Colonial Archive and gender twists in Ada Elflein´s unknown texts

Abstract

Between 1905 and 1918, one of the Sunday serials of the newspaper La Prensa was in charge of Ada Elflein (1880-1919). During the first years, Elflein's stories were patriotic, childish and were, for the most part, "lifted" from the press and re-published as a book. It is this small fraction of his work, reprinted several times, that is known today. However, archival research reveals that, simultaneously with this obsequious narrative regarding the sex-gender expectations of her time, Elflein published texts highly aware of gender inequalities. In the colonial notes that we analyze here, "La Maldonada", "Lucía Miranda" and "Isabel de Guevara", there are distortions regarding the versions of colonial texts and, above all, a denunciation of certain historiographical operations of invisibility of women in history,