Writing Through the Crack. Memory, Remainder, And Border in Cristina Rivera Garza

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of Cristina Rivera Garza’s induction speech to El Colegio Nacional, Escribir con el presente: archivos, fronteras y cuerpos (2023), as a critical condensation of a poetics previously developed in works such as Dolerse (2011), Los muertos indóciles (2013), and Escrituras geológicas (2022). It argues that this induction should not be understood merely as an institutional event significant in gender terms, but as an irruption that renders visible the mechanisms of legitimation, hierarchy, and exclusion sustaining a particular idea of the literary canon. The essay identifies three central operators in Rivera Garza’s poetics: border, fragment, and body. From these axes, it examines how her writing questions authorized cartographies, works with remains, traces, and incomplete archives, and situates the body as a territory where violence, memory, and resistance are inscribed. The essay also establishes a critical bridge with Elena Garro in order to show that the connections among women writers who work through memory, remainder, and disobedience allow us to rethink the canon as a network of dissident filiations rather than as a stable sequence of consecrated figures.