Elena Garro’s Gambit: The Politics of a Female Writer’s Intimate Archive (1935–1998)

Abstract: Literary and cultural criticism has historically held a highly dichotomous perception of Mexican author Elena Garro, generally more interested in making value judgments about her life than in analyzing her literature. In this essay, I defend that the analysis of her intimate archive gives us new methodological tools for archival research that, far from reproducing patriarchal approximations of her work, accepts ambiguity and chaos as an inherent part of her public persona. By analyzing both the documents held in the collection “Elena Garro Papers: 1935–1998,” which Garro donated to Princeton University, and the “missing” parts of her archive, still in the hands of private owners, this article brings to the fore the material dimension of the author’s struggle to be recognized as a serious writer. I argue that Garro’s curatorship of her intimate archive illuminates the strategies (gambits) needed to solidify her place as a female author in literary history.