Gloria Anzaldua says in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, reformulating Virginia Woolf's known quote:

As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural-religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos: yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento... (1990: 380)

Like her friend Gloria Anzaldua, Sonia Rivera-Valdés is also participating actively in the creation of an alternative culture, mestiza, feminist, and cosmopolitan, committed to the transformation of a patriarchal society and its myths about women. Her work enters fully into the parameters that Rosi Braidotti terms the "nomadic conscience", and that she conceives as "a point of exit from phallogocentrism". Faced with the literature of exile, stamped with loss and separation, and the literature of immigration that drags the past like a weight, nomadic literature defines itself as "a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self" (25). In particular, Sonia is waging a war with the traditional and still dominant forms of a patriarchal culture. Her alliance with these emerging representations of the feminine (the nomad, the mestiza...) converts her into a travel companion for many other creators and thinkers who use history, literature, the plastic arts, philosophy, or political activism to trace a radically new map of the world of women.

Sonia's characters are clearly a result of a crossing of cultures; her identity has been forged by the contrast of the familiar Latino world and the customs and values of North American society. Cultural Identity, as Rossi Braidotti affirms, is constructed in retrospect, and stems in good measure from the effect of the nomadic condition on a subject. The nomad, for this italo-australian philosopher based in the Netherlands, is a subject in which various spokes of differentiation coincide - social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and age. In this sense, the nomad and the mestiza are parallel representations of the ex-centric subject of Teresa de Lauretis, who exists "across boundaries and in a marginal, tangencial relation to the white, Western, middle-class male centre" (de Lauretis: 145).The humorous tone of the stories in The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda does not leave room for denouncing a tragically mundane daily life. Domestic violence was the cause of death of sixty four women in Spain in the year 2000, and today we know that this phenomena does not distinguish between nationalities, social spheres, or cultural levels. Nevertheless, it involves a theme that does not appear often in literature. I think it is important to underline the fact that in these stories Sonia Rivera-Valdes dares to break a conspiracy of silence between abusers, victims, the police, and the judges, and speaks in a loud voice about a topic that has traditionally been censured or ignored.

In contrast to the social ideal of a dependant woman who is submissive to men, the model of woman Sonia presents on repeated occasions, has been able to "kick out the worthless, the lies, the non-encounters, the brutalization" (Anzaldua, 1990:381). For Sonia Rivera-Valdés' women, the one apparently unavoidable aspect of "owning one's own life" is to be active in the search for pleasure and enjoyment in their own sexuality.

Through her different narrators , Sonia breaks with traditional taboos about the female body and sexuality, and brings to light long buried discourse about desire: For most of her characters, (and this includes two men who consult Marta Veneranda), unregulated desire, the kind that overflows its banks and is legitimately sanctioned - and that, as Gayle Rubin indicates, constitutes the very essence of the "forbidden."

The use of a narrative formula based on intimate confessions ends up generating and requiring a community of female readers. In this context, it is tempting to use a term (one that has lately fallen from grace) forged by Adrianne Rich in the eighties- the "continuous lesbian" - a term that extends the idea of identification with other women to include "the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny [and] the giving and receiving of practical and political support" (Rich: 239).

Numerous theories have argued that this idea dilutes the material difference between the existence of lesbian women and heterosexuals, and takes away significance from lesbianism as a sexual practice. But certainly, there on the margin of different orientations, the narrators of The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda form a sorority. We find numerous examples of this throughout all the stories. And this is, finally, the profound ethical compromise underlying these stories, one that allows us to recognize our sisters in the subversive women of Sonia Rivera-Valdés.

REFERENCES
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ALONSO YODU, Odette. 2000. "Mujer ante el espejo. (La presencia lesbiana en la literatura", en COCO de FILIPPIS, Daisy y RIVERA-VALDES, Sonia (eds). 2000.
ANZALDUA, Gloria. 1987. "La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness", en ANZALDUA, Gloria (ed) 1990.
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