SOURCE: Schaefer, Claudia. “Introduction.” In City of Kings, translated by Robert S. Rudder and Gloria Chacón de Arjona, pp. 13-19. Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Schaefer examines the major thematic concerns of the stories in City of Kings.

A writer capable of plotting the most superbly ironic of situations for her characters and a woman deeply aware of her own role in the everyday ironies of the Mexican social reality in which she lived and wrote, Rosario Castellanos would undoubtedly find a certain amount of joyful paradox in the translation of Ciudad real [City of Kings] (1960) for an English-speaking audience during the time of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' fateful landing on the American continent. For were it not for the act of the translator, the cultural intermediary, we perhaps could not even begin to fathom how historical events would have...