Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story

"Like Camilla Townsend’s book on Malintzin, this is a book about a woman born into absolutely no power in a small town in the Mexican provinces. But unlike Townsend’s book, this is a book about a woman who didn’t become powerful in her lifetime. Ruth Behar is an anthropologist and this book belongs to a genre of ethnographic writing that is very illuminating about what Mexican society was like in the 20th century, which consists of interviewing what we might call ordinary people, many of them very poor people, and then editing and reordering the answers of those people into narratives of their lives. Ruth Behar also combines those interview elements with a bit of her own life story and with the process of how she came to know and to interview Esperanza. One of the reasons to read these books, and perhaps this book in particular, is that their ‘ordinary’ protagonists are often quite extraordinary storytellers. In this case, you get this life story told by a poor Mexican woman who mostly works as a sort of peddler. She’s worked as a servant for times. She used to be stuck in a horrible marriage, where she was violently abused by her husband for sixteen years. But when Behar interviews her, Esperanza is single and has decided not to remarry because she says, ‘I was married before and that taught me not to remarry’. She has become this still poor but very strong-spirited, independent woman just making a life for herself and her children. She’s able to look back on her life and on a lot of suffering that she’s had to live through with a sense of humour, even though also a sense of indignation."