2nd INTERNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY
CONFERENCE ON DOMINICAN STUDIES
Dominicanos en los Estados Unidos antes 1970
Dedicated to Camila Henríquez-Ureña and Tito Cánepa
Henríquez Urena, Camila (1894-1973)
The fourth child and only daughter of two prominent Dominicans, Salome Ureña de Henríquez and Francisco Henríquez Ureña, Camila Henríquez Ureña is one of the finest Latina-Caribbean intellectuals of the twentieth century. She was born in the Dominican Republic three years before the death of her mother, the prominent poet and educator Salome Ureña de Henríquez. Camila Henríquez Ureña's figure has often been overshadowed by the presence of her two better-known siblings, the literary luminaries Pedro and Max Henríquez Ureña.
Camila Henríquez Ureña spent a good deal of her life in Cuba, where she moved with her father and his second wife and family in 1904. Henríquez Ureña received her doctorate in philosophy, letters, and pedagogy from the University of Havana in 1917. Her dissertation was titled "Pedagogical Ideas of Eugenio María de Hostos," honoring the memory of the illustrious Puerto Rican educator and her mother's mentor and supporter of her founding the first normal school for girls in the Dominican Republic. From 1918 to 1921 Henríquez Ureña lived in Minnesota, where she studied and taught classes at the University of Minnesota. Returning to Cuba in the early 1920s, Camila Henríquez Ureña became a Cuban citizen in 1926. She lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne from 1932 to 1934.
While living in Cuba in the 1930s, she was active in organizing feminists, as well as cultural institutions and events. Most notable among her activities is her role as cofounder and president of the Lyceum, a feminist cultural organization, and the Hispanic-Cuban Institute. In 1942 she moved to the United States and taught at Vassar College until 1959 in the Department of Hispanic Studies, where she served twice as chairperson and was a tenured professor. During a number of summers in her 1942-1959 residence in the United States, Henríquez Ureña was also on the faculty of the prestigious language and literature summer program at Middlebury College. Her contribution is notable, for she was one of the earliest instances of a LatinaCaribbean academic earning tenure and chairpersonship at a prestigious academic institution in the United States. Henríquez Ureña, however, gave up her pension as professor emerita at Vassar College to return to Cuba and to participate in the restructuring of the University of Havana, where she taught in the Department of Latin American Literature until her retirement in 1970. At the time of her death while visiting her native Dominican Republic, Camila Henríquez Ureña held the title of professor emerita from the University of Havana, as well as Vassar College, a rare if not unique accomplishment, worthy of note.
The breadth of knowledge to be found in Camila Henriquez Urena's writings gives evidence of her erudition and lifelong commitment to learning. Henríquez Ureña was a woman of many and varied interests. Pedro Henríquez Ureña's letters, collected in the family's Epistolarlo, record his own amazement at his sis ter's capacity for learning and her curious intellect. In several testimonios provided by Mirta Yanez in her "Camila y Camila" one finds how truly diverse Henríquez Ureña's interests were: her knowledge of, participation in, and even singing of operas in various languages; her ability with music and her fine, distinguished, but very Caribbean way of dancing; her work as an educator and in women's movements; and her ability to learn foreign languages, ostensibly so that she might read works in the original by some of her favorite authors-Dante, Ibsen, Racine, Shakespeare, and others. Furthermore, a selection of her essays, collected posthumously and edited by Mirta Aguirre, one of her most distinguished students and later her colleague at the University of Havana, gives evidence of a sound liberal education and a serious intellect. In brief, her intellectual capacity is evident in the subject matters she chose: her doctoral dissertation on Hostos, her introduction to a Spanish version of Dante's Inferno published in Cuba in 1935, her collaboration with the Spanish poet laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez in the now-classic La poesia en Cuba in 1936, and her studies of the pastoral genre in Spain and on the theater of Lope de Vega, to name just some of her known works.
Camila Henríquez Ureña's most significant contribution to the genre of the essay, however, is her nowclassic collection of essays on the condition of women, her formidable trilogy: "Feminismo" (1939), "La mujer y la cultura" (1949), and "La carta como forma de expresi6n literaria femenina" (1951). Mirta Yanez, Daisy Cocco De Filippis, and Chiqui Vicioso, among others, have pointed out the importance of these essays to the history of the feminist essay in the Spanish Caribbean. In "Feminismo" Camila Henríquez Ureña traces the history of the role women have played in societies from prehistoric time to her day. In this essay Henríquez Ureña takes to task the male creation of "exceptional women" to justify denying women's rights. It is not in these examples or "exceptions" that women are to find the road to moral, spiritual, intellectual, and economic independence. In "La mujer y la cultura," an essay she first wrote in 1939 but did not publish until 1949, she explains that true change comes about as a result of collective efforts:
Las mujeres de exception de los pasados siglos representaron aisladamente un progreso en sentido vertical. Fueron precursoras, a veces, sembraron ejemplo fructifero. Pero un movimiento cultural importante es siempre de conjunto, y necesita propagarse en sentido horizontal. La mujer necesita desarrollar su caracter, en el aspecto colectivo, para Ilevar a termino una lucha que esta ahora en sus comienzos. Necesita hacer labor de propagation de la cultura que ha podido alcanzar para seguir progresando.
(Exceptional women in past centuries represented isolated cases of progress in the vertical sense. They were precursors; at times they planted fruitful examples. But an important cultural movement is always a group effort, and it needs to be propagated in a horizontal sense. A woman needs to develop character, in a collective sense, to bring to fruition a struggle that is now in its inception. She needs to work on propagating the culture that she has acquired in order to be able to continue to make progress.)
In a certain sense, in reading "La mujer y la cultura," one finds understanding of why Camila Henríquez Ureña returned years later to Cuba to help out, as she would say, putting in practice the theories expounded in her cited essay. Indeed, this fine intellectual and teacher approached many of her studies and writings as a woman. In her essay "La carta como forma de expresion literaria femenina" she chooses four authors whose correspondence served as barometer, expression, and answer to the historical moment they lived. Among them are two writers whose names ought to head any history of the essay written in Spanish: Santa Teresa de Jesus (1515-1582) and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695). Henríquez Ureña's essay is a tour de force in the art of reading and the importance of the reader's response to giving meaning to the literature written by women. Tellingly, today, having gone through various stages of readings as women and as feminists, many people find themselves back where Camila Henríquez Ureña was fifty years ago: understanding more than ever the importance of reader's response, de leer con la sensibilidad de las mujeres las obras de ]as mujeres (to read with a woman's sensibility other women's writings), to the creation of a feminine and feminist aesthetic.
Camila Henríquez Ureña earns a place in the history of Latinas in the United States as a pioneer educator, essayist, and thinker who was able to transcend borders and whose work continues to have resonance in the development of new generations of readers, as evidenced by the publication in 2000 of Julia Alvarez's In the Name of Salome, a fictionalized retelling of Camila's and Salomd's lives.
See also Literature
SOURCES:
- Alvarez, Julia. In the Name of Salome: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.
- Cocco De Filippis, Daisy, ed. 2000. Documents of Dissidence: Selected Writings by Dominican Women. New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute; 2001. “La mujer y la cultura.” In Madres, maestras y militantes dominicanas, 116-126. Santo Domingo: Buho.
- Familia Henriquez Urena. 1995. Epistolario. Santo Domingo: Publication de la Secretaria de Education, Bellas Artes y Cultos.
- Henriquez Urena, Camila. 1971. Estudios y conferencias. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro
- Yanez, Mirta. 2003. Camila y Camila. La Habana: Ediciones La Memoria, Centro Cultural Pablo de la Torriente Brau.
