Latin American Women Writers Carolina Alzate When I was appointed to the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in 2012 for a three-year term, I decided to focus my contribution on strengthening the exchange and dialogue between Spanish-speaking Latin American and American women scholars and their respective critical traditions. Although language and national borders are often thought of as the origin of separate cultural fields, questioning those borders and revealing their arbitrariness has been crucial for women writing and thinking in Latin America since at least the nineteenth century. Building sisterhood across borders has been a way to create networks of intellectual, creative, and political exchange and support that cross not only national borders—in Latin America and elsewhere—but also oceans and languages. Excluded from the brotherhood of citizenship since the creation of republics in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, Latin American women were expected not to leave home, not to leave their nations, religion, or language. Soon after independence, they learned other languages, created their own journals, published their fellow women writers, became translators, traveled, and witnessed, both for themselves and for their women readers, that there are different ways of being a woman and that there is no "natural" path attached to any of them. These networks are still vital today, both for writers and scholars. They are powerful but can, and need, to grow stronger. For this forum, then, I engaged three young scholars who demonstrate the transnational character of women's writing in Spanish-speaking Latin America. Their articles show the ways in which American and British work on and by women has been read by some Latin American women or how these women dealt with similar challenges in order to pursue the education, material resources, and intellectual autonomy that would enable them to devote their lives to writing. Publishing articles about these crossroads in English in such a relevant journal as Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature aims to show the ways in which the literary and critical traditions of Latin America and of the United States and Britain are interwoven and shed light on each other. It is also a way for writers and critics to continue the cross-cultural work that has helped women to share and build their lives. Two of the authors included in this forum, Lucía Stecher and Azuvia Licón, are based in Latin America—Chile and Colombia, respectively—while Claudia Cabello Hutt is currently located in the United States. Stecher is originally from Perú, Licón from México, and Cabello Hutt from Chile, and they are all a part of a network of feminist scholars that have been working together for nearly ten years with frequent meetings mostly [End Page 13] in Santiago thanks to the generosity of our colleagues at Universidad de Chile but also at Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. The articles focus on late nineteenth-century women's periodicals, working-class women's writing and professionalization in the 1920s and 1930s, and feminist activism and criticism from the 1930s and 1950s. The literature discussed in the articles shows women negotiating authority based on their needs and on their particular national, class, and ethnic identities in dialogue with work from Europe and North America. Licón's article, entitled "Modernity, Editorship, and Readership in Victorian and Colombian Periodicals: The Girl's Own Paper and Soledad Acosta's La Mujer," "presents a comparative analysis of two late nineteenth-century magazines' positions on women's work and independent living," arguing that the ways in which the two periodicals negotiated "tradition and modernity were influenced by their respective publishing markets and readerships" (p. 17). It is an article about periodicals for and by women and the tensions triggered by modernity when social class and gender intersect. As the article shows, "the study of the nineteenth-century periodical press sheds light on the professionalization of women's writing, the expansion of public female readership, and the participation of women in public space" (p. 17). The theoretical and critical framework Licón employs helps her explore "the processes, actors, and forces involved in the configuration of the press and...