Final proyect: La mirada civilizadora
In the book Vírgenes viajeras: Diarios de religiosas francesas en su ruta a Chile, 1837-1874 (2000), Sol Serrano collects the diaries of several congregations of French nuns on their trip to Chile. Some of these nuns belonged to the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who traveled from Paris in 1852. The reason for this trip was to find convents of that order. During this journey, some of them wrote intimate letters-diaries with the details of their trips, their arrival to the new territory and their first encounters with the locals, but especially the difficulties they encountered on their way. The writing of these letters, as in other texts produced in the convents, was the product of a writing on request by the superior mothers or the priest of the congregations, who wanted to keep control of the sisters from a distance and inform the rest of the nuns of their activities. In my essay I will analyze how the nuns of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus use the complai...