"The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis" : Dramatic Irony and Double-Voicing as Cultural Critique in Maria Cristina Mena's Fiction

What is it about?

This essay explores the fiction of María Cristina Mena, who emigrated to the United States at the outset of the Mexican Revolution. Her stories, published between 1913 and 1931 in American magazines, depict life in Mexico, and some portray cultural influences from the United States through the presence of American visitors to Mexico, employing dramatic irony to suggest that the ways such characters represent, particularly the behavior of American “New Women” and the reverence of Anglo-Saxon ideals of beauty, are unworthy of the respect they receive there. Rather, these influences are presented as problematic forms of cultural colonialism from the United States, especially through the ironic tone of Mena’s narrators. Mena also turns a critical eye upon the patriarchal and hierarchical nature of Mexican society, but these stories, published in mainstream American periodicals, clearly contest the values of North American culture in the early twentieth century. As such, Mena's works, commissioned as “charming” portraits of Mexican life, can be seen as complex, double-voiced critiques.

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Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash