Explore "The Nine Guardians" by Rosario Castellanos on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The classroom walls are whitewashed. The damp makes strange shapes on them, which I turn into pictures when they punish me and put me in the corner. Otherwise I sit in front of Señorita Silvina, at a low, square desk. I listen to her as she talks. Her voice is like the little machines for sharpening pencils: troublesome, but useful. She speaks without emphasis, simply laying out the catalogue of knowledge before us. She allows each of us to make our choice of what we prefer. From the very beginning I picked on the word meteor, and ever since it has been a great burden upon me, because I think it must be sad to have dropped out of the sky.
No one has ever been able to discover which grade each of us is in. Though we are very different, we are all jumbled together. There are fat girls who sit on the back bench so they can eat peanuts without being seen. There are girls who go to the blackboard and do multiplication sums. There are girls who never do anything except raise their hands and ask if they can go to the lavatory.