Class, Sex, and Race Oppression through Two Stories: A Pariah’s Pilgrimage, by Flora Tristán, and Birds without a Nest, by Clorinda Matto

Abstract

To approach the critical thought of 19th century Latin American women activists regarding three structural oppressions: class, sex and race, the author proposes undertaking an analysis based on the narratological categories of two stories from Peruvian thinkers. The first is the autobiography of Flora Tristán, A Pariah’s Pilgrimage (1837) and the second is the social novel by Clorinda Matto, Birds without a Nest (1889). The reflection focuses on the lives of working women, both indigenous and mestizo, from two different social and historical backgrounds in the global periphery. From the first story, the author presents the narrative actors, the rabonas, members of an urban community. From the second, she takes Marcela and Margarita, inhabitants of a peasant community in the Peruvian highlands. These characters are linked by the fact that they are structurally subjected to the three forms of oppression, which together make human life an excruciating experience.