Biography

Elena Garro (December 11, 1916 – August 22, 1998) was a Mexican screenwriter, journalist, dramaturg, short story writer, and novelist. She has been described as the initiator of the Magical Realism movement, though she rejected this affiliation. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. Elena Garro was born in Puebla, Mexico to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother, the third of five children. She spent her childhood in Mexico City but moved to Iguala, Guerrero, during the Cristero War. She studied literature, choreography and theater in the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, where she was an active member of Julio Bracho's theatre group. She married Octavio Paz in 1937 and began a career in literature and theater. Garro's fiction explored political and social causes related to life in Mexico. Her citizenship status and views on Indian rights aroused controversy in Mexico. According to her biographer, members of Garro's family sympathized with white-supremacy and this influenced her predilection of blond people as more beautiful. After her divorce from Paz in 1959, Garro spent time in seclusion between Mexico City, Madrid and Paris in Europe until moving back to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1994. As a close ally of politician Carlos Madrazo she was also targeted in a campaign against political dissidents in 1968, and despite her anti-communist and right-wing views she became the object of an anti-communist smear campaign in the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre.