ABSTRACT

Juana Fernández is known by her married name, de Ibarbourou, which is a Basque term meaning “head of the valley.” She was one of the pioneers of a literary tradition for women in Latin America, and her literary career spanned some fifty years. Her work is connected to the production of Alfonsina Storni (Argentina) and Gabriela Mistral (Chile) because all three of them wrote in the first decades of the 20th century and found a “room of their own” through their writing. They questioned the prejudices and conventions of the conservative middle class from within its own ranks. As women enclosed in a patriarchal society they wrote from the margins focusing on their own difference, creating a new poetic language on the margins of male poetic discourse.