The aim of this work has been to look at marginality and gender as presented in the novels of Onetti, Valenzuela and Puig. These issues are enormous and many-faceted. They can at times be read as quite distinct and separate areas of thought, while at others they intertwine or even overlap to the extent of becoming one and the same.

While I have not taken a specifically historical approach, the three writers do come from a similar period and geographical area. The novels examined span the forty-five years from 1939 (El pozo) to 1983 (Cola de lagartija), although they are concentrated mainly around the 1960s; and they are all from the River Plate area. As a result of this temporal and spatial coincidence, there are aspects of the works which reflect and highlight historical factors at play in the region, which reflect, themselves, the consequences of earlier historical and sociological phenomena.

The overriding historical issue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in both Argentina and Uruguay was the influx of millions of immigrants. David Rock (1975: 11) maintains that: ‘between 1869 and 1929, 60% of Argentina's population growth can be attributed to immigration’. The vast majority of these people came from Italy and Spain, while others came from Russia, the Balkan states and many other regions of Europe. What was to be found, therefore, apart from the growing ranks of people in cities such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo, was a situation in which small towns with largely immigrant populations grew up in spaces which had previously been virtually empty. Or certainly they had been depicted as such, especially in the wake of the genocidal killing off of the native population in the late nineteenth century. Onetti's imaginary Santa María, a small town on the banks of the River Paraná, whose population has surnames such as Larsen, Díaz Grey and Barthé, reflects this historical process. So too does Puig's Coronel Vallejos, which is based on the small town in the pampa, Coronel Villegas, where he grew up. In La traición de Rita Hayworth, this immigrant background is overtly referred to when mention is made of the existence of relatives who are working the land in Italy.