| Sumario: | This essay analyzes moments of erotic tension in the work of Leonor Villegas de Magnón through eugenic feminist and settler colonialist critiques. Combining close reading and archival research, it conceptualizes her work as a transborder eugenic erotics, arguing that her feminist consciousness develops within translation and with a particular attention to erotics, which in her works is often tied to representations of racial and class difference informed by eugenics. The first section analyzes a short story from her archives, “Lingerie. Lingerie. Lingerie.,” published in the Laredo Morning Record on September 10, 1920. The second section uses the discourses of eugenics and settler colonialism to place this reading in conversation with her better-known autobiographical novel La rebelde and its English self-translation The Rebel, both published posthumously. The comparative analysis elucidates the collapse and overlap of eugenic and settler colonial ideologies at the turn of the twentieth century, seeking to complement and complicate the version of feminism we see in Villegas de Magnón’s most widely read texts, a feminism that has been largely read in celebratory terms in Chicanx and Latinx studies.
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