Cristina Ramirez

In the last two decades, scholars in rhetoric and writing studies have been calling for a greater representation of voices of those from other cultures who participated in rhetorical practices. As Jacqueline Jones Royster contends, rhetoric has been framed as a mostly white, male, and elite, and that these positions distort the democratic perspective of our discipline. My dissertation, Claiming the Discursive Self: The Rhetoric of Mexican Women Journalists, 1876-1940 presents a women rhetors who were participating in not only creating a national identity, but constructing that identity to insure women’s input and participation. It also closely examines the rhetorical strategies they employed to claim a discursive identity. It provides a rhetorical analysis positing a strong historical, cultural, political and feminist impact of their writings at that time.

Framed in a rhetorical historiographic methodology, each chapter foregrounds women’s writings through a feminist theoretical lens against those of the dominant discourse of the time. The first chapter examines Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1846-1896), Hermila Galindo (1885-1954), and Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875-1942). Through their writings, I argue for a mestiza rhetoric, a hybrid rhetoric of Mexican and indigenous cultures representative of our growing national populations. More focused, these Mexican women journalists wrote in order to contribute to a national identity situated in indigenous, Mexican, and European sensibilities which resisted any one dominate discourse; and two, they wrote to counter the repression of women’s voices in public. The two directions in their discourse created a mestiza rhetoric. A mestiza rhetoric is a discourse that emerges from a cultural background that recognizes its multiple subjectivities, adapts ideas and logics from various cultures, and “creates a symbolic space beyond the mere coming together of two halves” (Baca 5). Mestiza discourse can represent this symbolic space by calling on indigenous cultural symbols, but my perception of mestiza rhetoric does not necessarily depend upon the explicit discursive recognition of indigenous roots. It represents an intertextuality of cultures and ideas while resisting assimilation to a linear articulation of logic, thereby resulting in divergent, subversive texts. Mestiza rhetoric emerges from a place of suspension between cultural worlds, a mestiza consciousness, which does not necessarily mean that the writer considers herself to be from an indigenous background, but that she is able to conceptualize a different reality of herself and her behavior, making for an ontological shift.

Continuing in each chapter with the theme and theoretical lens of mestiza rhetoric, chapter two, “La Hija del Anáhuac: The Rhetoric of Laureana Wright de Kleinhans,” examines Wright de Kleinhans´s early attempts to expand female discursive spaces with 1887-1888 publication of one of the first feminine journals, Violetas de Anáhuac. As a Mexican female writer, Wright de Kleinhans has been looked over by scholars both in Latin American and the United States. Her corpus of work is sufficient for a dissertation, but my chapter is a first glimpse at her work and its significance in history, journalism, and literature during her time. Its rhetorical significance rests in the magazine’s dedication to poetry and historical accounts, but whose underlying message called for women’s suffrage and equality for the sexes.

Chapter three, “Recovering Lost Rhetorics: Las Mujeres de Zitácuaro as early Revolutionary Rhetors,” examines a feminist manifesto from 1900, which marks the separation between women writing for reform, such as Wright de Kleinhans, and those writing from a revolutionary perspective, such as Juana Belén Gutiérrez. In order to persuade their audience of the importance of keeping the powers of the Catholic Church aligned with the Reform Laws, the group of women activists, las mujeres de Zitácuaro, used various rhetorical structures, such as the manifesto, the plan, the grito, or battle cry, that are embedded culturally and in the Mexican tradition. In this chapter I explore the significance of their writings as breaking rhetorical barriers for women at the beginning of the precursor revolutionary era.

Chapters four and five focus on Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, the first Mexican woman to publish a protest newspaper, speak powerfully on gender and revolutionary politics, and whose writing career spanned nearly thirty years. Chapter four, “Hemos venido ha ocupar nuestro puesto: Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s Sophistic Rhetoric in the Mexican Revolutionary Precursor Movement.”(1) As with the writings of Wright de Kleinhans, Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s writings have also been over looked. Her brash discursive feminist and indigenous activism and discourse may have claimed a discursive space and identity for Mexican women, but at the same time, may have caused many conservative historians to ignore her work. Her writing was sophistic because, as liberal writer, her discourse countered the powerful positivistic thinking of the government and it wealthy followers called los científicos. (2) This chapter investigates how Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s voice was a rare inclusion on the Mexican journalistic scene that I compare to the democratic Athenian Assembly.

The fifth and final chapter, “Materiality of Discourse: The Embodiment of Juana Belén’s Revolutionary Rhetoric,” will investigate Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s writing, and how it intersected with her every day reality of being a woman journalist in Mexico prior to and after the Revolution. This chapter compares her to the Grecian Cynics, the outcasts of the Athenian society who were forced to take drastic measures in order to be heard. Men were mostly considered Cynics because they had the right to speak in public. But Gutiérrez de Mendoza broke the tradition of speaking, and speaking with such resolve. The scope and sequence of this dissertation will provide depth to the understanding of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Mexican rhetoric, while demonstrating that women were not static individuals in rhetorical history, but strategically projected their voices in an intellectual conversation on identity creation within a changing world.