05 · 02 · 25

The mysteries of Elena Garro

Rafael Aviña

Elena Garro (Puebla, December 11, 1916-Mexico City, August 22, 1998) was a playwright, novelist, journalist and film scriptwriter who lived a life of light and shadow. She spent time with Jean Paul Sartre, Marlene Dietrich and Picasso, among others, and played a small role in the short film Humanidad (1933) by Adolfo Best Maugard. She suffered the Cristero War as a child. She did not finish her degree in Literature and Theater at the UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] because she married the young writer Octavio Paz in 1937. Her first appearance in the theater was as a dancer in Euripides' The Trojan Women, premiered in 1936 at Bellas Artes palace and in 1937 she was a choreographer at the university theater under the direction of Julio Bracho. She worked as a journalist since 1938, collaborating in México en la Cultura, La Palabra y el hombre and Revista de la Universidad, among other publications.

Later she would study at Berkeley, in California, and at the University of Paris. It is said that she received threats from landowners, bankers and chieftains. She wrote about the horrors of Mexican reality through a sort of magical realism and feminist themes. She defended the rights of the peasants of Morelos and during the events of 1968¹ she was stigmatized for her statements against politicians and intellectuals and was forced to leave the country in a forced exile. She finally returned to Mexico in 1993. Despite his enormous talent, Octavio Paz's fame and international recognition overshadowed her career and she died in a condition of extreme poverty.

Author of works such as: Andarse por las ramas, Los pilares de doña Blanca, Un hogar sólido, or the book of short stories Andamos huyendo Lola, Elena Garro won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1963 for her novel Los recuerdos del porvenir, transferred to the cinema by Arturo Ripstein and Julio Alejandro in 1968, in a film that was not to the author's liking, set in an enigmatic town subjugated by the reminiscences of the Revolution and the Cristero War. Elena entered the film industry when she met director Julio Bracho, and even collaborated, according to her daughter Helena Paz Garro, in several of his scripts without receiving credit, such as Story of a Great Love (1942) starring Jorge Negrete and Gloria Marín.

At the same time, she participated in the lectern readings of poetry aloud at the university theater in the fifties, that were coordinated by Octavio Paz and Juan José Arreola. In that same decade she began his work as a film scriptwriter, writing with Juan de la Cabada and Josefina Vicens the successful comedy Las señoritas Vivanco in 1958, about a couple of elderly ladies of privilege fallen into disgrace (Sara García and Prudencia Grifell). In 1965 she wrote Sergio Véjar's Sólo de noche vienes (1965), set during Holy Week in Guatemala, which narrates the passionate idyll between a married Catholic woman and a Mexican tourist (Elsa Aguirre and Julio Alemán).

In 1959, the year she divorced Octavio Paz, Elena Garro collaborated with Archibaldo Burns in the short film Perfecto Luna, with a plot of her own and a production by Antonio Reynoso, who in turn photographed the film with the assistance of the young Rafael Corkidi. Later, as Burns' partner, he adapted her short story El árbol, in the disturbing independent film Juego de mentiras (1967)  —clumsily renamed as La venganza de la criada— which won the third place in the 2nd Experimental Film Contest; Garro did not like this film either. Its theme: frustrated desires, class grudges, ignorance, macho and oppressive education and the magical thinking of indigenous communities. An intriguing look at the feminine aspect and the contrasts between the possessors and the dispossessed.

Shortly after, filmmaker Salomón Laiter adapted another plot by Elena Garro: Las puertas del paraíso (1970), a story that moves between the urban and the rural setting with the theme of escape and travel, the blowout and uncertain eroticism. For her part, the actress Pilar Pellicer, who met Elena in the years of the reading theater, made the short film ¿Qué hora es? (1995) inspired by a story by Elena from the book La semana de colores. In 2001, José Antonio Cordero, a graduate of the CCC Film Training Center, directed the medium-length documentary La cuarta casa, un retrato de Elena Garro in which he interviewed the writer and her daughter Helena at her home in Cuernavaca surrounded by her cats.

"Films are made on paper: to ignore the writer is to deny cinema in its totality. It is inevitable that critics in Mexico continue to systematically ignore and disown that dark and dangerous character that is the writer. And especially the film writer": Elena Garro

Translated by Adrik Díaz

Translator's notes

1. TN: The Mexican Student Movement of 1968 was a social movement composed of a broad coalition of students from Mexico's leading universities that garnered widespread public support for political change in Mexico. The political movement was violently suppressed by the government following a series of mass demonstrations and culminating in a massacre of participants in a peaceful demonstration on 2 October 1968.