OVERSEAS. NARRATIVES OF THE SELF AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN OTHERNESS FROM THE SENSITIVE EXPERIENCE OF FORGOTTEN SPANISH WOMEN (1521-1600)

Abstract

This article traces the sensitive universe with which peninsular women of the Hispanic Monarchy of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constructed the American otherness. Based on the analysis of several letters from the collection compiled by Rocío Sánchez Rubio and Isabel Testón Núñez in El hilo que nos une, the text concentrates on reconstructing the emotional experience of many Andalusian, Castilian and Extremaduran women who saw their men depart for the New World during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries without return. The purpose of this analysis is to approach the way in which this female community signified those distant lands to turn them into an imaginary place that became a reality based on emotions such as pain, resentment, longing, anger, abandonment, loneliness, and desolation. The women who were left without their men on one side of the sea gave life, in their minds, to the unknown Indian reality based on everything they experienced as a consequence of that difficult separation. Thus, for many of them, America was the sensitive and imaginary geography where those kingdoms of wealth, abundance, opportunities, and lust that had attracted their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons were located, and  the place where those "others", for whom they had been replaced forever, lived.