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.