Reading with Frances Calderón de la Barca

Abstract

Who do we read? How do we read them? Do we read her differently? This paper, based on research and teaching at ETH Zurich within the ERC-funded project Women Writing Architecture 1700-1900 (WoWA), attempts to answer these questions by examining multiple readings of Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico (1843). Received favourably in both the US and in Britain, yet openly disdained in Mexico, the book was based on the two years the Scottish-born author spent in the country as the wife of the Spanish envoy. Rich in descriptions of people and places, it documents not only a country struggling to find itself and peace, but also her acclimatisation in a former Spanish colony. We have read and listened to passages of Life in Mexico with small groups of researchers and architecture students, guiding them through a number of reading layers as a way of reading-with - with her and with each other. This paper describes and interprets the collective readings performed in these various settings. Centering the author’s voice while decentering our disciplinary focus on building, we shift our attention to practices of reception, highlighting the agency that lies in writing. By choosing sources not commonly considered part of the architectural canon and reading them collectively, we make visible our own biases, associations and agendas when reading. We explore reading-with as a method to write inclusive histories which incorporate the experiences of those previously sidelined by architectural culture. Rather than believing the premise that women had no agency in this period, we assume they did. We credit them with having a voice, with their writing having an impact, we hear them and know that others at their time listened as well.