Capturing Voices of Voiceless : Literature: Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska focuses on the struggles of the poor and of women.

Writers in Latin America move in a rarefied sphere, an intellectual aristocracy whose power transcends boundaries of art and literature.

Mexican journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska has belonged to this elite for more than two decades. She wins prizes, she writes for top newspapers and literary publications, she jets to U.S. universities for conferences.

But the 60-year-old Poniatowska, who spent the past two weeks as a guest lecturer at UC San Diego, remains an unlikely citizen of the sometimes remote and haughty world of cocktail parties and literary readings.

That’s because she made her mark in the streets, as a working journalist who finds poetry among her country’s working people. She sits down for an interview at a professor’s house in sweat clothes and gym shoes; diminutive, playful, disarmingly down-to-earth.

“If they ask me what books I prefer, what were my influences,” Poniatowska said, “I would say what has influenced me the most have been the voices of the street.”

These are voices of the voiceless--jailhouse philosophers, itinerant vendors, poor women serving double life sentences imposed by economics and gender. Even their ownership of the Spanish language is tenuous, in some cases because of indigenous roots, in others because of the pervasiveness of North American culture in places such as Panama and Tijuana.

“Spanish slips through their fingers like sand,” she said. “To destroy a language is to destroy an identity.”

Poniatowska’s work builds on dogged reporting and documentation. In “The Night of Tlateloco,” first published in 1971, she assembled a condemnatory collage of interviews recounting the infamous night in 1968 when troops massacred hundreds of student protesters in a Mexico City plaza.

“Here’s Looking at You, Jesus,” published in 1969, is a fictionalized account of the true story of a peasant woman who fought in the Mexican revolution.

Her recently published novel “Tinisima” is based on the exploits of Tina Modotti, a photographer and left-wing political activist. A continuing series of books entitled “All Mexico” compiles years of interviews with Mexicans and non-Mexicans who have contributed to the national culture.

The subjects range from the sublime to the scruffy: an exotic dancer, Colombian Nobel-prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ranchera singing star Lola Beltran, an urban social crusader known as the Saint, who defied oppression and corruption in a mask and wrestler’s costume.

“They criticized me, they said it wasn’t well thought-out because everyone should have been of the same intellectual level,” Poniatowska said. “But I felt that Mexico is this mix of voices. . . . What I wanted to do was laugh a little. I didn’t want it to be a solemn book.”

The visit to San Diego gave Poniatowska a chance to reflect on the U.S.-Mexico border, whose simultaneous role as social reality and metaphor is irresistible to a writer.

Referring to the plight of illegal immigrants who sometimes end up “smashed like

cockroaches” on Interstate 5 freeway, she said: “It’s like a horror movie . . . . And it’s because Mexico simply cannot give them food to eat.”

Poniatowska’s lectures and seminars at UCSD centered on her two chief obsessions, the struggles of the poor and of women.

The legendary Latin American “boom” dominated by male writers--Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa--has given way to an increasingly prominent generation of powerful women writers, she said.

“What is happening in Mexico now is that the majority of people interested in culture are women, they are the ones who buy books, who go to lectures,” she said. “Male writers are angry because they say that to triumph in Mexico you have to be a woman. That is not true. But it is true that we are experiencing a ‘boom’ of women writers.”

In addition to the commercial and critical successes of Isabel Allende of Chile or Luisa Valenzuela of Argentina, the boom extends north into the harsh hybrid culture of U.S. barrios and border towns, Poniatowska said. She admires writers such as Sandra Cisneros, who write defiant fiction in English punctuated with sparks of a “feminized” Chicano Spanish that changes masculine nouns to the feminine.

“They are feminizing the language as they wish, and I think that’s great. They have benefited from living in a limited situation that is the border, confronting two cultures that reject them: the Mexican culture and North American culture. They have constructed their own language and their own way of seeing.”

Only now are these Latina writers being recognized in Mexico and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, Poniatowska said.

Poniatowska is of French-Polish origin on her father’s side; her mother was Mexican. Her astronomer husband died in 1987. Her three children are her main sources for keeping up with the ever-evolving language of the young and hip.

“They tell me, ‘Sintonizate, Mama ‘,” which means tune in, get with it.

She is still listening, still watching--and still teaching. Her Mexico City literary workshop has produced eight published books, many of them by housewives and other women who had to be coaxed into writing.

“You can’t teach someone to write, that is something they have inside,” she said. “But you can stimulate that. Among these women there is often a lack of self-confidence, of faith, they need a certain spirit of continuity to keep working. And a certain spirit of competition.”

True to their leader, the people in the workshop do not just sit around reading short stories to each other. After the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, they went into the rubble of hard-hit slums and helped research Poniatowska’s book entitled “Nothing, Nobody. The Voices of the Earthquake.”

“I said we can’t be shut in here talking about literature while the city is in ruins,” Poniatowska recalled, her eyes wide with a reporter’s memory of a story that was too big to miss. “I said, let’s go out into the street to do interviews. Let’s write a book.”