Occupying Our Space
ISBN: 9780816502035
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Arizona Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Feminism in literature.; Women in journalism; Women in journalism; Women journalists;

Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award Winner

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.

This book 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. The book closely examines the writings of Laureana Wright de Kleinhans (1842-1896), Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875­-1942), the political group Las mujeres de Zitácuaro (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.


Cristina Devereaux Ramírez is an assistant professor in the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English (RCTE) graduate program in the Department of English at the University of Arizona. She is the author of the article "Forging a Mestiza Rhetoric: Mexican Women Journalists' Role in the Construction of a National Identity." She has traveled extensively presenting and furthering the research into Mexican women journalists.
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