Fotografa, attrice e rivoluzionaria, dopo un'infanzia trascorsa a Udine, Tina Modotti si trasferisce prima negli Stati Uniti e poi in Messico, dove sviluppa il suo talento per la fotografia e intraprende la militanza politica. Frequenta artisti, scrittori e attivisti, tra i quali Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Edward Weston, Vittorio Vidali e il cubano Julio Antonio Mella. E proprio dalla storia d'amore con Mella prende le mosse l'appassionato romanzo che Elena Poniatowska dedica a Tina Modotti dopo dieci anni di ricerche. Un vibrante omaggio alla donna che più di altre incarnò lo spirito romantico e rivoluzionario dei suoi tempi, divenendo icona della nuova condizione femminile del Novecento.

Alma Reed arrived in the Yucatán for the first time in 1923, on assignment for the New York Times Sunday Magazine to cover an archaeological survey of Mayan ruins. It was a contemporary Maya, however, who stole her heart. Felipe Carrillo Puerto, said to be descended from Mayan kings, had recently been elected governor of the Yucatán on a platform emphasizing egalitarian reforms and indigenous rights. The entrenched aristocracy was enraged; Reed was infatuated—as was Carrillo Puerto. He and Reed were engaged within months. Yet less than a year later—only eleven days before their intended wedding—Carrillo Puerto was assassinated. He had earned his place in the history books, but Reed had won a place in the hearts of Mexicans: the bolero “La Peregrina” remains one of the Yucatán’s most famous ballads. Alma Reed recovered from her tragic romance to lead a long, successful life. She eventually returned to Mexico, where her work in journalism, archaeology, and art earned her entry into the Orden del Aguila Azteca (Order of the Aztec Eagle). Her time with Carrillo Puerto, however, was the most intense of her life, and when she was encouraged (by Hollywood, especially) to write her autobiography, she began with that special period. Her manuscript, which disappeared immediately after her sudden death in 1966, mingled her legendary love affair with a biography of Carrillo Puerto and the political history of the Yucatán. As such, it has long been sought by scholars as well as romantics. In 2001, historian Michael Schuessler discovered the manuscript in an abandoned apartment in Mexico City. An absolutely compelling memoir, Peregrina restores Reed’s place in Mexican history in her own words.

Before he became the celebrated Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) lived in Paris and was married to Russian painter Angelina Beloff, who wrote him a series of letters after he returned to Mexico. Mexican novelist Poniatowska rewrote the 12 letters into a 1978 romantic novella that blends fact and fiction. The Spanish and English are on facing pages. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

LEONORA - PONIATOWSKA ELENA - Planeta

Text by Mario Bellatin, Elena Poniatowska.

Elena Poniatowska is recognized today as one of Mexico's greatest writers. Lilus Kikus, published in 1954, was her first book. However, it was labeled a children's book because it had a young girl as protagonist, it included illustrations, and the author was an unknown woman.Lilus Kikus has not received the critical attention or a translation into English it deserved, until now. AccompanyingLilus Kikus in this first American edition are four of Poniatowska's short stories with female protagonists, only one of which has been previously published in English.

Poniatowska is admired today as a feminist, but in 1954, when Lilus Kikus appeared, feminism didn't have broad appeal. Twenty-first-century readers will be fascinated by the way Poniatowska uses her child protagonist to point out the flaws in adult society. Each of the drawings by the great surrealist Leonora Carrington that accompany the chapters inLilus Kikus expresses a subjective, interiorized vision of the child character's contemplations on life.

"A tantalizingly complex feminist author, whose importance and originality have yet to be appreciated in this country."--Cynthia Steele, author ofPolitics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988

Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted the imaginations of two artists—writer Juan Rulfo and photographer Josephine Sacabo. In one such village of the mind, Comala, Rulfo set his classic novel Pedro Páramo, a dream-like tale that intertwines a man's quest to find his lost father and reclaim his patrimony with the father's obsessive love for a woman who will not be possessed—Susana San Juan. Recognizing that 'Rulfo was describing a world I already knew' and feeling 'a very personal response, particularly to Susana San Juan and her dilemma,' Josephine Sacabo used Rulfo's novel as the starting point for a series of evocative photographs she calls 'The Unreachable World of Susana San Juan: Homage to Juan Rulfo.'

This volume brings together Rulfo's novel and Sacabo's photographs to offer a dual artistic vision of the same unforgettable story. Margaret Sayers Peden's superb translation renders the novel as poetic and mysterious in English as it is in Spanish. Josephine Sacabo's photographs tell, in her words, 'the story of a woman forced to take refuge in madness as a means of protecting her inner world from the ravages of the forces around her: a cruel and tyrannical patriarchy, a church that offers no redemption, the senseless violence of revolution, death itself.'

During the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully protest their nation's one-party government and lack of political freedom. In response, the police and the military cold-bloodedly shot and bayoneted to death an estimated 325 unarmed Mexican youths. Now available in paper is Elena Poniatowska's gripping account of the Tlatelolco tragedy, which Publishers Weekly claimed 'makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison.'
'This is a story that has not been effectively told before,' said Kirkus Reviews. 'Call it the grito of Tlatelolco, a cry of protest and the subjective manifesto of Mexico's suppressed, potentially explosive, middle-class dissenters.' In this heartbreaking chronicle, Elena Poniatowska has assembled a montage of testimony drawn over a three-year period from eyewitness accounts by surviving students, parents, journalists, professors, priests, police, soldiers, and bystanders to re-create the chaotic optimism of the demonstrations, as well as the terror and shock of the massacre.
Massacre in Mexico remains a critical source for examining the collective consciousness of Mexico. As Library Journal so aptly stated, 'While the 'Tlatelolco Massacre' is the central theme of this study, the larger tragedy is reflected, and we see a nation whose government resorts to demagoguery rather than constructive action while it maintains and protects the privileged position of the new 'revolutionary' elite.' Octavio Paz's incisive introduction underscores the inability of the Mexican government to deal with the socio-economic realities of the Mexican nation.
Students and scholars of Mexican culture, historians, sociologists, and others who seek to interpret aspects of that country's national reality will find this book to be invaluable.