Staging Gendered Perspectives on Mexico’s 1968 Social Movements: Elena Garro’s Sócrates y los gatos and Pilar Campesino’s Octubre terminó hace mucho tiempo.

Literary responses to Mexico’s 1968 sociopolitical movements tend to focus on male perspectives, resulting in a largely masculine version of the events. This study expands on this rather homogeneous response by focusing on two plays by women: Sócrates y los gatos by Elena Garro and Octubre terminó hace mucho tiempo by Pilar Campesino. Both works problematize the male-centered sociopolitical movement that advocated equity and inclusiveness while marginalizing women’s contributions to social activism. By focusing on personal relationships in parallel to political discourse, the two pieces underscore the political as explicitly intrinsic to gendered concepts and structures. Through their critique of Mexico’s political ideology, Garro and Campesino accentuate a male-centered social stratification that severely discounts women’s contributions to social change. Their plays propose an understanding of gender inequality as an encounter between a paternalistic nation-state, a tradition of masculine ideology as the center of Mexican thought and social movement, and a patriarchy embedded in identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]