Felicitas Guerrero: Love, Death and Femicide in Buenos Aires City

Abstract

The relationship between mind, consciousness and person opens many questions such as the ones related to the connection between body and soul and with the existence of the soul outside the body, linked with a historic name and with the social construction of the body. Eventhough it is impossible to give a definite answer to these questions, the subject of this article explores such connection, since it deals with the legend of a female ghost, associated with an aristocratic real young lady, tragically murdered, whose name, place of birth and death can be historically traced showing an impact through generations.As Valk (2006) wisely affirms, conflicts with the dead express problems dealing with the living minds, consciousness and persons. Moreover, the act of telling legends has also the potential of affirming collective identities (Tangherlini, 2008). From these standpoints, legends regarding ghosts of young ladies, which can be considered as symbols of differential collective identity (Bauman, 1972), mirror not only the spiritual relationship between body and soul beyond death but also historic conflicts dealing with gender aspects in daily contexts.From a corpus of legends already analyzed (Palleiro, 2018) we will revisit here the one of Felicitas Guerrero, from a gender in Folkloristics connected to discourse analysis, particularly associated with femicide. Felicitas Guerrero has been an aristocratic young woman, described by those who knew her as the cutest lady of the whole Argentinian Republic. In this sense Pentikäinen (1989: 128-134) points out the relevance of the social status given to the dead. Regarding such status, the high position of such young lady, which implied a strong social control over the body, transforms her in a paradigmatic character, whose violent death favored a process of identification with other young women, giving visibility to gender violence. Felicitas’s name, bound to an aristocratic social body, converts her in fact in a mirrored image of gender threats.