of African slaves to Brazilian culture. Such a view was radical at a time when what predominated were discourses on racial and environmental determination which attributed Brazil's backwardness to an unhealthy tropical climate and to a weak and degenerate mestizo population. Paulo Prado's pessimistic Retrado do Brasil (1928), published only five years before Freyre's seminal work, was a classic representation of Brazil as a country of fundamentally melancholy people, exhausted by a long history of sexual excess fueled by the land, climate, and presence of the African and Amerindian.

Freyre's definition of Brazil as instead a vibrant racially and culturally mixed society was in part a consequence of his advocacy of the northeast where he was born and raised. This region had been the center of colonial Brazil, basedwhat womanhood means. Women often write from the margins, the uncharted regions of language where they may blur the boundaries between public and private as they articulate new spaces. Though not all necessarily call themselves feminists, the Latin American women we will discuss here undertake artistic projects that explore relationships of power and question social hierarchies.

The division of intellectual labor of modern historiography associates women with difference, the private sphere, passivity, minor genres, sentimentality, the body, the quotidian, and the fluidity of boundaries. Latin American women's creative expressions – be they fictions, essays, journalism, performance art, or political activism – constitute a multicentered debate and inner polemics seeking to recode women's social spaces and symbolic formations in a struggle for representation and self-representation. The goal of Victoria Ocampo