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An outstanding writer of the 19th and 20th centuries
Laura Méndez de Cuenca, poet, writer, teacher, editor, pedagogue, journalist, narrator, translator, businesswoman, congresswoman, and feminist who dared to ignore the cultural traditions of her time. Loneliness, death, illness, ignorance, madness, insatiable and cruel pain, Mexican customs, and the uncertainty of human destiny in the face of love, were some of the themes of more than 260 works that make up the literary production of the most outstanding Mexican writer of the 19th and XX.
At the age of 17, she participated in literary meetings of the group of poets and writers La Bohemia Literária (Literary Bohemia) and later joined the Republican and Restaurateur movement, led by the Mexican writer, journalist, professor, and politician Ignacio Manuel Altamirano.
A string of personal tragedies
Laura Méndez de Cuenca was born into a conservative and relatively wealthy family of French bakers during the early years of the Mexican Republic. As a teenager, she found herself surrounded by young liberal writers and poets.
In 1873, at the age of twenty, she became the muse and lover of the poet Manuel Acuña and soon became pregnant. She and her sister were abandoned by their parents, considered libertines. When her son was about to be born, she too was abandoned by Manuel Acuña, who then committed suicide. Laura gave birth, but the child died shortly after birth. These sad events led her to write her first poems Cineraria, Adiós and Esperanza, published in the newspaper Siglo XIX.
Laura Méndez's adult life would continue to be marked by losses and long periods of hardship. She married Agustín Cuenca, another poet from the same circle of friends. With him he had seven children, of whom only two survived infancies. Both reached adulthood, but one of them died at age 22.
She struggled with depression and spent a few happy years with her husband before he too died. These personal tragedies perhaps influenced much of her celebrated poetry concerning the death of loved ones. Her life, however, would continue to be marked by loss and long periods of hardship.
A woman in the all-male literary world
In the early 1870s, when conservative religious thinking was pervasive in all aspects of Mexican life, Laura Méndez was one of the few women to be admitted into the ranks of male poets, playwrights, and novelists, who were also the publicists and statesmen of the era. She entered this world thanks to her poetry, intellect, curiosity, and assertiveness, that is, her social ability to assert her own rights and express thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in a direct, clear, and honest way.
Her works were the extension of her soul and temperament, but also a reflection of her social, political, educational, and revolutionary vision. In them, she sought to promote women's rights, combat ignorance and marginalization, and promote Mexico's development through educational innovation.
Important role in the field of education
As a penniless young widow facing social rejection, Laura became a teacher and a major force in Mexico's burgeoning education reform program.
For 42 years she was an assistant, teacher, director and inspector of primary education and a relentless explorer of knowledge and innovative teaching techniques. She was vice-director of the Escola Normal para Professores de Toluca and a professor at the institution of the same branch in Mexico City. She has represented her country at various conferences on education, hygiene, and mutualism. Obligate mutualism, also called symbiosis, happens when the survival of one or both organisms depend on the relationship between them, that is, at least one of them would not survive alone.
In the middle of the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1917), she wrote poems that portray her precarious situation in the teaching profession, highlighting:
A Jalapa - dedicated to the Normal School where she taught;
Sixth class - a postcard about the Day of the Dead;
Passing the regiment - which depicted the troops of Venustiano Carranza;
Homeland! and When we're dead - talk about the history of Mexico.
Her experience as a teacher and student of pedagogy inside and outside Mexico allowed her to acquire the necessary tools to write more than 10 educational texts — including reports, essays and presentations at conferences, typical testimonies of her enlightened and cosmopolitan erudition. Her critical and incisive spirit are a common element in her texts on education.
Sometimes their talents were recognized and rewarded. Justo Sierra, in his capacity as the Porfirian minister of education, sent her to St. Louis and then Berlin, Paris, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to research the pedagogical systems of these countries.
Méndez de Cuenca's career coincided with the development of the federal education system under the leadership of Justo Sierra and José Vasconcelos. These critical periods of educational reform, and her illustrious trajectory, allowed her to see and shape the changes that modernized Mexican education.
She has lived in San Francisco, St. Louis, and Berlin. In those places where she was not known and women were beginning to move confidently in the public sphere, she could walk freely and express her opinions. She wrote primarily for a Mexican audience and always returned to Mexico because it was her country's future that she strove to create.
Feminism with the right to education and paid work
In her works, Laura Méndez highlighted feminism as a word that identified the modern woman, committed and aware, fully participatory, with the right to access education and paid work and without denying marriage as a viable option for an educated lady. In her view, this woman should primarily nurture the intellect.
Often, complaints about her seemed to be sexist. She was repeatedly accused of masculinity. As a young woman, Laura began to recognize the injustice of women's status and struggled to challenge gender constraints throughout her life.
The writer and poet has written extensively on women's issues, including El Espejo de Amarylis (The Mirror of Amarylis), a serial novel, and a book on cleanliness that was a key text in Mexican domestic economics.
Along with her generation, she fought the first battles that opened space for women in education and the professions. These battles would give rise, after the revolution, to struggles for civil and political rights.
In some of the 11 texts she wrote for the newspapers El Mundo Ilustrado and El Imparcial, the writer was committed to comprehensive training with the aim of promoting women's access to the job market, favoring their economic autonomy, and encouraging them to take control of their lives. She openly demanded that women be given the same professional treatment as men.
According to her criteria, the modern Mexican woman should study, work and, at the same time, fulfill herself as a woman, wife and mother, a dream realized only in her imagination.
Feminism in Laura Méndez de Cuenca was configured as a call to embrace the legitimate rights of any human being, woman, or man. These works include the articles:
The Mexican woman and her evolution;
The Latin temperament;
What an Austrian think of the Mexican woman;
The woman progresses;
The modern Mexican woman in her new home;
The woman as a social factor;
The Mexican home.
A vast and varied literary work
The multiple aspects of Mexico's social and cultural history were portrayed by her thanks to the variety of her literary work. Laura was the only Mexican author who managed to express herself in all literary genres such as poetry, novel, short story, essay, translation, travelogue, journalism, education, and biography. Almost all her works were successfully published in the most prominent Mexican anthologies, newspapers, and magazines of the time.
Poetry, romance, short story and more
Poetry
A key genre in the work of Laura Méndez de Cuenca, it was present throughout her life because it was one of her greatest artistic expressions. An essentially romantic poet, she was inspired by elements of poetry from the Spanish Golden Age, neoclassical and Spanish romantics.
In her works published between 1874 and 1875, she portrayed her pain, her discouragement for the love of her life and her love for her son. Later, she wrote about the limits of human reason, man's uncertain destiny before God and death, and the dramatic human condition.
From 1883 to 1890, she produced significant poems that dealt with themes of disappointment, grief, orphanhood, and loneliness. In these years she also wrote patriotic and civic poems.
Between 1890 and 1905, the writer recorded in her poems a diversity of themes, voices, and motifs: from historical, social and justice clippings to love songs or ballads about mythical or historical women, the seasons, the dreams of a couple and the invitation to be loved for luxury and power.
She also wrote poems about disasters, wars, historical events, legends of women, slaves, and wars. She expressed an interest in social, labor, and racial injustice and gave voice to workers in poems such as The Slave (1900), The Diggers (1902) and The Hoe Man (1903).
Novel
Laura Méndez portrays Mexican customs, her interest in the influence of medicine on city life, love conflicts, unrequited love, social classes and conditions in the development and life of the nation.
Her only novel, The Mirror of Amarilis, published in eight columns at the beginning of the 20th century in fascicles in the newspaper El Mundo, published in Mexico City, is a formative work and a treatise on education.
In it, the author tries to show the passage of health and life in the hands of superstition and magical thinking. Scientific training in big cities cannot reveal all the mysteries of life, nor provide happiness.
The novel tells the story of a frustrated love, but above all, the writer denounces racial prejudice, the cruelties of a social group that had been defeated in the war (Juarez had defeated Maximiliano de Habsburg in the Reformation) and how the middle-class customs continued to be governed by parameters of class behavior and conservative morality.
She also portrays, in her fictional characters, some traits belonging to historical figures close to her, such as her youthful loves: Manuel Acuña and Agustín Cuenca, as well as contemporary poets.
Tale
Her tales show petty, upstart, and mediocre characters portrayed in the middle and lower classes. They present as a distinctive element the use of metaphors, irony, comedy, and characteristics of almost all currents of contemporary thought that were beginning at the time; Darwinism, psychoanalysis, positivism, dialectical materialism, nihilism, and nationalism.
Some of the issues addressed are:
female indecision and the destiny of seclusion of abandoned women;
the desperation of manual labor in the face of innovation and knowledge;
the social evils arising from obscurantism and superstition;
personal and social improvement;
the wrong directions and the wrong decisions; inevitable fates and social determinism;
backwardness, misery, and ignorance.
Miscellaneous works
Laura Méndez de Cuenca also produced more than 40 works, including journalistic articles, essays, sketches, biographies and correspondence, texts that are characterized by an agile, fun, and nuanced poetic prose, as they are testimonies or records of the writer's personal ideology or a faithful portrait of her soul and the cultural actions she carried out.
Raúl Cáceres, in the text Hablando de prosa (Speaking of prose), about Laura Méndez de Cuenca (2011) highlights that: when reading the literary work of Mrs. Laura, we feel her heartbeat. Her lyrics preserve the vital breath of late 19th century souls. They are an allegory of symbols, the caress of legend, in biographical studies, to give them play, animation or imagination.
Travel chronicles
In her more than 120 travel chronicles published between 1892 and 1910, which oscillate between journalism and literary creation, Laura Méndez can be seen as a traveler on the road and generally solitary. In these texts, she reflected everyday problems, or contrasts between different societies and classes to reconcile the educational point of view, love of freedom and hatred of tyranny and betrayal.
Laura's life
Laura Méndez de Cuenca, daughter of Ramón Méndez and Clara Lefort, was born on August 18, 1853, at the Fazenda de Tamariz, jurisdiction of Amecameca, State of Mexico. In 1861 she moved to Mexico City with her family and dwelling in the former Convent of Santa Clara, located on calle Tacuba.
I frequented the La Amiga elementary school, located on Calle de San Juan, where I learned the syllabary (a basic book to teach children to read), especially the syllable of San Miguel and after the four arithmetic operations, some verses on the rules of civility, Christian doctrine, sacred history and religion.
As a teenager she studied at the private school of Madame Baudoin, who created her devouring works of Locke, Montesquieu, Bacon, Aristotle, Pascal, Montaigne, and Rousseau. The latter had a significant impact on her to the point that her deep love for education and letters began to emerge.
In 1872, she enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts and became a disciple of Enrique de Olavarría, Eduardo Liceaga and Alfredo Bablot. She also enrolled at the Music Conservatory where she learned singing, music theory, piano. She also took language classes.
Her long career has included publications, writing, and research in pedagogical methods. To support herself, she returned to teaching. She retired on a teacher's pension at age seventy-two.
Laura has spent the last few years suffering from diabetes. She died on November 1, 1928, at her home in San Pedro de los Pinos, Tacubaya. She left a legacy of more than 260 works.
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