IN THE 1930’s, in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas, a little girl travelled to her family’s ranch for the holidays. She made the journey as generations of the state’s white landowners had done, and as at least one generation to come would still do, sitting on a chair strapped to the back of an Indian. Her mother travelled on the back of another man, her little brother on the back of a third, perched for days on their mounts, up rainforest-covered elevations and down steep ravines, in the suffocating heat of the dry season or through drenching rains. In Chiapas, long after the Mexican Revolution had brought the idea of equality, at least, to the rest of the country’s citizens, the owners of the state’s most productive land continued to use the destitute indigenous majority as beasts of burden, and considered this the rightful order of things. In the particular case of this little girl, however, several exceptional things occurred: as she grew up she came to understand the twisted nature of the relationship between her family and the people who served them; she remembered what she had seen; and she became a writer. In due course she wrote the novel we now have before us in a fluid and powerful translation whose English title is stunningly apt: The Book of Lamentations.

Rosario Castellanos found her calling as so many writers do, out of loneliness. But in her case, the decision to write only served to compound her sense of isolation. There was no precedent for her choice: no woman before her in Chiapas had decided to write, and the idea was as shocking, as against natural law as if, say, an indio or a horse had decided to put pen to paper. The act of writing—indeed the very act of observing that precedes writing —was subversive, and banished her from the place that birth and upbringing had reserved for her in the tiny social universe of Chiapas. It is hard to imagine today what it meant not to know one’s place in so rigid a society; for Castellanos it meant, of course, that her chances for achieving the expected goals—a comfortable marriage, children, the safe rituals of family and religion —were reduced to zero. But in such suffocating circumstances, not to know one’s place could also mean something more terrifying: not knowing who one is, not understanding the face in the mirror, because that face does not resemble any other face one knows.