Subscribe to our newsletter
Jazmina Barrera is a Mexican writer and member of the Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. She is the author of five books in Spanish, including On Lighthouses, Linea Nigra, Cross-Stitch, and The Queen of Swords. More about this author >
Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator. In addition to her work with Jazmina Barrera and Elvira Navarro, she has translated works by such authors as Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, and Karla Suárez. She has also contributed to various anthologies of Latin American literature. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Sifting through the writer’s archives at Princeton, Barrera is repeatedly thwarted in her attempt to fully know her subject. Traditional means of research—the correspondence, photos, and books—serve only to complicate and cloud the woman and her work. Who was Elena Garro, really?
She was a writer, a founder of “magical realism,” a dancer. A devotee to the tarot and the I Ching. A socialite and activist on behalf of indigenous Mexicans. She was a mother and a lover who repeatedly shook off (and cheated on) her manipulative husband, Nobel-laureate Octavio Paz. And above all, she wrote with simmering anger and glittering imagination.
The Queen of Swords is a portrait of a woman that also serves as an alternative history of Mexico City, a cry-out for justice, and an homage to the unknowable. It transcends mere biography, supplanting something tidy and authoritative for a sprawling experiment in understanding.
