El dieciocho de enero/January 18th

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Elena Arizmendi Mejía! (1884-1949)

Cover of the 2010 biography of
Arizmendi written by historian

Arizmendi founded the Neutral White Cross (when the Red Cross refused to treat insurgents in the Mexican Revolution), the feminist magazine Femenismo Internacional, and the organization Mujeres de la raza, which aimed to unite Latina women in the struggle for rights. Born to a wealthy family in Mexico City in 1884 (her mother's father was Ignacio Mejía, a general and close ally of Benito Juárez, and her great grandfather was Manuel Cristóbal Mejía, who had fought in the Mexican War of Independence against Spain), Arizmendi spent the early years of her life with her grandfather in Oaxaca. When she was only fourteen, her mother died, and she became responsible for the care of the household and her siblings. When her father remarried two years later, Arizmendi also hastily married, perhaps to escape the house, but that marriage fell apart (some say due to abuse), and she left for San Antonio, Texas to study nursing. She was there in 1910 when war broke out in Mexico. She returned to help care for wounded combatants and founded La Cruz Blanca Neutral with her brother Carlos. Arizmendi had a long term affair with Mexican educator, writer, politician and philosopher José Vasconcelos, who was married with two children, and it was partly to escape from the public scandal of this relationship that she left Mexico for New York City in 1915 (Vasconcelos followed her there at one point in an attempt to reconcile and wrote about her as "Adriana" in his autobiography La Tormenta). It was in New York that Arizmendi founded the feminist magazine Feminisimo Internacional, which published articles reflecting what she considered a Mexican version of feminism. She argued against what she considered racism and social radicalism in the feminist movement in the United States and Europe. In 1923, she co-founded Mujeres de la raza to unite Latina women in the struggle for their rights. In 1927 she published a partial autobiography, Un Vida Incompleta, and in 1938, she moved back to Mexico City permanently, where she lived, working for La Cruz Blanca and often speaking out against the anticlericalism she noted in post-revolutionary Mexico, until her death in 1949. In 2010 historian Gabriela Cono wrote a biography of Arizmendi entitled Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi, a clear reference to the iconic 1977 biography of José Vasconcelos Se llamaba Vasconcelos by José Joaquín Blanco.

To read more about Arizmendi's life (based on Cono's autobiography) click HERE.

Picture from zendalibros.com
Click HERE

For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.

Other January 18th birthdays:

Rubén Darío: (1867-1916): Influential poet from Nicaragua, considered the "father of modernism." Eres un universo de universos y tu alma una fuente de canciones ("You are a universe of universes and your soul a source of songs")