Elena Garro
Elena Garro was a prominent Mexican writer born in Puebla in 1920 to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother. She briefly studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México before marrying renowned poet Octavio Paz at the age of seventeen. Their marriage led her to travel extensively in Europe, where she engaged with various artists and intellectuals, enriching her literary perspective. Garro's writing often addressed the challenges faced by women and marginalized individuals in society, as well as the tensions between reality and illusion in Latin America. Among her notable works are the novel "Los recuerdos de porvenir," which earned the Villarrutia Prize, and a successful collection of short stories titled "La semana de colores." Throughout her career, she also wrote eight plays and continued to produce work until her return to Mexico in 1993. Despite operating in a male-dominated literary landscape, Garro gained significant recognition, with critics considering her one of Mexico's most important literary figures. Her legacy endures as an essential voice in Latin American literature.
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Elena Garro
Writer
- Born: December 20, 1920
- Birthplace: Puebla, Mexico
- Died: August 22, 1998
- Place of death: Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico
Biography
Elena Garro, the daughter of a Spanish father, Jose Antonio Garro Menendreras, and a Mexican mother, Esperanza Navarro Benitez, was born in Puebla, Mexico, in 1920. She was enrolled in the College of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City for a time. In 1937, at age seventeen, she married Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and 1990 Nobel Prize winner in literature, sparking her interest in writing.
Soon after marriage, Garro traveled with her husband to Europe, moving from Paris, France, to Barcelona, Valencia, and Madrid, Spain. This experience enabled her to meet and carry on discussions with a number of artists from Spain, Latin America, and many other countries. After their return to Mexico, they traveled to the United States, where Paz taught at the Middlebury College Summer School in Vermont in 1945, the same year that Paz took a diplomatic post in Paris; Garro may have attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College. A daughter, Helena, was born in 1948.
In the early 1950’s, Garro lived in Bern, Switzerland, where she wrote the novel Los recuerdos de porvenir. The novel, published in 1963, won the prestigious Villarrutia Prize in 1964. After some time back in Mexico, Garro returned to Paris until 1963, when she and her daughter returned to Mexico. Back in Mexico City, Garro spent some time as a reporter while she pursued further writing. Paz initiated divorce proceedings in 1959, although it would be some years before the Mexican government recognized the divorce as legal. Not long after a massacre in the Plaza de Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968, Garro was detained for nine days, then released with no passport or permission to leave Mexico. She did leave, however, to go to New York and then to Spain. Near the end of the 1970’s, she moved to Paris until 1993, when she and daughter returned to Cuernavaca, Mexico. She continued to write, and her 1981 novel Testimonios sobre Mariana won the Juan Grijalbo Prize. Only a handful of her novels were translated into English.
In 1964, she published a successful collection of short stories, La semana de colores. Garro also wrote eight plays over three decades, notably Un hogar sólido(1957), El árbol (1967; The Tree, 1988), and Felipe Angeles (1979). Major concerns in her work were the plight of women and those who live on the fringes of society. Her works also explored the clash between reality and illusion in Latin America, making her one of Mexico’s most important literary figures. Although male writers predominated in Latin American literature, Garro, a highly intelligent and intense woman, was able to earn a level of recognition unusual for Mexican writers. Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, president of the National Council for Culture and the Arts in Mexico, declared Garro to be one of the three most important female writers that Mexico had produced.