From 1955 to 1976. Alicia Eguren, Aurora Venturini, and Historic Disruption Figures

Abstract

The coup d’état perpetrated against Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 at the hands of the
self-proclaimed “Liberating Revolution” is the condition of exile that two Peronist writers and militants must face: Alicia Eguren and Aurora Venturini. If political violence
breaks out in 1955, in 1976 the last military dictatorship does not allow them to
return to Argentine. In Eguren’s case, her work ends abruptly with her kidnapping and
subsequent disappearance; Venturini, on the other hand, continued writing until an old
age that, belatedly, glorified her. But beyond deadlines and durations, there is a trait that
both works have in common, and that is the silence or reserve that surrounded them like
an impure and distrustful aura. Thus, the names of Eguren and Venturini rest on texts
that have barely been read or have been directly excluded from the systematizations
of the history of Argentine literature. Our reading hypothesis claims that if politics was
one of the reasons for marginalization, the form and motives of their writings contributed
to forging a silence that critics and academia chose not to confront. Catholic and
nationalist idealism in one, obscene monstrosity in the other: two poetics that escape
classifications and categories, both aesthetic, ideological and cultural.