2024/09/16 by Leuzinger, Mirjam
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.25.2
pp. 18-35 The Spanish-Cuban writer and journalist Silvia Mistral (1914-2004), who fled to Mexico at the end of the Spanish Civil War, has attracted increasing research attention in recent years. However, Madréporas (1944), an unconventional book in which the exiled author writes about her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, has so far garnered little notice. The article traces Mistral’s legacy and analyzes, drawing on literary and sociological research on (migrant) motherhood, the uniqueness of this matrifocal narrative and its potential to disrupt hegemonic discourses and to rethink mothering in migration and exile.