El treinta de mayo/May 30th
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| Photo from eldemocrata.com, from story about March 2018 performance of her work. Click HERE. |
A Mexican poet known for challenging the social norms of her age (she had passionate affairs, was a single mother, posed nude for painters Diego Rivera and Antonio Peláez, and never shied away from saying exactly what she thought), Amor was the last of seven children born into a wealthy, conservative family. Even as a child, she was rebellious (she has said that as a child she was graciosa (funny), as an adolescent she was llorona (moody), and as a young adult she was cabrona (an a*hole, more or less). She published her second (and perhaps most famous) book of poetry Yo soy mi casa (I Am My Home) in 1946, dedicating it to her friend Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945 (the first Latin American woman to do so). She went on to publish eight more books in the 40s and 50s. In 1961, her son Manuel, who was not quite two years old, died in an accident while her sister was caring for him. For the decade after this, she did not publish and was not in the public eye as much. Her next book would be El Zoológico de Pita Amor in 1975. Amor's verse has been called "perfect" by Mexican writer and winner of the Premio Cervantes Elena Poniatowska (Amor's niece), who remembers her aunt often telling her dramatically, "¡No te compares con tu tía de lava! No te compares con tu tía de fuego!" (Don't compare yourself to your aunt of lava! Don't compare yourself to your aunt of fire!). In 2015, filmmaker (and nephew of Amor) Eduardo Sepúlveda produced a documentary about her that was shown at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (see the trailer HERE). Referring to the recent popularity of artist Frida Kahlo as kahlomania, Sepúlveda said "Ha llegado el momento de pitamania (read more HERE). He also added that his aunt "No tenía ningún pelo en la lengua ... te decía lo que pensaba" (one of my favorite expressions, no tener pelo en la lengua, literally "to not have hair on one's tongue," meaning to not mince words).
For resources for teaching Spanish, Level 1 through AP, CLICK HERE.
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