Primarily poets, writers Alfonsina Storni and Alejandra Pizarnik had in common being daughters of immigrants, and both committed suicide. Storni’s poetry during her lifetime was popular and accessible, with topics of women, love, and modernity. Poet, journalist, dramatist, and maestra (schoolteacher), she gained early fame but only partial critical success. She crafted a defiant public image and even staged her suicide after a long struggle with cancer. She protested the stigma of being an unwed mother and other injustices borne by women. In contrast, Pizarnik initially reached a smaller but influential reading public; many young readers identify with her elusive and fractured poetry-theater of interiority. Rebellious and bisexual, she was the daughter of Jews who had escaped the Holocaust but lost their world. Loss, mourning, and sometimes violence, abjection, and terror are recurring topics, as in The Bloody Countess. As with Storni, there is confessionalism, but Pizarnik’s “I” is not a stable subject but a wandering marker, emphasizing the body, sexual desire, and fragmentation. Pizarnik’s struggle with language becomes a battle against the breakdown of the world.

Latin America in 1870–1930 initiated many modernization projects, and “First Wave” feminism resulted from expanded education, a modernizing strategy. Feminism engaged in emancipation strategies and legal and labor reforms. Suffrage was not its primary aim. Periodicals showed feminism’s impact in culture, commerce, civil rights, and public health, and films showed women in daring roles. Early leaders were professionals (Moreau de Justo) and labor activists (Capetillo, Muzzili). Feminism was first successful in cities (São Paulo, Buenos Aires), changing education, labor practices, and child protection. The Mexican Revolution produced new contexts for women in the arts (Campobello). The US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico reordered Caribbean racial and social hierarchies. Women writers and activists of varied social classes, feminist or not, showed the costs and benefits of urbanization, family, and immigration. Teaching and writing allowed “middlebrow” access to the public sphere (Mistral, Storni). Literature brought women’s issues to the public sphere.

In an essay written in 1928, the Peruvian radical intellectual José Carlos Maríategui reflected on literary nationalism:

In recent decades the concept of the nation has been under scrutiny in ways similar to Mariátegui’s critique. But in Spanish America, the creation of nations is inextricably intertwined with literarydevelopment, and no single historical narrative can account for the multiple developments in the literary sphere. National political projects shaped historiography as well as the history and concept of literature because, despite similarities of language and formation within the Spanish heritage, vast geographic extensions and striking cultural differences made Spanish America difficult to conceive without national categories. The dominance of the national framework did not, however, preclude other visions of the future. From the early years of the nineteenth century, independence leaders like Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar envisioned a unified Spanish America joined together by a common linguistic and occidental cultural heritage.