Turning the page on Mexican women: born to a Jewish immigrant family, Rosa Nissan transcended cultural and personal obstacles to question the traditional role of females in works celebrating their identity.

• Author: Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod

When the Mexican film Novia que te vea [Like a Bride] made the rounds at Latino film festivals in the U.S. in the 1990s, some spectators were surprised. "I grew up in Mexico and I didn't know there were Mexican Jews," was an often-heard reaction. Obviously, however, many Mexicans knew they were Jewish, but that their ethnic background was not a part of the nationalistic mestizo ideology that defines Mexican heritage as part Indian, part Spanish.

More than a decade before the film's release, Rosa Nissan had begun to create this humorous, poignant tale of a Sephardie-Mexican girl (based considerably on her life) in a writer's workshop with her coach, well-known writer Elena Poniatowska (see "Elena Poniatowska: Between the Lines of the Forgotten," Americas, March-April 2005). The story grew so extensive that Poniatowska suggested that Nissan cut it into two books, and publish the first. About the same time, documentary film producer Guita Schyfter was looking for Jewish personal accounts to help create her first feature film, and Poniatowska recommended Nissan's story. Nissan then worked with another writing coach, Hugo Hiriart, and Schyfter, on the screenplay. As a result, the film and her first novel were released in the same year, 1992, each carrying Nissan's title, Novia que te vea, which is a Sephardic saying for, "May you be a bride soon."

The film has two Jewish girl protagonists, Oshinica, of Sephardic background, and Rifke, of Ashkenazi. Born in Mexico City, they come of age in the politically charged 1960s. In the film, as in Nissan's novel, Oshinica's family members speak Ladino (an archaic form of Spanish retained by Jewish Spaniards who were expulsed from Spain in 1492), and celebrate traditional customs. The teenage girls rebel against their families, one marrying a Gentile, the other refusing her family's arranged marriage in order to choose her own spouse. The film's popularity in wider international venues, as well as its interest at home, may have helped sell Nissan's first and second novels, and certainly propelled her into the limelight as a writer of notice. It was a good coming-out party, both for Mexican women and minority ethnic populations, and for Nissan as an independent woman.

It was also the perfect juncture for such awareness in Mexico. Political changes that took place toward the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, in the wake of mounting economic and political crises, generated the collapse of a longstanding myth of national cultural unity. Manifestations of gay activism, a stronger feminist movement, and greater indigenous resistance movements surged, creating an opening for new artistic portrayals. For Nissan, born in 1939, the 1980s and 1990s meant freedom, a type of freedom denied her as a woman, whether in her status as a Mexican, a married woman, or as a member of the Jewish community. Being an innovator and forerunner is a difficult role to assume, and Nissan has had her share of travails. But now, after the publication of six books, numerous presentations as an artist, and more than twenty years living independently and unmarried, Nissan acknowledges that a woman of her generation could have missed it all. "If I had died at age thirty-five, I never would have enjoyed so much being a woman."

The teenage Nissan loved to read, talk to people, explore Mexico City neighborhoods, and write, but her parents steered her away from those pastimes, and instead to preparation for marriage at age seventeen. It would take more than twenty years for Nissan to wrest free of traditional prohibitions to her personal development...