Travel writing and reenactment in/of exile: the case of Maria José de Chopitea, Maria Lluisa Algarra and

This chapter undertakes a comparative reading of texts -- a novel, two short stories and a play -- by three post-Civil War refugees of Catalan origin in Mexico City that have received little previous critical attention because they evade the primarily political or testimonial readings of Spanish Republican women's writing or are considered aesthetically naive or flawed. The analysis attends closely to the authors' performative engagement with the landscapes, spaces and material objects of their birthplace, considering each as a process of reenactment of remains that reveals the heterogeneous experience of exile, in which identity is negotiated across languages, cultures, spaces and bodies. The women writers discussed in the chapter stand out because of their focus on bodily experience and intense emotional engagement with a layered and ambivalent geography, traversed by multiple memories.