Famous Latinx Birthdays

Photo from usatoday.com. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... José Emilio Pacheco! (1939-2014) A Mexican poet, essayist, and novelist who won the Premio Cervantes (2009) and the Premio Reina Sofía de Poesía (also 2009), among many other awards and honors, Pacheco used his writing to explore profound questions. He began his career in the 1960s addressing societal ills such as pollution, poverty, and government corruption. He often wrote about the cruelty of nature and considered humans to be the most cruel of all the animals ("Fish don't torture"). Pacheco was born in Mexico City and raised with a grandmother who told him Mexican legends, and a grandfather who taught him to read. He studied literature and law at UNAM (though never earned a degree) and worked for literary publications there. Later in life he taught at universities in Canada, England, and the United States, including many fall semesters at the University of Maryland. He was married to Cristina Pachec...

Photo from eldemocrata.com, from story about March 2018 performance of her work. Click HERE .  ¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Pita Amor (Guadalupe Teresa Amor Schmidtlein)! (1918-2000) 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 bo...