Tununa mercado biography of nancy

Home / Celebrity Biographies / Tununa mercado biography of nancy

Desperate to spill out her angst, she turns to friends; but they prefer not to listen, instead “scrutinizing her for signs of lasting damage”. She received a Mention at the Casa de las Américas Prize in Havana, Cuba, for a book of short stories that she published later in 1967.

Born: 25 December 1939, Argentina
Died: NA
Country most active: Mexico
Also known as: Nilda Tununa Mercado

The following is republished with kind permission from the Enciclopedia de la Literatura en México.

[Nilda] Tununa Mercado es una investigadora y escritora argentina.

During this exile, Mercado writes for Ovidio Gondi’s political journal, seeks to ward off alienation—and perhaps even madness—by the daily repetition of banal tasks, makes regular, quasi-religious visits to the former home of fellow-exile Leon Trotsky, and treasures a special folder in which she keeps mementos of those friends who have disappeared during Argentina’s “Dirty War”.

There is, however, nothing uplifting about Mercado’s account of her Mexican exile: she even compares it to a lead-coloured Rivera mural.

While some of these “ArgenMex” succeed in bridging the cultural divide, most cling to their national heritage, hanging up the Argentine flag in their living-rooms and turning up their noses at fríjoles.

Tununa Mercado – In A State Of Memory

Peter Robertson

Tununa Mercado’s memoir, In a State of Memory, recounts the pain of exile and the even greater pain of return.

In her quest to find a cure for her sense of splintered self, Mercado drops acid, psilocybin and mescaline. While the subsequent violent deaths of her friends provoke in her spasms of gastritis, throat infections and neck-cramps, even before her first period of exile in France she had sought out the services of shrinks, cranks and faith-healers.

tununa mercado biography of nancy

She has reached an impasse, staring at a seemingly insurmountable wall. During those years, she was an editor at the magazine Fem. In addition, she worked at the press office of the Plastic Arts Department of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA). After a total of sixteen years in exile, she finally returns to Buenos Aires.

In 2007, she won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

Read more (Wikipedia)


Posted in Literary, Scholar, Writer and tagged Latina, Latina > Argentina. En 2007, ganó el Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

[Nilda] Tununa Mercado is an Argentine researcher and writer. Indeed, her attitude towards her adopted country—she is “possessed by the covetous and impossible desire to be Mexican”—is inspired not so much by any affection as by a feeling of having been betrayed by the homeland which had cast her out.

She worked as a journalist for the newspaper La Opinión (UNC). On one occasion the sudden onrush is so harrowing that, in an act of supreme decorum, she swallows back her own vomit. After a few days, she summons up the courage to attempt to reclaim the city only to find that memory assails her at every turn. In 1987, she returned permanently to Buenos Aires.

Throughout her career she has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and various prizes.

Durante esos años fue editora en la revista Fem. Además, trabajó en la prensa de la Dirección de Artes Plásticas del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes inba. She studied Literature at the National University of Córdoba (UNC).