The Mexican writer most prominent of the 19th and 20th centuries
Laura Méndez de Cuenca, poet, writer, teacher, editor, pedagogue, journalist, narrator, translator, businesswoman, congresswoman and feminist who dared to ignore the cultural traditions of her time. Loneliness, death, illness, ignorance, madness, insatiable and cruel pain, Mexican customs and the uncertainty of human destiny in the face of love, were some of the themes of the more than 260 works that make up the literary production of Laura Méndez de Cuenca, the Mexican writer most prominent of the 19th and 20th centuries.
At age 17, she participated in
literary meetings of the group of poets and writers La Bohemia Literaria and later joined the Republican and Restaurador movement, led by Mexican writer,
journalist, professor and politician Ignacio
Manuel Altamirano.
Personal tragedies that influenced her life and work
Laura Méndez de Cuenca was born into a
conservative and relatively wealthy family of French bakers during the early
years of the Mexican Republic. As a teenager, she found herself surrounded by
young liberal writers and poets.
In 1873, Laura became the poet Manuel Acuña's muse and lover and soon
became pregnant. Scandalized, her parents abandoned her, along with her equally
libertine sister. Manuel Acuña also left her when her son was about to be born
and later committed suicide. Laura gave birth, but the child died shortly after
birth. This sad event led her to write her first poems Cineraria, Adiós and Esperanza, published in the newspaper Siglo XIX.
Laura Méndez's adult life would continue to be marked by losses and long
periods of penury. She married Agustín
Cuenca, another poet from the same circle of friends. He had seven children
with him, only two of whom survived childhood. The two-reached adulthood, but
one of them died at the age of 22.
She struggled with depression and spent a few happy years with her husband
before he too died. These personal tragedies may have influenced much of her
celebrated poetry regarding the death of loved ones. Her life, however, would
continue to be marked by losses and long periods of penury.
Only woman in the all-male literary world
In the early 1870s, when conservative religious thought was present in all
aspects of Mexican life, Laura Méndez was one of the few women to be admitted
to the midst of male poets, playwrights, and novelists, who were also the
publicists and political leaders of the country. She entered this world thanks
to her poetry, intellect, curiosity and assertiveness.
Her works were the extension of his soul and temperament, but also a
reflection of his social, political, educational and revolutionary views. In
them, she sought to promote women's rights, combat ignorance and marginalization,
and promote Mexico's development through educational innovation.
Extremely important role in the area of Mexican education
As a
penniless young widow facing social rejection, Laura became a teacher and a
major force in Mexico's burgeoning education reform program. For 42 years, she
was an assistant, teacher, principal and inspector of primary education and a
relentless explorer of knowledge and innovative teaching techniques. She was
vice-director of the Normal School for
Teachers in Toluca and a teacher at the institution of the same branch in
Mexico City. She has represented Mexico at several conferences on education,
hygiene and mutualism. In the midst of the Revolution, she wrote poems that
portray her precarious situation in the teaching profession, highlighting:
· A Jalapa – dedicated to the Normal School where she taught;
· Sixth class – a postcard about the Day of the Dead;
· Passing the regiment – which depicted the troops of Venustiano Carranza;
· Homeland! and When we are dead – talk about the history of Mexico.
Her
experience as a teacher and student of pedagogy inside and outside Mexico
allowed her to acquire the necessary tools to write more than 10 educational
texts — including reports, essays and presentations at congresses, typical
testimonies of her enlightened and cosmopolitan erudition. His critical and
incisive spirit is a common element in her texts on education.
Sometimes
her talents were recognized and rewarded. Justo
Sierra, as Porphyrian Minister of Education, sent her to St. Louis and then
Berlin, Paris, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to research the pedagogical
systems of these countries.
Méndez de
Cuenca's career coincided with the development of the federal education system
under the leadership of Justo Sierra
and José Vasconcelos. These critical
periods of education reform, and her illustrious trajectory, allowed her to see
and shape the changes that modernized Mexican education.
She lived in
San Francisco, St. Louis and Berlin. In those places where she was not known
and women were beginning to move confidently in the public sphere, she could
walk freely and express her opinions. She wrote primarily for a Mexican
audience and always returned to Mexico because it was her country's future that
she strove to create.
Feminism
In her
works, Laura Méndez highlighted feminism as a word that identified the modern
woman as a committed and conscious being, fully participatory, with the right
to access education and paid work and without denying marriage as a viable
option for an educated woman. In her view, this woman should primarily nurture
the intellect.
Complaints
about her often appeared to be sexist. She was repeatedly accused of
masculinity. She was a woman who began to recognize the injustice of women's
status at an early age, and who struggled to challenge women's gender
restrictions throughout her life.
Méndez de
Cuenca has written extensively on issues related to women, including a
serialized novel, El espejo de Amarylis,
and a book on cleanliness that was a pivotal text in the Mexican home economy.
Along with
her generation, she fought the first battles that opened space for women in
education and in the professions. Battles that would give rise, after the
revolution, to struggles for civil and political rights.
In some of
the 11 texts, she wrote for El Mundo
Ilustrado and El Imparcial, it
could be seen that the writer was committed to comprehensive training that
would promote women's access to the labor market, favoring their economic
autonomy and encouraging them to assume control of their lives. She openly
demanded that women be treated in the same professional manner as men.
According to
her criteria, the modern Mexican woman should study, work and, at the same
time, fulfill herself as a woman as a wife and mother, a dream that she was
able to fully realize only in her imagination.
Feminism in
Laura Méndez de Cuenca was configured as a call to embrace the legitimate
rights of any human being, woman or man. These works include the articles:
· The Mexican woman and her evolution;
· The Latin temperament;
· What an Austrian thinks of the Mexican woman;
· The woman progresses;
· The modern Mexican woman in the new home;
· The woman as a social factor;
· The Mexican home.
A vast and varied literary work
She
portrayed the multiple aspects of the social and cultural history of Mexico
because she was the only Mexican author who managed to venture into all
literary genres such as poetry, novel, short story, essay, translation, travel
chronicle, journalism, education and biography. Almost all of her works were
successfully published in the most important anthologies, newspapers and
Mexican magazines of the time.
Poetry, romance, short story and more
Poetry
A key genre
in the work of Laura Méndez de Cuenca, she was present throughout her life
because it was one of her greatest artistic expressions. An essentially
Romantic poet, she was inspired by elements of poetry from the Spanish Golden
Age, Neoclassical and Spanish Romantics.
In her works
published between 1874 and 1875, she portrayed her grief, her dismay for the
love of her life, and her love for her son. She later wrote about the limits of
human reason, man's uncertain fate before God and death, and the dramatic human
condition.
From 1883 to 1890, he produced
significant poems that dealt with themes of disappointment, grief, orphan hood,
and loneliness. In those years, she also wrote patriotic and civic poems.
Between 1890 and 1905, the writer
recorded in her poems a diversity of themes, voices and motives: from
historical, social and justice clippings to love songs or ballads about
mythical or historical women, the seasons, the dreams of a couple and the
invitation to be loved for luxury and power.
He also wrote poems about disasters,
wars and historical events, legends of women, slaves and wars. She expressed
interest in social, labor and racial injustice and gave voice to workers men and
women in poems such as The Slave
(1900), The Diggers (1902) and The Hoe Man (1903).
Novel
In this genre, Laura Méndez portrays
Mexican customs, her interest in the influence of medicine on city life, love
conflicts, unrequited love, social classes and conditions in the development
and life of the nation.
Her only novel, The Mirror of Amarilis, published in eight columns at the beginning
of the 20th century in installments in the newspaper El Mundo, published in Mexico City, is a formative work and a
treatise on education. In it, the author seeks to show the passage of health
and life in the hands of superstition and magical thinking. Scientific training
in big cities cannot reveal all the mysteries of life, nor provide happiness.
The novel tells the story of a
frustrated love, but above all, the writer makes a denunciation against racial
prejudice, the cruelties of a social group that had been defeated in the war (Juarez had defeated Maximilian of Habsburg in the Reformation) and how the Middle-class
customs continued to be governed by parameters of class behavior and
conservative morality.
She also portrays, in her fictional
characters, some traits belonging to historical figures close to her, such as
her youthful loves: Manuel Acuña and Agustín Cuenca, as well as contemporary
poets.
Tale
His tales show petty, upstart and
mediocre characters portrayed in the middle and lower classes. They present as
a distinctive element the use of metaphors, irony, comedy and characteristics
of almost all currents of contemporary thought that were beginning at the time;
darwinism, psychoanalysis, positivism, dialectical materialism, nihilism and
nationalism.
Some of the issues addressed are:
- female indecision and the fate of reclusion of abandoned women;
- the despair of manual work in the face of innovation and knowledge;
- the social ills that stem from obscurantism and superstition;
- personal and social improvement;
- the wrong directions and wrong decisions;
- inevitable fates and social determinism;
- backwardness, misery and ignorance.
Miscellaneous works
Laura Méndez de Cuenca has also
produced more than 40 works, including journalistic articles, essays, sketches,
biographies and correspondence, texts that are characterized by a poetic,
agile, fun, nuanced prose, as they are testimonies or records of the writer's
personal ideology or a faithful portrait of her soul and the cultural actions
he carried out.
Raúl
Cáceres, in the text Speaking of prose, about Laura Méndez de
Cuenca (2011) highlights that “When
reading the literary work of doña Laura, we feel her heartbeat. Her lyrics
preserve the vital breath of souls from the late 19th century. They are an
allegory of symbols, the caress of legend, in biographical studies, to give
them play, animation or imagination”.
Travel chronicles
In her more than 120 travel chronicles
published between 1892 and 1910, which oscillate between journalism and
literary creation, Laura Méndez can be read as a traveler on the road and
usually lonely. In these texts, she reflected everyday problems, the contrast
between different societies and classes with the aim of reconciling them from
the educational point of view, the love of freedom and the hatred of tyranny
and betrayal.
Biography
Laura Méndez de Cuenca, daughter of Ramón Méndez and Clara Lefort, was born on August 18, 1853 at Fazenda de Tamariz,
jurisdiction of Amecameca, State of Mexico. In 1861, she moved to Mexico City
with her family and lived in the old Convent
of Santa Clara, located on Tacuba Street.
He attended primary school at La Amiga school, located on San Juan
street, where he learned the syllabary (elementary book to teach children to
read; primer), especially the San Miguel
syllabary and then the four arithmetic operations, some verses on the rules
of urbanity, Christian doctrine, sacred history and religion.
As a teenager she studied at the
private school of Madame Baudoin, who
made her devouring works of Locke, Montesquieu, Bacon, Aristotle, Pascal, Montaigne and Rousseau, the latter had a significant impact on her to the point
that her deep love for education and letters.
In 1872, she enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts and became a
disciple of Enrique de Olavarría, Eduardo Liceaga and Alfredo Bablot. She also enrolled at the Conservatory of Music where she learned singing and music theory,
piano and took language lessons.
Her long career included publishing,
writing, and research into pedagogical methods, but she returned to teaching
repeatedly to support herself, eventually retiring on a teacher's pension at
age seventy-two.
Laura Méndez de Cuenca has spent the
last few years suffering from diabetes. On November 1, 1928, she died at her
home in San Pedro de los Pinos, Tacubaya, leaving a legacy of over 260
works.
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