Angeles Mastretta: women of will in love and war.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Bestselling Mexican author and Spanish professor at Georgetown, Univ. - Interview

"I think that the Mexican Revolution is a period that initiated things, I ideas," says Mexico's bestselling author Angeles Mastretta. "All revolutions do that. That's why people make revolutions, to I change things. Lots of times revolutions change very little. But during a revolutionary period, people dare incredible things. They enjoy an enormous amount of freedom. I can tell you that there's no way that during the forties and fifties Mexican women had as much freedom as during the twenties. Because when a war is going on, people don't care who you make love with, if you get married or you don't, if you're living with someone with or without papers. Those things become absolutely secondary. The most important thing is life."

Understanding this dynamic has become Mastretta's life's work. Since 1985 she has lit up the literary horizon with the publication of two highly entertaining novels that frame her homeland's revolutionary experience--Arrancame la vida [Tear This Heart Out] and Mat de amores [Lovesick]. Instant bestsellers in Mexico, both books have also become international hits and have been translated into many languages.

What's clear from Mastretta's success is that the Mexican Revolution continues to fascinate the public, and that it is still a meaningful subject for the contemporary reader. Mastretta thinks that this is because there are people who still remember stories of those days or because the revolutionary period resembles so closely the times we're living through now.

"War allows you to do a lot of things that peace and society would probably change," she continues. "Things that war made possible. Afterward, in times of peace, you wouldn't be able to do those things, and that doesn't go for just the Mexican Revolution. That happened a lot in the Nicaraguan Revolution. And in the Cuban, it goes without saying. Women who went to war with guns in their hands, who jumped on and off trains, who slept surrounded by men, and who all of a sudden had to go back home and behave like housewives. It's been enormously hard for them to take up the kind of lives their grandmothers led. They can't do it. They don't know how. They never reamed. They don't want to. And still, this is what their world is imposing on them. In revolutionary Nicaragua that's pretty much what happened."

In Washington, D.C., to promote the English edition of Lovesick, Mastretta is gorgeous and impeccably dressed. At first glance she reminds you of those society ladies that one of her characters is bent on rebelling against. However, once she starts speaking, she displays exuberance, warmth, candor, and a bit of irreverence, without a speck of pretense at "stardom." She is modest and straightforward about her initial literary forays and about the unexpected success of her first novel.

"I guess that I started to write in late adolescence," she says. "I was born in Puebla, but I moved to Mexico City at nineteen when my father died. Journalism is what he would have liked to do. I completed my studies in journalism, but about three years later I discovered that what I really liked was literature. Even so, I got a job in journalism and I worked at it for ten years before writing my first novel, Tear This Heart Out."

The book's title is from a bolero, a beloved musical form in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, whose popularity crested in the thirties and forties, when the novel takes place. This is a period of intense industrialization and modernization in Mexico, a period of radical social changes, which included the migration of thousands of peasants to urban areas, the integration of European and North American concepts of production, and the emergence of a consumer culture. In this historical context the protagonist, Catalina Guzman de Ascencio, embarks on an odyssey of self-discovery and learns what it means to be a woman in the new Mexico. Married to Andres Ascencio, who incarnates the repression of state and family, Catalina resists more and more the codes of conduct considered acceptable for upper-middle-class women. Her search for self leads her to become involved with other men, among them Carlos Vives, an orchestra conductor who combines love of music with political and social subversion. For Catalina, popular songs, the people's sentimental and collective expression of their yearning for freedom, become a vehicle for personal liberation. Thus, Mastretta interweaves the artistic, the political, and the particular into a love story that takes place during a pivotal moment in Mexican history.

"It's a novel about...