In the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America. This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.

In 1930s rural Argentina, a determined fifteen-year-old left an isolated, poverty-stricken life to find her fortune in the “Paris of South America”—Buenos Aires. There, with few connections, little education, but plenty of persistence, Maria Eva Duarte gained a toehold in the city’s artistic scene. Eva—Evita—then navigated the radio revolution to fortune, providing for her mother and siblings along the way. She caught the eye of rising political star Colonel Juan Perón, and with him, she rode the pro-labor wave all the way to the presidential palace. The story of Eva Duarte Perón highlights not just her own extraordinary life, but the opportunities seized by women of all classes and backgrounds in post-independence modernizing Latin America. This work offers an alternate method for understanding modern Latin America and its history. The ten figures treated are ethnically mixed, of African, Indigenous, European, and mestiza heritage. They include figures from all social classes, geographic settings, and occupations seen in Latin America, and they acted over the entirety of the more than two centuries of the modern period. Through their stories, the reader comes away with a deeper understanding of this rich, diverse region.

Biografieën van de volgende Latijns Amerikaanse vrouwen: Malinche, Inés de Suárez, Catalina de Erauzo (The nun Ensign), Inés de la Cruz, Policarpa Salavarrieta (La Pola), Leopoldina van Habsburg, Mariana Grajales, Gabriela Mistral, Eva Perón, Tamara Bunke (Tania).

El objetivo principal de este libro es impulsar un campo de estudio de la historia de las mujeres en América Latina, que reconozca que las experiencias de las mujeres conforman una historia específica, aunque no independiente de las de los hombres. Esta nueva visión de la historia social que incluye a los grupos anónimos- como las mujeres-, significa un aporte importante en la historiografía de finales del siglo XX, cuando las mujeres y los desplazados conquistaron el derecho a la historia, a una historia de la que dejaron de ser sólo víctimas para convertirse en protagonistas.

El libro que prepararon Asuncion Lavrin y su grupo de trabajo nos proporciona una extraordinaria panoramica de la situacion de las mujeres latinoamericanas. La obra nos permite ahora empezar a conocer una region de la historia de nuestros paises en todos los ordenes: social, economico, familiar y politico.