SOURCE: “Moving Toward the Other: New Dimensions in Human Relationships in Rosario Castellanos' ‘Album de familia,’” in Chasqui, Vol. XVII, No. 1, May, 1988, pp. 3-7.

In the following essay, Parham explores Castellanos's focus on alienation and her evolving sense of optimism in the stories in her last work of fiction, Album de familia.

In Album de familia, Rosario Castellanos' final work of fiction, she no longer concerns herself with the difficulties of relationships between races, and the setting has moved from provincial to urban Mexico.¹ As racial strife disappears from the stories, relationships between members of the same sex and of the opposite sex become the principal concern. New elements such as homosexuality and feminism-as-politics appear, and three of the stories explore new ways of dealing with the old problem of alienation, injecting in several instances an optimism largely absent in the writer's previous works.² In view of these...