After all, what is the passing of time but a diamond turned to dust? - Kathleen Alcalá

I'm really interested in is this notion that when you read histories and when you read official documentations of countries and people, they tend to be very much on the macro level. When I did the research on nineteenth-century Mexico, you can find out where all the railroads ran, you can find out the front lines of all the battles, of all the wars, but you can't find out things like how women actually prepared meals in the home every day. That was much harder to find. The outward history, the official history, is easy to find. But the little things of how families interacted were much more difficult to research and I had to dig a little deeper.

In some cases, the stories take the reader right over the line to horror, the worst thing you can imagine fulfilled. In others, the fantastic elements are merely implied, and if the reader tried to pinpoint the specific elements that made the story fantastic, it would be impossible to do. Rather, the fantastic element lies in "the overall effect" that Edgar Allan Poe tried to infuse into each of his stories.

When we use the term feminism in 19th Century Mexico, it means something entirely different from what Americans think of as feminism from the 1960s or 70s. Feminists in Mexico, at that time, were fighting for state-funded education for women. They were fighting for legitimate employment for women, fair wages and working conditions. Women had actually lost legal status in the mid 1800s under the rewriting of the constitution after independence from Spain, and women did not get the vote in Mexico until the 1950s. I suppose the fight is not too different today, including the search for cheap labor by the United States, and the search for foreign capital by the government of Mexico.