“La identidad más profunda”: Epistolary Hints of Ulalume González de León’s Double Identity

Abstract

Drawing on correspondence from her personal archive, this article examines the question of identity during the years in which Uruguayan-born writer Ulalume González de León (née Ibáñez Iglesias, 1928–2009) defined her career as a poet while consolidating her Mexican identity in both civic and cultural terms, roughly from 1949 to 1984. This examination pursues two objectives: to identify the moments of identity crisis related to nationality, and to clarify a series of biographical details that shaped her authorial persona. These personal and aesthetic tribulations were partly rooted in her family ties to the Uruguayan poets Roberto Ibáñez and Sara (Iglesias) de Ibáñez, and are considered at two key moments: when she began publishing the short stories that would become A cada rato lunes (1970), and when she refused to be included in the Diccionario de literatura uruguaya (1987). In other words, Ulalume González de León’s consolidation as a writer was not only shaped by personal concerns, but was also the result of a lengthy process in which her debts to Latin American writers—Uruguayan and Mexican alike—converged with the apparent influence of the environments in which she grew up or in which she developed A cada rato lunes, independently of and alongside her more prominent writing project, Plagios (1973–1980).