Maria Teresa y Fredrika: imagining Cuba

Abstract

The Women’s travelers in the nineteen century write their adventures using the romantic repertory and use the illustration experience, between subjective impressions and empiric observations. Social explorers say Mary Louise Pratt. They look and listen, confront with new geographies and bodies. There is a direct relation between travelogues and costumer’s fictions. A women’s ethnography center in the social role of women produced for women that construct visual, cognitive and emotive map says Adriana Méndez Ródenas combining three factors: methods, objects of study and circumstance. I am interesting in the contrast the travelogues of two transatlantic women, in the middle nineteen century. They came to the island, where the modern economy transformed the plantation with technology and slavery. The Cuban Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Montalvo and the swedish Fredrika Bremer come from different geographies and bring us costumes portraits and natural view through an intimate writing. Consecrates writers take different position about slavery and write ethnographic fictions that talks about an island where they find the hell ant paradise.