Gender, race and class in La sangre, el polvo, la nieve by Karina Pacheco Medrano [Género, raza y clase en La sangre, el polvo, la nieve de Karina Pacheco Medrano]

Abstract

The article examines La sangre, el polvo, la nieve (2021), a novel by Karina Pacheco Medrano (Cusco, 1969), from a gender perspective within the framework of Cusco society at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Attention is paid "to the exercise of private power based on the naturalization of the gender hierarchy and the inferiorization of the feminine due to its identification with the domestic" (Mannarelli 57), as well as the various roles that women play in the society (the "motherwife", motherhood, conjugality and eroticism). To study the family structure of the domestic space, the concept of the "great house" by Ariès is used and it is also analized how the colonial heritage is reproduced in the Peruvian society of the time (Quijano, Flores Galindo), and the roles that play the patriarchal authority and the female characters-mother and daughter-as well as the reproduction of social and racial hierarchies in contrast to the project of indigenismo (De la Cadena), with which the protagonist Giralda Loayza and her husband identify. Likewise, a parallelism is drawn between the novel and Aves sin nido (1889) by Clorinda Matto, recognizing the differences in the national projects that both novels propose, as well as the role played by family nuclei in them (Cornejo Polar). Finally, in terms of narrative strategies, the semantic polarizations proposed by the novel are examined, bringing it closer to nineteenth-century novels and melodrama (Brooks). © 2024 Universidad Catolica Silva Henriquez. All rights reserved.