Elena Garro

Elena Garro (December 11, 1916 – August 22, 1998) was a Mexican screenwriter, journalist, dramaturg, short story writer, and novelist. She has been described as the initiator of the Magical Realism movement, though she rejected this affiliation. She is a recipient of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize.

Quotes

 * There is nothing easier for my people than that quick show of grief.
 * Recollections of Things to Come, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms from Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963)


 * Without his walks, the evenings were not the same, and my sidewalks were full of fruit husks, peanut shells, and ugly words.
 * Recollections of Things to Come

Quotes about

 * For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
 * Marjorie Agosín "Reflections on the Fantastic" Translated from the Spanish by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman. In Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile (1992)


 * (What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza.
 * Sandra Cisneros interview (2021)


 * here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos...
 * Luisa Valenzuela Interview (2022)