Desde las faldas de la madre/From Underneath Mother’s Skirt: Nellie Campobello (Re)Claims (Single) Motherhood and Mothers as Historians

Abstract

Motherhood has been a revered space for women for centuries. It has also been a prison, a place that keeps women in the home, tied to children and—if it is to be considered proper—to a husband. Children must be born to a mother and a father, inside the institution of marriage, to be labeled “legitimate” and to be given the privileges that come with a proper birth. Motherhood can be a privileged (if limited) domestic site or a source of scorn if it happens off the marriage bed. In Las manos de marna (Mother’s Hands, 1937) Nellie Campobello revises the myths surrounding motherhood—the Virgin, la Malinche and la Llorona—to reclaim out-of-wedlock mothering as proper, and to construct the mother as a historian.