It is now widely accepted that the oil scare followed by the devaluation of the peso in 1982 triggered an unprecedented political, economic and social crisis that had ramifications across civil society in Mexico. This led, as Roger Bartra asserts, to serious splits and shifts within the unity of the 'revolutionary family'. It is out of these splits and shifts that women's voices begin to emerge in the cultural arena in Mexico. Clearly this is not the first instance of cultural production by women in Mexico but it is the first time that they are positioned as both substantive producers and consumers of culture. They are, therefore, deeply implicated in the modernization project of that decade which in turn leads to an ambivalence in the nature of their voice, a new freedom that is enabled and empowered through forces that were also in many cases, deeply repressive. It is this ambivalence that haunts the pages of Sara Sefchovich's best-selling novel, Demasiado ainor (1990), and it is the nature of the ambivalent relationship to the nation in particular that I would like to explore in this article. In my view, the text constitutes what Homi Bhabha terms a 'counter-narrative of the nation', staging an attack on the totalising narrative of modernity and thus contesting the limits of the modernizing project.