Of the Margins and the Centre: Gertrudis Gómez Avellaneda

[First paragraph] Gertrudis Gómez Avellaneda’s most famous literary work, Sab, opens with a line from the popular Spanish dramatist of the eighteenth century, José de Cañizares: ‘¿Quién eres? ¿Cuál es tu patria?’ (38) (‘Who are you? What is your homeland’ [Sab, Scott 27]). This is a question that might very well be posed of Avellaneda’s own life and work and which surfaces throughout this valuable collection of essays. Avellaneda was born in Cuba in 1814 to a Spanish naval officer and Cuban mother and lived on the island until moving to Spain in 1836, where she spent most of her adult life, and wrote and published the vast majority of her work. Whilst Avellaneda’s life straddled two continents, her literary output is profoundly oriented towards Latin America. As this collection stresses, she published not only the first abolitionist novel of the Americas – her great anti-slavery work, Sab, which is set in a lushly tropical Cuba – but across much of her writing was fascinated with Latin America, particularly that moment of first encounter between the Old and New Worlds, especially in Guatimozín: Último Emperador de México, which relates the story of the Conquest of Mexico.