the church, the Spanish Tribunal, Jesuits, and more--all seeking her destruction. In the process, Sor Juana "hoists [them] with their own petard." In seventeenth-century colonial Mexico, just as her Latina sisters in the Americas are doing today, Sor Juana used her pluma (pen) to create counternarratives in which the wisdom of women and the Nahua inform her sueno of a more just world for all.

The contemporary English-language translation has been done by Margaret Sayers Peden, professor of Spanish-American literature at the University of Missouri, who is highly regarded for her literary translations of modern authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, and Horacio Quiroga. Mrs. Peden's detailed introduction to the volume gives background information about the nun and the creation of her major writing.

Front Lines documents the literary practices of imperial Spain's common soldiers. The epic poems, chronicles, ballads, and autobiographies that these soldiers wrote at the front provide a critical view from below on state violence and imperial expansion.

Defiant writing by the first feminist of the Americas—the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—in response to the church officials that tried to silence her. Known as the first feminist of the Americas, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great lyric poets and dramatists of her time. The Answer/La Respuesta (1691) is is Sor Juana's impassioned response to years of attempts by church officials to silence her. While earlier translators have ignored Sor Juana's keen awareness of gender, this volume brings out her own emphasis and diction, and reveals the remarkable scholarship, subversiveness, and even humor she drew on in defense of her cause. This expanded, bilingual edition combines new research and perspectives on an inspired writer and thinker. It includes the fully annotated primary text responding to the church officials; the letter that ultimately provoked the writing of The Answer; an expanded selection of poems; an updated bibliography; and a new preface.

Movies are meant to be entertaining, but they can also be educational. People are naturally curious to know how much of what they see on their screens might be historically true. In Latin American History at the Movies, experts on Latin America focus on five centuries of history as portrayed in feature films. An introduction on the visual presentation of the past in movies sets the stage for essays that explore sixteen of the best feature films on Latin America made from the 1980s to the present.