A Review
By Frederique Rolland-Mills

"The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma" by Rosario Aguilar
Rosario Aguilar (born in 1938 in León, Nicaragua), has been described by literary critic Raymond Souza as "one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary Spanish-American fiction." Aguilar has written eight novels in which she focuses on the lives of women in Central America. Even though she refuses to be coined a "feminist," her recurrent preoccupation with gender-specific issues such as the isolation of women, abortion or the right not to have children, point to her clear understanding of the relationships of power that continue to mold women’s experiences in Nicaragua.

"The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma" (1997) is Aguilar’s last work of fiction and her first historical novel. The plot is set during the electoral campaign of 1990, which brought President Violeta Chamorro to power. The story seems simple at first. A young Nicaraguan journalist covers the elections with her Spanish lover and at the same time struggles to write an historical novel about the conquest of Central America. 

The narrative juxtaposes the personal stories of women from the Spanish aristocracy, as well as those of two indigenous princesses and one mestiza, and records the transformation that each of them experiences as a result of their exposure to a different culture. Their stories are related to the quest for identity of the young journalist, who, through her writing and research, is trying to recover her lost connection to her Indian and Spanish roots and to understand herself as Central-American mestiza.

Structurally more sophisticated than Aguilar’s previous works, "The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma" is also the author’s most subversive piece of fiction. In this intuitive and metafictional text, she rewrites the history of the conquest from a woman’s point of view and subverts the genre of the chronicle. Originally, Latin American chronicles were texts written by men about men, and usually failed to acknowledge the participation of women in the events they described. These "lost chronicles" are of a different kind; instead of focusing on facts and on the feats of famous conquistadors and adventurers, they center on the intimate thoughts and experiences of their wives, daughters and concubines. 

Frederique Rolland-Mills is a liberal arts professor at SCAD.