Motherhood, Coloniality, and Literature:

The Maternal Experience as a Historical Category in Maria Altamira (2020), by Maria José Silveira

Abstract

Along this article we analyze motherhood as a historical and political category through a dialogue between the novel Maria Altamira (2020), by Maria José Silveira, and decolonial theoretical productions on motherhood and coloniality and its unfolding in the formation of the decolonial literary reader. Our writing is based especially on the texts of Lugones (2020), Barbosa (2025), Gonzaga and Mayorga (2019), and Fleck (2017, 2025). We start from the premise that motherhood, far from constituting a universal, natural, or neutral experience, is historically produced within the modern/colonial project, operating as an instrument of control, hierarchization, and violence over female bodies. The analysis demonstrates how the fate of the character Alelí, mother of the protagonist Maria Altamira, literarily enacts the disabling of certain motherhoods in the context of gender coloniality, converting maternal absence into political denunciation and a gesture of narrative resistance. From there, we sought to understand how the experience of reading the work destabilizes naturalizations, reconfigures the reader's horizon of expectations, and fosters the construction of a critical stance towards hegemonic narratives – precisely what characterizes the formation of the decolonial literary reader (Fleck, 2025). Thus, our study constitutes qualitative research, centered on an interpretative bibliographic review of the topic. As a result, we highlight the potential and relevance of reading this work in the process of forming a literary reader towards decolonial thought and the decolonization of Latin American minds, identities, and imaginaries.