The Consulate General of Mexico is hosting the Numina Femenina project, which brings 35 artists and 4 curators from 10 countries, including local artists like musician Diana Gameros and painter Ana Teresa Fernández, together in one exhibit.
Working in a wide range of mediums, the artists represent Latinas from the United States and all across Latin America.
The project collaborated with Litquake and the Center for the Art of Translation to bring Mexican literary giants Carmen Boullosa and Pura López Colomé to give readings and lectures as a representation of Mexico’s contemporary literary tradition.
Boullosa, who currently lives in the U.S., is known as groundbreaking feminist author, and was once referred to by renowned Chilean poet and novelist Robert Bolaño as “Mexico’s best writer.”
“Everyday the world becomes smaller … I am a Mexican writer and I live in New York,” Boullosa said. “There’s a lot of back and forth. It’s a reality that we now all share. We are all driving on the same highway, artistically, intellectually. It’s not an easy road, so we work together. I love the idea of participating with other generations and other mediums.”
Pura López Colomé is another Latina literary giant who lives between the cultural and linguistic borders of Mexico and the U.S. She spent her youth split between Mexico City, Yucatán and a Catholic boarding school in South Dakota.
“I was extremely fortunate to have contact with literature written in English since very early on,” Colomé said.
She has since gone on to publish 10 books of Spanish poetry, including “Santo y seña,” which received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in 2008. She has also translated several books of English poetry into Spanish.
For Colomé, the hardest part of translating a poem is recreating its rhythm.
“The greatest obstacle is the music in which the poem was created—definitely linked to emotions,” she said. “One should recreate the poem precisely in the music owned by the other language.”
But despite her renowned, published translations, Colomé does not think of herself as truly bilingual.
“There is no such thing as a completely bilingual person, in my opinion, because there can really be only one mother tongue,” she said. “In my case, the mother tongue is, and will always be, Spanish, a language I am absolutely devoted to.”
But at the same time, Mexican literature has always been focused outward, on the world and international community.
“We never thought we were the center of the universe, the way New Yorkers think,” Boullosa said. “Since colonialism we were always looking at what is going on in the world: what is going on in Paris, in Latin America, in Africa. Constantly looking around has lead to a peculiar tradition—very cosmopolitan. Mexican writers read and speak many languages.”
Boullosa would love to see more connection between Mexican authors and Mexican-American readers, and she laments that the education opportunities for this population have gone from bad to worse, limiting access to literature, something she said is a “disgrace.”
Boullosa said that when she was younger, she was against “women-only art spaces, ” but her participation in Numina Feminina reflects how her thinking on the subject has changed.
“If it’s not done just for women to have spaces then [art from women] doesn’t appear,” she said.
Both author’s readings will include Spanish and English, melding the languages of their thoughts and craft into the blend that Latinos in America live every day.