Salem Press

	Guerrero Viejo is a stone in the sun, a hard, implacable sun. The rocks in a row at the edge of the road like the earth's teeth. Stone, the men's heads, and stone, their bones, scattered there. Stone, their memory of themselves, of their lives that, for the uninitiated, leave no more of a trace than the rings in the water when a stone is dropped.
- from Guerrero Viejo

Notable Latino Writers
Elena Poniatowska

Born: Paris, France; May 19, 1933

Nonfiction: Palabras cruzadas, 1961; Todo empezó el domingo, 1963; La noche de Tlatelolco, 1971 (Massacre in Mexico, 1975); Fuerte es el silencio, 1980; Domingo siete, 1982; ¡Ay vida, no me mereces!, 1985; Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor, 1988 (Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake, 1995); Juchitán de las mujeres, 1989; Guerrero Viejo, 1997 (bilingual); Me lo dijo Elena Poniatowska, 1997 (interviews); Octavio Paz: Las palabras del árbol, 1998; Las mil y una: La herida de Paulina, 2000; Las siete cabritas, 2000; Mariana Yampolsky y la buganvillia, 2001.

Long Fiction: Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, 1969 (Here's to You, Jesusa!, 2001); La "Flor de Lis," 1988; Tinísima, 1993 (Tinisima, 1996); Paseo de la Reforma, 1997; La piel del cielo, 2001 (The Skin of the Sky, 2004).

Short Fiction: Lilus Kikus, 1954; Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, 1978 (Dear Diego, 1986); De noche vienes, 1979; Tlapalería, 2003.

Elena Poniatowska (eh-LAY-nah poh-nyah-TOW-skah) is best known for her journalistic work, a career launched by chance when, in 1954, she interviewed the U.S. ambassador the day after meeting him at a cocktail party. Poniatowska has dedicated her writing to recording a wide spectrum of Mexican life, from the country's power elite to marginalized peasant populations. In 1978 she became the first woman in Mexico awarded the Premio Nacional de Periodismo, the country's most prestigious prize in journalism.

Dialogue serves as a foundation for most of her literary production. Poniatowska's first collection of interviews, Palabras cruzadas (crossed words), includes such varied personalities as Spanish film director Luis Buñuel, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. By contrast, Todo empezó el domingo (everything started on Sunday) celebrates the mundane Sunday outings of working-class Mexicans. The attention Poniatowska gives to the cross-section of social classes in Mexico reflects aspects of her own background.

What to Read: Dear Diego

Dear Diego (1978) is based on one chapter of Bertram Wolfe's The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (1963). It is a fictionalized portrayal of the Russian painter Angelina Beloff as a broken-hearted lover waiting for the well-known painter Diego Rivera to send for her from Mexico City. At first Angelina, or Quiela (the Spanish name given to her by Diego), is confident that her lover will send for her. They share a ten-year union and the tragic memory of a child lost to a terrible fever. She continues to paint in his absence but cannot recapture the joys of creation that Diego's presence made possible.

In a desperate attempt to bring his spirit back, she turns her letters into monologues that review the comradeship and poverty of their life together. Because Diego's Mexican sensibility has, in a sense, replaced her Russian soul, she becomes almost crazed by loneliness and lost identity. She takes cold baths and long aimless walks. Nothing helps. Instead of losing him in the Paris crowds, she "recognizes" his face, with its warm smile, cresting the wave of faces pouring out of the Metro.

Diego finally sends money orders accompanied by impersonal messages that are more painful than was silence. To add to her suffering, Diego asks Angelina to pass on money to another former mistress, a promiscuous woman who has earned Angelina's disdain. Instead of succumbing to jealousy, Angelina throws herself into her painting and overcomes her despair through a rediscovery of her artistic independence and creative will.

Most of the novel is epistolary, but it ends with a short narrative that presents a curious paradox of reconciliation. Although Diego never sends for her, and years later does not even recognize her at a concert in Mexico City, Angelina has turned his rejection of her into a source of inspiration. Deprived of his companionship, she has internalized his power and enlarged her own capacities. He deserts her, but Diego Rivera--that genius with a "large belly"--has also given birth to her artist's soul.

Poniatowska was born in Paris in 1933 of French-born parents whose families had been displaced by political upheaval. Her mother, Dolores de Amor, came from a Mexican family of hacienda owners who left for Europe when the government of Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated their land and instituted agrarian reform after the Mexican Revolution. The paternal family of Polish aristocrats settled in France after fleeing Poland during World War II. When her own family moved to Mexico, Poniatowska was about nine years old and spoke only French. In fact, Poniatowska never studied Spanish in school and acquired the language from house maids. She attended French and English schools, one of which was a convent school in Pennsylvania. Since rigorous religious training instilled young women with self-sacrificing qualities, the fact that many nontraditional women populate her writing suggests the author's rejection of customary female roles.

Although Poniatowska grew up among the Mexican gentry, the household help exposed her to the problems of the working-class poor. Furthermore, since from an early age Poniatowska witnessed her parents' civic involvement and wartime service (her father fought in World War II, and her mother drove ambulances), it is not surprising that much of her journalistic work documents national crisis. The October 1968 clash between police and student protesters at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City prompted Poniatowska to record the bloodbath in Massacre in Mexico. Fuerte es el silencio (silence is strong) incorporates other national concerns such as the influx of peasants into the capital in search of work, the miserable shantytown housing of these urban dwellers, the "disappeared" victims of political repression, and the struggle of rural communities to improve living conditions. The very title suggests the voicelessness of the unrepresented poor, a social ill Poniatowska denounces in her writing. In Nothing, Nobody Poniatowska turns from social inequities to natural disaster by recording the aftermath of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. Typically her journalistic texts feature mixed media, including accounts from news clips, eyewitness accounts, interviews, author narrative, and photographs.

The interviews of the seven 1982 presidential candidates compiled in Domingo siete (Sunday the seventh) suggest the importance of politics in Mexican society. The country's intelligentsia also command a space in Poniatowska's writing. The essays in ¡Ay vida, no me mereces! (oh, life, you do not deserve me!) delve into the work of prominent contemporary writers Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Fuentes. A feminist, Poniatowska shows a predilection for Castellanos's writing, which takes a stand on women's issues.

Themes relating to women's issues predominate in Poniatowska's fiction writing. Her first book, Lilus Kikus, consists of short vignettes about the protagonist's nonconformity with typical female socialization. Lilus likes to play outdoors and explore nature, but society dictates otherwise for girls. Fiction took a back seat to journalism until the publication of the testimonial novel Here's to You, Jesusa!, which is based on a year's worth of conversations with Josefina Bórquez, an extraordinary peasant woman. A staunch feminist by today's standards, Jesusa Palancares--as Poniatowska renames her in the novel--fought in the Mexican Revolution alongside her father and husband, stood up to their abuse, liberated herself from male tutelage, and led an independent life. Again drawing from real life to construct fiction, in Dear Diego Poniatowska writes the series of letters she imagines that émigré Russian artist Angelina Beloff would have written to her lover, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, when he left Paris and returned to Mexico in 1921. The emotional dependence the heart-broken Quiela shows for Diego contrasts dramatically with the polygamous wife in the title story of De noche vienes (you come at night). Esmerald, a nurse by profession, epitomizes the traditional caretaker role of females--so much so that she manages to keep five husbands until getting caught. Poniatowska applies a humorous feminist spin to machismo's double standard.

Autobiographical similarities abound in La "Flor de Lis." An aristocratic child, Mariana, lives in France surrounded by luxury and servants until World War II changes her family's lifestyle. Mariana's French father leaves for the war, while her Mexican mother sets off for exile in Mexico with two young daughters. The narrative focuses on the class and gender traditions that shape Mariana's cultural identity in the new country. Whether focusing on the uniqueness of one woman, as in Tinísima, the story of early twentieth century photographer and political militant Tina Modotti, or of village women, as in Juchitán de las mujeres (the women's Juchitán), Poniatowska's writings typically inscribe the cultural contributions of the underrepresented in Mexican society.

Gisela Norat

Learn More
Amador Gómez-Quintero, Raysa Elena, and Mireya Pérez Bustillo. The Female Body: Perspectives of Latin American Artists. Foreword by Elena Poniatowska. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Examines the works of Poniatowska and other women writers to determine how they represent themselves and treat female identity and the female body.

Franco, Jean. "Rewriting the Family: Contemporary Feminism's Revision of the Past." In Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Discusses the unconventionality of both protagonists and genre categories.

Hurley, Teresa M. Mothers and Daughters in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Literature. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2002. Explores the myths about women that were prevalent in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Shows how women writers debunked those myths. Includes an analysis of the treatment of mother, country, and identity in Poniatowska's La "Flor de Lis."

Jörgensen, Beth Ellen. The Writing of Elena Poniatowska: Engaging Dialogues. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. A study of the whole range of Poniatowska's work, focusing on how Poniatowska's work as a journalist informs her fiction.

Medeiros-Lichem, María Teresa. Reading the Feminine Voice in Latin American Women's Fiction: From Teresa de la Parra to Elena Poniatowska and Luisa Valenzuela. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Focuses on Poniatowska's fiction, providing a feminist critique of her work.

Poniatowska, Elena. "How I Started Writing Chronicles and Why I Never Stopped." In The Contemporary Mexican Chroncle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre, edited by Ignacio Corona and Beth E. Jörgensen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. An examination of the crónica or chronicle, a popular literary genre in Latin America that combines fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism. The essays by Poniatowska and other authors describe the theory and practice of this genre in the twentieth century.

Schaefer, Claudia. Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation in Modern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Explores Poniatowska's use of the epistolary genre in reconstructing true-to-life protagonists.

Von Son, Carlos. Deconstructing Myths: Parody and Irony in Mexican Literature. New Orleans, La.: University Press of the South, 2002. Analyzes Poniatoska's Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela and works by three other writers to determine if these writers' use of parody and irony is unique to Mexican literature.