“Doña María Dolores López, Vecina of Tehuacán” or the Case of a Too-Soon Forgotten Nineteenth-Century Mexican Woman Writer

The essay examines the only extant work of the relatively unknown María Dolores López, an ode written for a poetry contest and compiled in Cantos de las musas mexicanas con motivo de la colocación de la estatua equestre de bronce de nuestro augusto soberano Carlos IV (1804). The challenging tone of María Dolores López’s ode sets it apart from the other poems in the compilation and from those of her times. The decidedly political topic of the competition is cleverly used as a pretext for placing in the spotlight a female subject who writes and defends her right to do so publicly. This ode constitutes a precedent in a new era of nineteenth-century women’s writing in Spanish America based on a new female subjectivity.