By Kathleen Bohné
Below you will find an article from the May 22 edition of “La Semana” newsletter. To read more and subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com.
“Your writing is a cry of love for our beloved Mexico.”
At a celebration of her 90th birthday in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on May 19, Mexican literati paid homage to Elena Poniatowska, giving speeches and reciting excerpts from her work. The author of 40 books spanning genres and decades, to this day Poniatowska writes a regular column for La Jornada and continues to be an eloquent, critical voice analyzing the life and times of the country.
She began her career in the social pages of Excelsior at 21 years old. “My parents think that a woman’s name only appears accompanied by a few lines in the newspaper when she is born, when she marries and when she dies,” wrote Poniatowska in her most recent semi-autobiographical novel, “El Amante Polaco”. Journalism was unequivocally a male-dominated world, but Poniatowska was not deterred: “she distills a sensitive and critical feminism that does not idealize womanhood, yet she herself embodies feminist ideals of work and autonomy,” said Martha Lamas, anthropologist and friend of Poniatowska, at the birthday celebration.
The work that cemented her status as a “living legend” was “La Noche de Tlatelolco”, an investigative journalism tour-de-force published in 1971 that told the story—through interviews and witness accounts—of the student protests and massacre on October 2, 1968. Poniatowska went out to start interviewing witnesses as soon as she heard that students had been attacked, when there was “still blood on the streets.” After the tragic 1985 earthquake, she wrote another chronicle, “Nada, Nadie: las voces del temblor” memorializing “hundreds of voices” in the aftermath of the disaster. “No one has interviewed like Elena Poniatowska in her time: her questions, full of courage and sincere curiosity, have provoked equally creative, and often surprising, answers,” noted writer Cristina Rivera Garza.
Poniatowska’s ancestry was illustrious, a descendant of the last king of Poland, born in Paris to a French-Mexican mother and Polish father. She arrived in Mexico at 10 years old with her sister and mother, and learned Spanish quickly from her family’s staff and on the streets. “Because of her left-leaning proclivities, her European relatives called her ‘la princesse rouge’,” noted her biographer, Michael K. Schuessler. Poniatowska became a naturalized citizen in 1969. “The daughter of aristocrats, she turned away from the false pretense of that social class,” according to Lamas, who highlighted Poniatowska’s leaving behind “what destiny provided for her.”
Her dedication to reporting and telling the stories of “seamstresses, students, campesinos, railway workers” sometimes raised eyebrows in the literary circles she came to inhabit, and to conquer. “Look at poor Poni, there she goes in her bochito (VW bug) to interview the director of the slaughterhouse,” teased renowned writer Carlos Fuentes, one of her interview subjects in Palabras Cruzadas and a dear friend, whom Poniatowska credited with “throwing open the doors of Mexican literature.”
“I am a female Sancho Panza,” she said in her acceptance speech for the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world. She is the only Mexican woman to be so honored. “…[I am] a writer who cannot talk of windmills because there aren’t any left, and instead follows around the everyday ramblers carrying their bags of groceries, their pick or spade, sleeping where chance permits and trusting that this impulsive chronicler will record what they tell.”
Poniatowska is mother to three children and was married for twenty-five years to Guillermo Haro, a prominent Mexican astronomer who was 19 years her senior. Haro is considered the father of modern Mexican astronomy and was the director of both the Tonantzintla and Tacubaya observatories, where he made important discoveries, particularly in relation to star formation. In Poniatowska’s biography of Haro “El universo o nada”, she writes he was “the most notable and visionary astronomer who gave his life to the field, and put science in Mexico on par with developed countries doing pioneering work.”
Poniatowska and the leftist Mexican intellectual movement were radically influenced by the events of 1968 and the repressive government of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). “Everything changed…I am not the same, we are not the same. There is a Mexico before the Student Movement and another after 1968. Tlatelolco is the rift between two Mexicos,” says a professor from UNAM in “La Noche de Tlatelolco”. While President López Obrador was not a participant in the student protests (he was only 15 in 1968), his political career would eventually ride on the anti-PRI wave, drawing fierce support from those who remembered ‘68 and the “dirty war” of the 1970s.
AMLO and Poniatowska have been friends for decades, and he describes her as “an angel…Mexico’s best writer”. She has been a supporter since AMLO’s 2006 electoral defeat and she wrote a book about the seven-week occupation of the Zócalo in Mexico City following the election (Amanecer en el Zócalo). The book was criticized by some for its lack of journalistic rigor compared with her previous work, and for displaying too openly her admiration of López Obrador, whom she described as “the most kissed and hugged man in Mexico…I don’t know how he still has cheeks left.”
While other activist intellectuals and long-time friends of AMLO joined his government, Poniatowska maintained her distance. In 2021, she criticized the president for his daily morning press conferences (mañaneras) as a “comedy of errors” in an interview and declared “Mr. President, it’s time to stop with the mañaneras. Haven’t you noticed the country has had enough?”
Poniatowska has not stifled her voice, continuing to advocate for the less visible, the most marginalized and to question those in positions of power. As performer and activist Jesusa Rodríguez described in song: “There is only one Elenita, and she belongs to our era. Princess of the tomato, empress of the maguey, countess of the pot shards (tepelcate).”
