From 1955 to 1976. Alicia Eguren, Aurora Venturini, and Historic Disruption Figures

Abstract

The coup d’état perpetrated against Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 at the hands of theself-proclaimed “Liberating Revolution” is the condition of exile that two Peronist writers and militants must face: Alicia Eguren and Aurora Venturini. If political violencebreaks out in 1955, in 1976 the last military dictatorship does not allow them toreturn to Argentine. In Eguren’s case, her work ends abruptly with her kidnapping andsubsequent disappearance; Venturini, on the other hand, continued writing until an oldage that, belatedly, glorified her. But beyond deadlines and durations, there is a trait thatboth works have in common, and that is the silence or reserve that surrounded them likean impure and distrustful aura. Thus, the names of Eguren and Venturini rest on textsthat have barely been read or have been directly excluded from the systematizationsof the history of Argentine literature. Our reading hypothesis claims that if politics wasone of the reasons for marginalization, the form and motives of their writings contributedto forging a silence that critics and academia chose not to confront. Catholic andnationalist idealism in one, obscene monstrosity in the other: two poetics that escapeclassifications and categories, both aesthetic, ideological and cultural.