We are what we remember and we understand heritage and belonging through our own passion to remember. Home is a living scrap-book of memory that we c… - Marjorie Agosín

Throughout history, women have always been close to language. Transmitters of legends, healers, magicians and fortune tellers, women possess a tapestry of stories that are slowly beginning to be transcribed. Curiously, with the advent of authoritarian governments in Latin America, women have left the private spaces of house, church, and marketplace to begin to poeticize their experiences through the written word that had previously been denied to them. We must not forget that even with the Cuban Revolution and the political effervescence that followed in the 1960s, the arts in Latin America continued to be dominated by men. Women were only allowed to participate through their relationships with men: the "companero," the boss, and the patriarch.

At times of great political repression, literature acquires a powerful function: It legitimizes artistic expression in a totalitarian society whose government prohibits this expression. Women writers, through their words and stories, manage to reaffirm what the greater society has denied. Paradoxically, if patriarchal societies have historically denied the presence of women writers, and also those who write about politics, the existence of extreme conditions due to political and civil violence has allowed these women writers to create and through their texts become visible.

The search for identity and belonging is also a motif for the human condition of the twentieth century-a century defined by displacements and migrations.