Representations of the Yucatecas: Founding fictions in the peninsular newspaper the Museo Yucateco, 1841-1842

This article analyzes the discursive representations of "the Yucatecan woman" present in the literary newspaper the Museo Yucateco (1841-1842), as part of the foundational fictions of Yucatecan identity that were configured by the Yucatecan elite, when Yucatan was independent of the Mexican nation in the mid-nineteenth century. This construction of regional identity is based on a nationalist discourse appropriated by regionalist ideology. It has a patriarchal, binary structure that imagines political identities in an iconized way (the public and the private) and models the power of the male subject over the female as part of his search for political and symbolic hegemony.