Editor’s Note: We are pleased to share, in bilingual edition, the winning essay of LALT’s Third Literary Essay Contest, held in 2025: “Gleaner of the Minuscule: On Rosario Castellanos,” by Mexican educator, linguist, and researcher Xóchitl Tavera. The prize jury said the following of the essay:
“Gleaner of the Minuscule: On Rosario Castellanos,” by Mexican educator, linguist, and researcher Xóchitl Tavera, is an essay that, as the author tells us herself, “returns to Rosario Castellanos to rethink writing as an act of gleaning: crouching down, picking up, and giving sense. One writes not to put things in order, but rather to call into question even that which seems evident.” Through prose that is critical and personal at once—nourished by other artistic languages, such as that of film—Tavera describes certain key points of the creative practice and the intense biography of Rosario Castellanos. The author makes use of an effective metaphor that gives her essay context: “…gleaners and writers persevere in their routine of crouching down in the hopes of recovering, from the useless and the discarded, that which is untouchable and coveted.” Also of note is her flexible, intimate perspective, with which she seamlessly joins together quotes and references related to Castellanos along with her own intellectual concerns and her own vocation as a writer. In rethinking the life and work of Rosario Castellanos, Xóchitl Tavera reveals the effective, clear poetics of an author who is still seeking a definitive space in Latin American narrative.
You’ll have to write, whether you like it or not, whether you want to or not. To write, you’ll have to be alone.
Rosario Castellanos, Tablero de damas
The centerpiece of a room in a museum in the heart of Mexico City is a pistachio-green metal typewriter. The zenith lighting that shines on its glass case highlights marks left by wear, the unmistakable sign of the persistent fingers that pressed its keys until finally hearing the ding that announced the inevitable need to change the page. Its main purpose, we are told, was transcribing notes scribbed down by hand—notes that, any other way, would have been lost to hieroglyphic immensity. We are not told whether this artifact was often taken as carry-on luggage, but our attention is drawn to one detail: it came to Mexico from Tel Aviv. The owner of the indecipherable script and the ink-stained manuscripts that came off the roller was Rosario Castellanos.
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Writing is a work of perseverance. It takes monastic patience to calmly accept the texts that can’t be finished, courage to rewrite those that can be rewritten, and wisdom to recognize the difference. One must also learn to recognize the life cycle of thought that transforms into pages. To first identify the seed, to water the initial notes and let the draft grow, and then to undertake the never-ending task of pruning until it takes its final form.
Rosario had something like this in mind when she wondered if the writer was that figure sitting in front of the blank page, mulling over ideas and doubts before so much as daring to put down the first letter, or if, on the contrary, the writer was someone who, confident in having succeeded in transferring the contents of her mind to paper, ended up discovering she had managed to produce only an insipid, colorless outline. And, convinced, she asserts: “Behind every unwrinkled page, every orderly, delightful, well defined text, are hidden infinite crossings-out, dissident eraser marks, waste baskets full of discarded pages.”1 This image of hers, so close to that of the seamstress who mends, patches, and unstitches only to stitch again, has much in common also with the patient labor of those who dedicate their lives to the arduous task of gleaning.
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In her film The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda documents the transition of gleaning, or glaner in her native French, a communal practice that has gone from collecting ears of wheat to recovering said forgotten fruits from the farmland after the harvest, left behind because modern agricultural machines failed to carry them off or because some aspect of their size or shape renders them unacceptable to potential buyers. On the contemporary version of gleaning, Varda depicts people who scour among waste for some sustenance that might allow them to survive; televisions and radios with resellable metal coils and even objects with which to create artwork or decorate a room. The eyes of the world see piles of rotting refuse, while the sharp-eyed explorers of the spillover continue to perfect their technique of embracing that which is rejected, to nourish their bodies and fill their homes.
Rosario wrote that the world is sustained thanks to humanity’s accumulating answers to its questions and objects for its needs, with the same tenacity as insects. Similarly, gleaners and writers persevere in their routine of crouching down in the hopes of recovering, from the useless and the discarded, that which is untouchable and coveted. It may be that the heap of gathered things—words, fragments, objects, and remains—looks the same to everyone, and what varies is the standpoint from which we look at it. Only those who bend down to reach that which others discard are able to make something relevant of the everyday. The stooped posture common to both vocations is no coincidence.
I write because one day, in my adolescence,
I leaned toward the mirror and there was no one there.
You see? Emptiness. And beside me, the rest
oozed importance.2
*
In Writing, Marguerite Duras pointed to solitude as one of the intrinsic qualities of the creative act. She reaches a resolute conclusion: to be able to write, separation from others is indispensable. It’s a matter of physical distance, yes, but also of the necessary measure for words to be able not only to gestate, but also to reach full term. For this purpose, the primordial condition of the writer’s work is isolation, which Duras claims to defend. Mary Oliver shares this defensive trench, but recognizes that, sometimes, the greatest distractions come not only from the doorbell shooing away ideas, but also from the inner voice that warns of an empty pantry or an urgent dental appointment.
But we are well aware that detaching from yourself is a senseless endeavor; there are always bills to pay, family and friends to attend to, and other adult responsibilities right, left, and center that will keep us—always in the future tense—from reaching a blank space whose only purpose is to allow us to write without distractions. There is nothing for it but to live a double life: paid job by day, writing by night. And when you add the familiar noise of self-deceit, of lack of faith in what we write, and of our certainty that we have nothing new to tell, then the space grows even tighter, squeezing down on us until we crack.
I’m sure Rosario Castellanos didn’t have time either. When she was not a teacher, she was a mother, and when she was a mother, she was a diplomat too. Buried in bureaucracy, duties, and emotional ups and downs, her discipline made her into a gleaner working two shifts a day: first, to find the time (who knows where) to write, and second, to gather up the trivial details of life: dishes, receipts, and children who become chamberlains or aspire to be revolutionaries or soccer players. I highly doubt that she even once achieved absolute solitude and peace, and nonetheless, she made of the racket her finest sculptor’s clay.
As a writer, Rosario was able to fine-tune her perspective in order to find meaning among the apparent remains of the everyday. She was able to glean through the junk piles of home economics, love, motherhood, and death, turning them all into one shared subject. She wrote not for herself, but from herself; her work evinces the fact that the personal, seen with precision and from a distance, is a shared fabric, and that poetry can also be found sleeping in those places filled only with cooking pots and tablecloths.
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Writing is a paradoxical practice: it happens in the first person, but it tries to cross over into collective experience. It is held up by a single black thread that we now know was not discovered, but is rather the very thread that has stitched us together as humankind. Themes, beyond a silly determination to be unique, are rather resonances with other bodies, other places, and, without a doubt, different times. This is why writing comes much closer to the task of the gleaner, who rummages and pokes through that which we all share. The gleaner evolves a refined nose with which to sniff out smidgens of the everyday and make of them her own version. No two works of writing are the same, just as no two apples are the same.
Rosario Castellanos was not some Ariadne, holding a singular ball of thread with which to save society from the labyrinth. Her task was not to lead us toward the exit, but rather to pause and get a good look at the walls. She was able, instead, to braid questions out of the very fiber with which one sweeps away dirt and scrubs away stains. Thus she gleaned the most fitting and cutting words, not just to lay bare that which unites us all, but also to call it into question. For Rosario, writing meant never hiding under the rug, but rather figuring out how to show that we are dust and to dust we shall return.
*
One day, the pistachio-green machine fell silent, and the next it was given to us as a gift at the museum. When you step up to the glass, you can imagine what it holds in its gears: letters that were never sent, drafts that ended up in the trash, poems that interrupted an academic dissertation and, perhaps, some story left on standby because the rice was burning. Typing to glean; gleaning to exist. Just like during harvest season, what matters is not just what you pick up, but also the act of bending down. While there are willing hands, writing will allow us to continue gathering the fruits that, little by little, are left behind.
El Colegio de México
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
1 Rosario Castellanos, Juicios sumarios II, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984.
2 Rosario Castellanos, Poesía no eres tú, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2020.
