Hacia la Interculturalidad: Rosario Aguilar y La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies.

Over the course of the last twenty years, Nicaraguan novelists have been exemplifying what Seymour Menton has termed the 'New Historical Novel' in Latin America. Writers such as Sergio Ramírez (Margarita, está linda la mar), Gioconda Belli (El pergamino de la seducción) and Ricardo Pasos (El burdel de las Pedrarias), among others, are constructing a literary historiography of Nicaragua whose multiple discourses reflect the richness of a national history that is only now being narrated. The novel La niña blanca y los pájaros sin pies (1992), by the Nicaraguan writer Rosario Aguilar, offers a re-vision of the Spanish conquest of Central America and, specifically, Nicaragua, through the voices of women whose experiences emphasize the multifaceted consequences of the Conquest. For our purposes, we will demonstrate that the tension and complicity between these characters construct an intercultural space that facilitates dialogue between the distinct voices of the Conquest. We will contextualize the study within an intercultural framework elaborated from a Post-Colonial Latin American context that considers as its focal point the ideas of Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, analyzing the progressive development of the women's voices in the novel and how these complement each other and offer an intercultural space that takes the initial steps toward an understanding between multiple cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]