What Is Eating Latin American Women Writers: Food, Weight, and Ea ...

and in form the condition of the Latin American woman. At that juncture, culinary imagery, so close to their gender experience, was an expressive vehicle in their critical discussions and in their analysis of literature as a metanarrative.

For instance, in 1982, Eliana Ortega and Patricia González, who were teaching at Mt. Holyoke and Smith College respectively, organized the “Colloquium on Latin American Women’s Writers” in Amherst, Massachusetts. Many distinguished Latin American literary figures participated in the gathering, among them, Rosario Ferré, Marta Traba, Sara Castro-Klarén, and Josefina Ludmer. The conference resulted in the publication of La sartén por el mango (The Frying Pan by Its Handle), an edition put together by González and Ortega.⁸ As its title suggests, the editors’ approach was to present the kitchen as a site of female agency in their discussion of women’s writing, just as Sor Juana and Rosario Castellanos previously had done. Ortega writes in the introduction, “[i]n our three day experience, to focus on the dilemma in oppositions resulted in not grabbing the frying pan by its handle, and obviously, the words spilled from us.”⁹ As well, Ortega asserts, “while we cut the onion, we wept, but as we peeled the artificial layers superimposed on our identity as a Latin American woman, we were finding a center. So there, take the frying pan by the handle and stew.”¹⁰

The Massachusetts and other similar gatherings promoted the sharing of themes and concerns among an international group of feminist Latin American writers and critics who for the most part had been working in isolation. In addition, it inspired a new generation of feminist Latin Americanist scholars working in U.S. academia to examine a Latin American voice proper. One of them was Debra Castillo, who in Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992) argues: “[w]e cannot speak…other than in a discourse given us by the West, by