Typewriter Workshop: Amparo Dávila and Margos de Villanueva as Typewriters of Alfonso Reyes

Abstract

Throughout this article, I approach Alfonso Reyes’s typewriters, women that turned office work into a writing workshop: Amparo Dávila and Margos de Villanueva. Dávila, winner of the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, is known for her fiction; only after working with Reyes did her writing migrate from poetry to prose. Villanueva, on the other hand, was a novelist and playwright: her two novels were written during the time she worked with Reyes. This article focuses on the women that appear in the last volume of Alfonso Reyes’s diaries because it registers his last years of life. The diseases that affected him also prompted him to look for assistance: physical—granted by his wife and son—and, particularly, intellectual. Through a close reading of Reyes’s diaries and the Marxist theory of Friederich Kittler and Bruce Bliven, I distinguish the different variants of secretarial and typist work to prove that within this invisible labor there existed mentorship and collaboration that led both Villanueva and Dávila to turn into writers themselves. I emphasize the materiality and sensorial quality of copying and highlight the validity of listening in order to prove that the typewriter laboratory aided the work of these two writers, as well as that of Alfonso Reyes.