SOURCE: Ahern, Maureen. “Reading Rosario Castellanos: Contacts, Voices, and Signs,” In A Rosario Castellanos Reader: An Anthology of Her Poetry, Short Fiction, Essays, and Drama, edited by Maureen Ahern, pp. 31-8. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

In the following excerpt, Ahern discusses several factors that shaped Castellanos's development as a short fiction writer.

Fiction: Under a Man's Hand

Rosario Castellanos' fiction centers on two areas of experience long overlooked in Mexican letters: the critique of racial and cultural oppression of indigenous peoples in Chiapas and the status of women in provincial and urban Mexico. The stories translated in this anthology [A Rosario Castellanos Reader], represent those major foci of her prose: a perversion of signs and values in “The Eagle” and women as signs of solitude and conflict under patriarchal rule in “Fleeting Friendships” and “The Widower Román.” “Three Knots in the Net” and “Cooking Lesson” are...