Acosta 114 PERSONA RECOVERY THROUGH HOMAGE: POETIC TRIBUTES TO SPAIN’S GENERATION OF 1927 ANGE LA AC OSTA T HE O H IO S T A T E U N IV E R S I T Y ABSTRACT Tània Balló’s Las sinsombrero documentary series (2015-2021) about modern Spanish women led to the creation of multimedia projects and online spaces for paying homage to forgotten women throughout history. However, such crowdsourced and scholarly recuperation efforts are at odds with the prevailing canonization of the Spanish avant-garde artistic group known as the “Generation of 1927”. A deliberately constructed practice of homage has historically excluded women’s legacies and granted nearly exclusive support for the ten male poets considered the originators of the Generation of 1927. Modern women writers like María Teresa León and Concha Méndez lacked such cultural support and thus constructed personas in their life writing by placing themselves outside the sphere of influence of the Generation of 1927 despite their successful literary careers. This creative piece brings together persona studies and homage to study how performances of prestige by writers and literary historians reveal the gendered, classed, and sexualised ways that the literary history of the Generation of 1927 has been constructed. My proposed theory of homage uncovers the closeted and undocumented sapphic and sororal relationships between women, and imagines queer feminist futures where women’s work is central to understanding the cultural milieux of the Generation of 1927. These poetic tributes are what I call “life-making homages” that celebrate and grant prestige to recuperated knowledge of writers’ queer, undocumented lives. The paper and accompanying poems demonstrate how, through life-making homages, scholars can propose alternate paradigms for tracing the development of the Generation of 1927 as part of Spain’s cultural heritage. KEY WORDS Homage; Poet Persona; Modernism; Las Modernas; Life Writing; Generation of 1927 INTRODUCTION My poems envision Madrid’s Gran Vía, writers’ homes like Velintonia, and other locations peopled by modern Spanish women seeking liberation and creativity. Among these poetic tributes, one will find Victorina Durán, an out gay actor and dramaturge, partners Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera, and beloved children’s book writer, Elena Fortún. Although their lives and works illuminate the vibrant cultural milieux of early twentieth-century Spain, queer and female stories do not appear in canonical Spanish literary history such that reintroducing them constitutes a political act. To write poetic tributes is to work against canonical exclusions to maintain their memory in the twenty-first century. At the turn of the twentieth century, to obtain public recognition as an established poet in Spain, one had to be assigned male at birth. Such men befriended other male writers during the late 1920s, Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 115 published and promoted their poetry collections with the same editing houses, and ultimately formed part of the Spanish literary canon still widely taught in the twenty-first century. According to official histories, Spain’s “Generation of 1927” was birthed through homage on December 17, 1927. A well-circulated photograph of this event depicts ten men in suits gathered at the Atheneum of Seville, Spain on the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. These men were excited to bring Góngora’s work back into the public spotlight and even more eager to make a name for themselves as poets (Mainer 2020). The homage to Góngora, the mythos of the Generation of 1927, would become the moment that defined the artistic trajectories of these upper-class male poets whose work continues to garner more attention by scholars than their female counterparts.1 Homages have codified the Generation of 1927 as an object of study within the periodization of Spanish literature. Placing the study of homage, as presented through life writing and poetic tributes, within the field of persona studies offers a greater understanding of how the development of poetic and autobiographical subjects along gendered and sexualised lines of identity shapes how scholars maintain writers’ and artists’ legacies posthumously. Homages consist of events, publications, and performances that uphold the personas of individuals. Homages, “homenaje” in Spanish, are easily recognizable insofar as writers and organizers label them as such, thus forming a poetic category yet to be interrogated within literary and cultural theory.2 Such homages have inscribed men within the cultural heritage of the Spanish avant-garde and, like literary canons, homages operate through cultural capital (Gambarte 1996). Consequently, male poets positioned themselves well for illustrious literary careers through documenting and organizing homages (Alonso and Guillén), founding the literary magazine Litoral in 1926 (Prados and Altolaguirre), and developing and sharing avant- garde creative works at literary gatherings known as tertulias at cafés like the distinguished Café Gijón in Madrid where women were barred entry. For nearly a century, women’s legacies have been excluded through a deliberately constructed practice of homage that has granted nearly exclusive cultural support to ten male poets considered the originators of the Generation of 1927. Homages to the Generation of 1927 are comprised of fan-made content like poetry, performances, and caricatures of writers. As in fan studies, homages require a certain point of entry to participate, which (in this case) is often mediated through academic channels and requires a thorough knowledge of personal and cultural details about writers and their work. The public can now join organizations like the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre (AAVA) to participate in homages organized by researchers and cultural activists. The mythos of the Generation of 1927 operates through a particular construction of personas based on male literary success while obscuring networks of women and other writers who have been minoritized due to class, literary genre, national origin, and other factors that impede literary productivity and public recognition. “Life-making homages” by feminist scholars and cultural practitioners make feminist and queer readings of writers’ personas visible, and by doing so they make alternative conceptualisations of the generation accessible to scholars, students, and the public. My poetic tributes are one such example of life-making homages that share lesser- known details about writers’ lives for a non-specialist readership. My poems and other life- making homages anticipate readers’ unfamiliarity with the subject matter, crafting a creative narrative to introduce readers to the cultural milieux of early twentieth-century Spain. Examples of life-making homages from other writers include Alicia y las sinsombrero (Balló & Conde 2021), an illustrated children’s book in which the daughter of painter Margarita Manso finds her mother’s diary documenting the exciting world of “sinsombreristas” (“the hatless ones”) like Rosa Chacel, María Zambrano, and Maruja Mallo. Hellekson and Busse’s 2014 volume on fan fiction studies also emphasizes the life-making potential of fan communities that adapt texts and characters to suit the diverse needs of fans, albeit with fewer gatekeeping mechanisms than literary traditions that require participants pay a much steeper charge of cultural capital. Acosta 116 Since the inception of the Generation of 1927, women writers and feminists alike have worked against the exclusion of women from records documenting early twentieth-century Spanish literature. In 1927, men at the Atheneum of Seville dared to ask whether the four women who attended the homage were in the right room. By the 1990s, Ernestina de Champourcín, an accomplished female Spanish poet, was surprised to have even been invited to an homage to the few surviving poets at the Generation of 1927 Cultural Centre in Málaga. Recent feminist scholarship by Eva Moreno Lago (Durán 2019) and Capdevila-Argüelles (2018) argues that modern women, las modernas, were systematically excluded from the androcentric literary canon through anthologisation and research practices that discredit their work under the guise of its not meeting rigid standards for canonization. Balló’s Las sinsombrero documentary series (Balló 2015, 2019, 2019) about modern Spanish women who dared to take their hats off in public led to the creation of multimedia projects and online spaces for paying homage to forgotten women throughout history. The crowdsourced and scholarly recuperation efforts are at odds with the prevailing canonization of Spanish literature precisely because they recover the personas of women writers through surviving documentation of life writing and personal ephemera. As an undergraduate in the United States, my first glimpse of the Silver Age of Spanish literature (1898-1939) came through reading literary anthologies and texts written and compiled by Generation of 1927 writers (Alonso and Guillén) and their close friends from subsequent generations (Carlos Bousoño). It wasn’t until I decided to pursue doctoral research in Iberian Studies that I finally encountered novels and life writing by women writers thanks to the exciting work being done by Fran Garcerá, Cari Fernández, Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles, and many others affiliated with archives and the Torremozas and Renacimiento editing houses. These new editions of works by modern women (las modernas) foreground writers’ activism and their reactions to women’s suffrage and the right to divorce granted by the 1931 Constitution of the short-lived Second Spanish Republic (Capdevila-Argüelles 2017; 2018). Given the pervading misogyny and homophobia of Spanish society during the first half of the twentieth-century, women could not easily claim an artistic identity (i.e., persona). Spanish women often collaborated on writing projects with their husbands without receiving written acknowledgment, as was the case for Zenobia Camprubí, wife of Nobel Laureate poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Concha Méndez, wife of Altolaguirre. Additionally, Amanda Junquera published all her short stories and translations under the pseudonym Isabel de Ambía. For as much as homages are imbued in subjective cultural practices maintained by androcentric and heteronormative canon formations, they also provide a way forward for scholars and the public to better include remarkable modern women as part of the cultural imaginary of early twentieth-century Spain. Homages are both celebratory and political, and I challenge the hegemonic discourse surrounding cultural heritage in Spain by referencing lesser- known details about writers’ lives (i.e., queer relationships, nicknames, and informal gatherings) in my poetic tributes. My creative and academic work builds upon ongoing studies of the periodization and classification of the Generation of 1927 to propose a more inclusive approach to canon formation (Anderson 2005; Mainer 2020). This approach not only benefits women writers but also allows for an emergence of persona based on artistic collaborations and friendships instead of prestige and cultural capital. My poetic tributes and scholarly apparatus bring together persona studies and homage to study how performances of prestige by writers and literary historians bring forth the gendered, classed, and sexualised ways that the literary history of the Generation of 1927 has been constructed. The Generation of 1927 represents a period of cultural effervescence, yet minoritized writers were denied entry into literary establishments like Atheneums and the Residencia de Estudiantes (Students’ Residence) due to gender, class, and a lack of formal education.3 Furthermore, male homosexuality was criminalized during much of the twentieth century and made more visible than female homosexuality (Mira Nouselles, 2014), resulting in strategic omissions in (auto)biographical details by and about queer writers. Emilio Calderón’s 2016 biography of Vicente Aleixandre was Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 117 the first to confirm Aleixandre’s relationships with men and women, and José Luis Ferris’s 2007 biography of Carmen Conde makes a similar claim regarding Conde’s nearly half-century relationship and cohabitation with fellow writer, Amanda Junquera. Working with persona in early twentieth-century Spain means grappling with how writers constructed their personas in response to sociohistorical limitations and power structures. These dynamics come into play when referring to queer identities as well as how modern women used life writing to convey their messages for posterity. As a participant in and creator of homages to the Generation of 1927, I take advantage of the dual purpose of literary tributes: to maintain the mythos of the generation and to recover the lives and stories of those overshadowed by the dominant narrative of Spanish literary history. I negotiate the ways Spanish creatives constructed their public personas during their lifetimes and how present-day tributes represent writers’ multifaceted identities. Homages emerge from literary canon formations deeply rooted in the power structures prevalent since their inception, yet the medium is also full of liberatory potential for minoritized writers. Through such tributes, scholars and the literary public can celebrate the complicated and interweaving lives and artistic worlds of modern Spanish creatives across gender, sexuality, ability, and social class for the benefit of the ten male writers and countless understudied writers alike. Present day homages acknowledge poetic and literary persona while operating under a more inclusive framework vis-à-vis the possibilities of digital archives and social media. My poems demonstrate alternate paradigms for telling the narrative of the Generation of 1927 by imagining the private lives of Fortún, Conde, and Junquera. In an interdisciplinary and public-facing context, homages are important pedagogical tools for making persona visible and accessible by filling in gaps in life stories not otherwise mentioned in canonical texts. Homages in their various forms (written, performed, multimedia, etc.) present many possibilities for establishing and maintaining persona, but their most important work lies in the queer potential of recovering testimonies of what people could not say or do because of the pervading social constraints of their time. My proposed theory of homage uncovers the closeted and undocumented sapphic and sororal relationships between women, and imagines queer feminist futures where women’s work is central to understanding the cultural milieux of women and men of the Generation of 1927. The poetic tributes included in this piece are examples of what I call “life-making homages” that celebrate and grant prestige to recuperated knowledge of writers’ queer, undocumented lives. My life-making homages to women writers are intimately tied to my cultural activism. As it stands, the spaces women inhabited like the “Academy of Witches” at Velintonia in Madrid are in danger of destruction (Diario Sur 2021).4 Likewise, archival preservation practices favour conserving works by and about male writers and prioritize male autobiographies over women’s diaries, travelogues, and other forms of life writing.5 Tània Balló (2018) writes about the lengthy fieldwork she conducted for her Las sinsombrero documentaries, the modern women pioneers who dared to remove their hats in public, emphasising how she needed to visit small towns in Spain and make many phone calls with descendants in order to obtain the information needed to construct female personas in her books and documentaries. Life-making homages validate writers’ agency by pairing known details about them with an intimate understanding of the social constraints they encountered. While homages to prominent writers seek to reverently elevate their verses, paying homage to non-canonical writers requires significant archival research and preparation before celebrations can begin. It is through studies of life writing and personal ephemera that twenty-first century scholars and the public can begin to piece together intimate details about writers’ lives. When contemporary audiences learn (auto)biographical details about writers from life-making homages, they can better conceptualize the personas writers established for themselves during their lifetimes. By reading the poetic homages Conde made to Junquera compiled in Poemas a Amanda (Poems to Amanda) and their epistolary correspondence (Fernández and Garcerá 2021; Conde and Junquera 2021), I was able to look beyond their public-facing personas to envision their lives Acosta 118 together in their Madrid home, Velintonia 5. Since these poems and letters mostly show Conde’s perspective, her diligent daily diaries inevitably shaped what we know of Junquera’s less public persona. These life-writing documents remain incomplete as Conde does not code herself as queer in her 1986 autobiography Por el camino, viendo sus orillas (Along the Path, Seeing its Shores) despite her private, affectionate messages to Junquera found elsewhere in her personal archive. When faced with archives that do not yield sought-after information, scholars should centre practices of life-making homages around humanizing their honourees. Little is known about the “Academy of Witches” that convened in Velintonia 5, above the historic site of meetings between Aleixandre, Lorca, and Alonso in Velintonia 3. I can only imagine Concha Zardoya leading the inaugural reading of her play La novia del espejo (The Bride of the Mirror) on February 8, 1946 while attendees listened with bated breath (Calderón 2016, p. 179). It may seem counterintuitive, but I appreciate learning about the less appealing details about writers’ personalities that also must be negotiated when depicting their personas in homage. Conde’s writing reveals her dual responsibilities to her husband, Antonio Oliver, and to Junquera, who at times appeared needy or insufferable. When scholars and event organisers include these details in carefully mediated written and performed tributes to women writers, audiences gain a more nuanced appreciation of the writers’ personas. By including these details in my poetic homages, my persona work focuses on writers’ lived experiences instead of the ways they accrued social prestige to enter the literary canon. 6 The difficulties women writers faced in their lives and careers over the course of the twentieth century affect the production of homages in the present. The year 2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Josefina de la Torre (1907-2002), a multitalented poet and actress of the stage and screen born in the Canary Islands, and the beginning of a new era of homages organized by loved ones, scholars, and other custodians of writers’ memories. She has been immortalized in a 1997 episode of “Rincón Literario”, a show featuring notable Spanish writers. Nevertheless, she feared that her life’s work would soon be forgotten and proclaimed: “Voy a ser olvidada” (“I am going to be forgotten”) (Medel 2017). Homages are essential memory devices for safeguarding the legacies of artists like Josefina de la Torre when their life writing alone cannot escape oblivion. Cultural preservation of literary history tends to rely on maintaining and mediating the personas of male writers who accrued significant prestige and cultural capital during their lifetimes. I move my own work away from focusing on writers’ accomplishments and accolades to celebrating their daily acts of creativity and resilience. For as ground-breaking as Carmen Conde’s induction to the Royal Spanish Academy in 1979 was, it was only possible through the connections she formed with other writers and her partnership with Junquera. Queer feminist tributes push back against the homages to the “Generation of 1927” that traditionally commemorate the promising poetic careers of the ten male poets. I watched one such tribute at the Atheneum of Madrid in July of 2019 in honour of avant-garde female creatives now known as “las Sinsombrero”.7 Unlike tributes to their male counterparts, the audience likely had little familiarity with these women, despite how well the Atheneum affiliates re-enacted their larger-than-life personalities. In one comical interlude, “María Zambrano” acted amazed as she peered upwards at the air conditioning unit, a far superior technological substitute to her hand fan that was making too much noise in the microphone. Overall, the women playing philosopher María Zambrano and painter Maruja Mallo successfully conveyed the optimism and resilience of modern women who lived their lives to the fullest and deserve the dignity of being remembered. At the end of the event, the organisers encouraged the attendees to read the life writing of “las sinsombrero”, promising a rewarding reading experience. Modern Spanish women were prolific writers of life writing and many such memoirs, autobiographies, and travelogues continue to be well read and circulated. These works include Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 119 María Teresa León’s Memoria de la melancolía (Memory of Melancholy), Concha Mendez’s Memorias habladas, memorias armadas (Spoken Memories, Assembled Memories), and Elena Fortún’s Oculto sendero (Hidden Path). These texts offer glimpses into upper-class female life during the twentieth century, from Fortún’s depiction of how her protagonist María Luisa grows into her sexuality as a gay woman, to Méndez’s transcribed recordings about life in exile in the Americas. Despite having participated in social and artistic experiences tantamount to admission into the canonical generation, these writers do not claim a space for themselves within the Generation of 1927 due to the discrimination they experienced in their daily lives. Women were the protagonists of their own life writing, yet they minimised their cultural and political contributions in these texts. They were reluctant to construct personas for themselves like those of male writers, and opted to call themselves collaborators instead of foundational canonical figures. While female autobiographical subjects tackle questions of gender, sexuality, politics, and exile, women like Méndez and León avoided claiming involvement in the core group of the Generation of 1927. Méndez remained steadfastly unapologetic about her identity as a writer and what she called her “cáracter aventurero” (“adventurous character”) (Méndez & Altolaguirre 2018, p. 25), however she feared that she became too masculine when writing about social issues. In this sense, women negotiate being othered by their sexuality and/or gender by refusing to claim the sociocultural influence of being writers in their life writing, thus constructing autobiographical personas from the periphery. Female life writing and biographies tell the story of the fraught relationships women had with developing their own persona and authorial voice. During the 1920s and 1930s, young women in search of literary pursuits banned together at the “Residencia de Señoritas” (“Ladies Residence”) and “Lyceum Club Femenino” (“Female Lyceum Club”) in the face of the inaccessibility of male-dominated institutions. They wrote against the backdrop of a gruesome Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francisco Franco’s authoritarian dictatorship (1939-1975) that kept countless writers in exile and in the closet for the remainder of their lives. These “sinsombreristas” never stopped writing with the fervent hope that a future generation would answer their call. Fortún dedicates Oculto sendero “To all who missed their path…and still have time to change their course”, imagining the possibilities for people brave enough to challenge gender roles and heteronormativity when she herself could not do so openly (Fortún 2021, p. v). While Fortún created a persona for herself as the author of the acclaimed “Celia y su mundo” (“Celia and her world”) children’s book series, the manuscript of Oculto sendero lay dormant from its completion circa 1945 until its recovery in the 1980s and subsequent 2016 Spanish publication and 2021 English translation. I dedicate “My Dear Encarna” to Fortún’s courage and foresight in opening a queer path for all those who refuse to conform. León’s 1970 autobiography shows her true mettle as a staunch antifascist even when her own words betray her. She frequently refers to herself as the “cola de la cometa”, the “tail of the comet” of her husband Rafael Alberti, even when nothing about her story renders her secondary (2020, p. 172). Women like León and Fortún exemplify the disjunction between their active role as creators of art and knowledge and documented reluctance to edify their personas as male writers did. Marshall, Moore and Barbour (2020, p. 29) discuss the construction of persona in literature as the creation of a poetic, fictional, or autobiographical “I” through which many male poets claim expertise over their reality. In the case of Spain, Aleixandre and Salinas established male poetic personas as lovers and creators of universes in metaphysical poetry while women who wrote outside of surrealism and ultraism did not construct these same types of poetic subjects in their work. Homages thus serve as the vehicle for performing prestige and persona to exalt creative lives. Creators of homages provide a bridge between the documented ways writers constructed persona and the initiatives to engage new publics with writers’ literary and cultural contributions. While this piece does not address the proliferation of online homages (digital humanities projects, social media, etc.) or news stories about writers’ lives and places of habitation, future work on persona in Spanish literary history should address the influence of Acosta 120 the internet and media in writers’ status as both celebrities (i.e. Nobel laureates) and non- celebrities (i.e. marginalised writers).8 I wrote these poems with the hope that, through life writing and archival materials, we can keep these writers’ personas and the spaces they inhabited with us a little longer. Some writers like Aleixandre require little work to maintain their legacies while others must be nurtured through ongoing recovery efforts that depict their lives in vibrant colour. Homages have become commonplace across literary traditions and popular culture such that it is necessary to examine the imperatives for their creation and how personas are created and expressed through the mediums of homage and life writing. Doing so will allow for a fuller understanding of the individuals under question and yield fruitful collaborations between academic research and public activism. ACADEMY OF WITCHES Velintonia 5, the upstairs neighbour, away from the rarefied air of Aleixandre’s tertulias and famous men. Steps above from sites of memory lies another gathering place, a veritable Academy of Witches, breathing life into the Spanish avant-garde. Already the witching hour, the pair sets up lamps with calming tones of yellow and perhaps a few cups of tea and prepares the stage for their latest collaboration. We know not how it started, only that it was so luminous it cannot be experienced second hand. The histories say it was nothing, they say it was just women talking, but witches don’t need an audience to leave a little magic for the next generation. We only know their names: hostesses Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera, the many illustrious learned women, wives of writers, Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 121 Concha Zardoya, Matilde Marquina, Carmen Iglesias, Consuelo Berges, Eulalia Galvarriato, and anonymous others. Translators, poets, dramaturges, they were the pioneers who didn’t need men to send them an invitation. Ambitious and determined, they weathered history to birth their work, writing modernity into their lives, and rebellion into their secretive existence. We continue their legacy by forming our own covens for the bravest among us. CARMEN AND AMANDA Love at first sight in 1936, her future waited patiently across the room on the arm of the man she married. Tenderly Carmen wrote to her with tales of reading Virginia Woolf, all the while wondering if British sapphic codes would be enough for spending a summer holiday in Cartagena. Linked to her husband, even in death, through the hyphen in her namesake patronage,9 we nudge Carmen Conde and Amanda Junquera closer, no longer just lifelong friends, Acosta 122 by examining the photographs of the Rock of Ifach, each smiling wide knowing her companion was behind the camera. The pictures speak volumes, of the dreams they deferred and the memories they made together. Slowly, careful penmanship reveals nicknames, Amanda as “Nenita” and her beloved Carmen as “Nis”. We find the plays they wrote together, the letters regaling Amanda with stories from abroad. They suffered greatly, from the burden of Francoism, the duty to their husbands and to each other, the anonymity of their art and existence in Velintonia 5. Amanda could be insufferable at times, but they needed each other, needed queer joy and contemplative walks at the Escorial. Theirs is a story not soon forgotten, brought into being through Carmen’s biography, recovered letters, and the fervent hope for liveable queer futures just beyond the horizon. MY DEAR ENCARNA Querida Encarna, my dearest, how are you? When your parents named you Encarnación did they know you’d embody resistance, willing into being a queer gender defying writer, Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 123 an elder who died too young? Have tea with me for I know your alias (Elena Fortún) and name by heart, but most adore the work you sent upstream to the twenty-first century, the sapphic Hidden Path to your soul. Encarna, if I may, let us go on a walk, a short jaunt through your Madrid, and may I show you the iridescent glow of your rainbow kin who stare without shame, love without limits and follow the paths you knew were always there. RECOVERED VOICES I search for voices recorded later in life when bright memories of transatlantic adventures assemble the melancholy of María Teresa León’s exile. I can still hear the melody of Concha Méndez’s voice assuredly ringing through old cassette tapes, for her granddaughter and all those who claim her as our collective heritage.10 Faded diaries, letters, and solemn admissions of antifascism, literary magazines, and depression do not lead me to Spanish archives but to the hidden firmament of your own testament, the life writing where you almost dared Acosta 124 to write yourself out of your own story, never just the “wife of”, but a woman with a life. Your youthful poetic voices tell stories of modernity, of bright lights, ocean bathers, and airplanes, that in adulthood became the bombs and censor of a dictatorship, revoked rights, and lives in the closet as ocean liners reached a new horizon, a new start in the Caribbean, New England colleges, or the theatres of Buenos Aires. To keep a record is to know the value of personal experience and female wisdom passed down in pseudonyms and letters, yet I continue seeking the moments and monikers between the diary dates and photographs, for I know those meant the most for all you who sought remembrance beyond life’s adiós. DREAMING OF THE GRAN VÍA All lights in Madrid lining the Gran Vía lead to Recoletos street, to tertulias at the Café Gijón, to new metro lines and street cars, to literary Madrid and all her possibility. Little girls in Catalonia and Galicia would soon realize their dreams, reaching their port of call, a literary city and a safe harbor for a residence of Señoritas. Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 125 Ángeles Santos, a young prodigy painted a whole world by age eighteen, chaperoned by her father to the royal academy. Ernestina de Champourcín, barred entry to the domain of male poets sought sororal company in letters to new pen pals. Maruja Mallo, the first to dare to remove her hat in the Puerta del Sol plaza, for it stifled her ideas and virtues. Victorina Durán, consummate actor and daring socialite, her life story Mi vida a testament to lesbian survival. Excluded for too long, we now dedicate spaces to the ones kept out of the Residencia de Estudiantes, provide safe passage to homages at the Atheneum, and elevate their names in the vaulted Spanish academy, for this bustling city was always their Madrid. VELINTONIA 3 The House of Poetry remains empty with a “for sale” sign placed in the upstairs window: Velintonia 3 on Vicente Aleixandre Street in Madrid. I yearn to ascend the short staircase and knock on the door, waiting for the friendly poet to greet me, but here I am on the other side of the street envisioning an imaginary Alexandrian encounter as if I were Carlos Bousoño, Luis Cernuda, or a young poet Acosta 126 like Jaime Siles showing him my humble verses. Just think, if I were there in the 1930s, I would cross through the threshold of the front door, summoning the generations gathered in this house of poetry and I would take a seat and smile with my newfound friends, but now I fall to the ground, only hearing the sound of my own echo because neither furniture nor gatherings appear in this house. I wish I could enter the garden behind the house to witness the shady magnificence of the cedar tree that Aleixandre himself planted and continues growing on this summer day in which I visit his house – Sirio’s barks float through the air tertulias and memories etched into the rings of the tree. When I leave this house devoid of residents, I realize that this abandoned house and overgrown garden are sometimes full of the Association of Friends of Vicente Aleixandre striving to save this house of poetry, Velintonia 3. HOMAGE TO PARADISE From the depths of war and personal strife, south into homelands glistening along the shores of Valencia, Murcia and Andalucía emerge the poets’ paradise. The sea didn’t take your people, the fascists did. La Desbandada, the massacre on the way to Almería, a forced evacuation from Málaga, the City of Paradise, thrown out of Eden into a lost paradise over two hundred kilometres of road long until they could return to the sea’s embrace in Almería once more. Persona Studies 2022, vol. 8, no. 1 127 Málaga, an ethereal city between mountains and ocean, capped by a bright Andalusian sky still shining over the waves that broke like a storm surge over Vicente Aleixandre’s small feet as he played in the sand with his sister Conchita. I stand on the Castle of Gibralfaro, wishing these happy marine days could last forever, in this moment of eternity facing the postcard view of a bullfighting ring, apartments, and the old city. The resplendent rocks covered in seafoam, malagueños bustling through the streets, mounds of sand where an etched footprint became a sign of man’s ephemeral trace in the cosmos, a sea of paradise revealing ships and adventures in the distance for Málaga’s daring daughter, Isabel Oyarzábal. The Peñón de Ifach rock greeted Carmen and Amanda as they sought a summertime refuge, lining photo albums with geology and their own odyssey for entwining their lives and prosody. Like you, I feel as though I have lived there, the places where even after the Spanish Civil War the sun coats the backs of tourists and dazzling laughter dances off the rocks, a reverberation from your earliest memories of childhood innocence that comforted you into the murky waters of old age. Acosta 128 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has been funded with a Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant for Research on Women, Gender, and Gender Equity through The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University in the United States of America. The poem “My Dear Encarna” first appeared in the Autumn 2021 issue of the Stratford Quarterly. END NOTES 1. Andrew Anderson (2005) provides documentation of how the list of ten male poets has not changed since its inception. Scholars continue to cite Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Cernuda, Gerardo Diego, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Emilio Prados, and Pedro Salinas as the originators of the Generation of 1927 with an occasional nod to other male artists like José Bergamín, who is considered an honorary eleventh member (Anderson 2005, p. 130). 2. A similar phenomenon occurs within the English tradition of odes wherein page headings, rather than consistent stylistic conventions, denoted poetic categories for eighteenth-century poems like odes, elegies, and epitaphs (Teich 1985). Ultimately, the word “homenaje” itself delineates the poetic category of homages within Spanish literature. Wealthy educated women organized their own intellectual and artistic spheres for modern women (las modernas) like the Residencia de Señoritas (The Ladies’ Residence) and Lyceum Club Femenino (Female Lyceum Club) in Madrid (Capdevila-Argüelles 2017; 2018). 3. A 2021 article in Diario Sur documents ongoing government initiatives to recognize Velintonia as a “house of poetry” to save it from being sold and potentially destroyed to make room for new residential properties. 4. Compared to archival materials about the ten male poets, I have not located as much documentation about modern Spanish women writers while visiting the National Spanish Library (BNE), the Residencia de Estudiantes Library and Archives, and the Library of the Generation of 1927 at the Cultural Centre in Málaga, Spain. Even among collections of female epistolary correspondence and life writing at the Residencia de Señoritas Archive at the Fundación Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón, there is a marked tendency to emphasize women’s relationships with famous male mentors like Juan Ramón Jiménez. 5. Goode’s (1978) analysis of formal rewards (i.e., literary prizes) and social control serves as a precursor to persona studies and brings attention to how patriarchal and heteronormative social systems operate through prestige. 6. The “las Sinsombrero” label proposed by Balló (2015) has provided an effective means for making the lives of women writers and artists visible, however it has also been commercialized in a way that leaves out women with more marginalised creative trajectories due to class, genre, and political affiliation. 7. See Marshall (2015) for an overview of celebrity persona amidst changing social networks and technologies. 8. The Carmen Conde-Antonio Oliver Patronage was founded in Cartagena, Spain in 1994 after Conde gave her personal archive and that of her late husband to the city of her birth. 9. See Concha Méndez’s autobiography Concha Méndez: Memorias habladas, memorias armadas (Spoken Memories, Assembled Memories) edited by her granddaughter Paloma Ulacia Altolaguirre (2018). 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Angela Acosta the Ohio State University Abstract Key Words Introduction Academy of Witches Carmen and Amanda My Dear Encarna Recovered Voices Dreaming of the Gran Vía Velintonia 3 Homage to Paradise Acknowledgements End Notes Works Cited