Autocartografías de Alicia Dujovne Ortiz: la narrativa detrás de las fronteras en Las perlas rojas (2005) y Camarada Carlos (2007)

Within the literatures produced by second and third generation migrants, there are texts of an autobiographical nature. In these writings, the self is not constructed on the basis of the narration of life but on the basis of the reconstruction of the territories abandoned by their ancestors. These places have disappeared from the current geopolitical cartography since there have been border movements, some towns and cities have changed nation or have been given another name. As a result, returning to and finding these territories is often impossible. The sub-genre of autocartography allows us to study these works by analysing how these spaces are accounted for and how geopolitical borders are re-signified. Two questions have been used to analyse Alicia Dujovne Ortiz’s Las perlas rojas (2005) and Camarada Carlos (2007). How does she reconstruct in her narrative the lost spaces of her paternal grandparents? How does she re-signify borders and what kind of cartography is the result? The study is carried out in dialogue with the principles of geocriticism proposed by Bertrand Westphal (France, 1962) and Catherine Malabou’s (France, 1959) concept of plasticity. Here we have found that Dujovne composes a multi-layered cartography. It is a map of plausible places (Westphal), that is, she offers us not a single version but a composition of territories in the midst of dialogues with diverse experiences of those places. This cartography is an exponent of the plasticity where space, narrator and her representation mutually give and receive shape. Constructing the cartography of a place as a result of conversations between its present and the stories of its inhabitants and migrants thus implies a map shaped by the experience that also shapes the writer.