Isabellita Aroza, dancer, and Lupe Franceschi, flower girl, shown at last night’s pageant, which told story of Los Angeles’ first Independence Day.
Los Angeles Times
July 3, 1948
Unfinished Spaces, premiering tonight (October 12) on PBS, check your local listings.
In 1961, in the heady first days of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro asked three visionary architects to build the Cuban National Arts Schools on what had been the golf course of a country club. Before construction was completed, the revolution became Sovietized, and suddenly the project was denounced as bourgeois and counter-revolutionary. These radical, magnificent buildings become a prism through which we see the turbulent, ever-shifting history of Castro’s Cuba and follow the fates of the three architects, now in their 80s, who may get a second chance to revitalize their utopian project.
For another look at the Cuban National Art Schools, check out Dancing with Cuba, Alma Guillermoprieto’s memoir of the six months she spent teaching modern dance at Cuba’s National School of Dance.
Rebeca Matte and her sculpture “Lily”, Florence, 1926. Close up of “Lily,” Santiago, 1904. Photos via El Litoral.
The daughter of a Chilean diplomat, Rebeca spent her adolescence and early adulthood in Europe where she studied under sculptures such as Giulio Monteverde and Denys Puech. During this period, Rebeca contracted tuberculosis.
In 1902, Rebeca gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Lily who is shown in the sculpture above. Rebeca limited her work for six years while her daughter was young before accepted several commissions from the Chilean government in the 1910s and 1920s. One of these commissions, Los Héroes de la Concepción, can be seen on Avenida Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins in Santiago. Several of her other sculpures can be seen at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago.
In 1926, Lily died of tuberculosis which she may have contracted from her mother. Rebeca devoted the rest of her life to charitable works in her daughter’s name.
Clara Gonzalez (1900-1990) was the first woman in Panama to receive a law degree. While she was a student, Clara wrote one of the first papers on women’s legal rights in Panama (La mujer ante el derecho panameño). Clara completed law school in 1922 but she could not begin practicing as a lawyer until 1924 when the Panamanian Legislative Assembly passed Law 55 giving women the right to practice law.
Clara was a founding member of Partido Nacional Feminista (National Feminist Party) and la Escuela de Cultura Femenina (School of Feminine Culture), two organizations that worked to empower women. One of the objections to women’s suffrage was that women were not educated enough to vote and the civics classes provided by the school were designed to counteract that opinion. In 1941, Panamanian women obtained the right to vote.
Clara’s law career had focused on the rights of children as well as women and in 1951 she was appointed the first juvenile court judge in Panama.
In 1970 a young dancer named Alma Guillermoprieto left New York to take a job teaching at Cuba’s National School of Dance. For six months, she worked in mirrorless studios (it was considered more revolutionary); her poorly trained but ardent students worked without them but dreamt of greatness. Yet in the midst of chronic shortages and revolutionary upheaval, Guillermoprieto found in Cuba a people whose sense of purpose touched her forever.
Recruited for her dance experience as a student of Merce Cunningham, Alma arrives in Cuba during the Ten Million Ton Sugar Harvest and is assumed to be an internationalist (friend of the revolution) rather than an apolitical dancer teacher. The National Art Schools are neglected and Alma finds herself teaching her eager students without basic dance equipment. The book leans more towards how the experience impacted the her own development rather than the lives of the dancers in the program, but it is an interesting look as a small slice of life in Fidel’s Cuba.
Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalists who has written about Latin America for American, British, and Latin American newspapers. She is currently teaching at Princeton.
PBS is showing a documentary on the design and administration of the Cuban National Arts Schools October 12.
"At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues. Both rejoice to have been invited to this festival of Nordic life with its tradition of centuries of folklore and poetry."
— Gabriela Mistral accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945). She was the first Latin American to win the award.
(Source: nobelprize.org)
Escaramuza: Riding From The Heart, premiering tonight (October 5) on PBS, check your local listings.
Las Azaleas are a gutsy team of women rodeo riders vying to represent the U.S. at the National Charro Championships in Mexico — where “to be Charro is to be Mexican.” Escaramuza, or skirmish, describes both the daredevil horseback ballets, ridden sidesaddle at top speed, and the intensity of the competition season. Neither life-altering challenges at home nor cartel violence across the border can keep Las Azaleas from their goal.
In the holdings of the National Archives at Riverside, men and women of Hispanic heritage are intertwined in many of our records, including records documenting citizenship.
¡Celebración de la Herencia Hispana!
To pay tribute to the many generations of Hispanic Americans that have enriched our nation’s history, the National Archives at Riverside will be highlighting some of our holdings relating to Hispanic American history in our region (Southern California, Arizona, and Clark County, NV), including records relating to Private Land Claims, Immigration and Naturalization, military service and many more.
For more information about Hispanic Heritage Month, see http://hispanicheritagemonth.gov/
Maria Gonzalez and soldaderas, South Texas border 1900-1920.
Soldaderas were female soldiers who fought alongside men during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). The word is also used to refer to camp women who traveled with the troops but did not fight.
According to Onda Latina at the University of Texas:
Maria Gonzalez was part of Cruz Blanca, an organization formed in Laredo to provide medical aid for the soldiers and volunteers in Venustiano Carranza’s armies. The women in Cruz Blanca made their way to battlefields, often provided their own armed protection while in movement and raised their funds in cities across the United States and Northern Mexico. Their key organizer, Leonor Villegas de Magnon, based herself out of Laredo, and wrote a fictionalized autobiography about her work with armed reform movements in Mexico and South Texas.
Robert Runyon was the society photographer in Brownsville and Matamoros, and was called on to offer his services when dignitaries came to the border. This photograph reflects the presence of the Revolution in the respectable parts of South Texas society.
Carolina Coronado by Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, circa 1855, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Carolina Coronado (1820-1911) was a Spanish Romantic poet, novelist, and playwright. Many of her early poems were about her lover Alberto (Nada resta de ti), who may or may not have existed. She swore off marriage when Alberto died at sea, but eventually married US diplomat Horatio Perry.
The position of women in Spanish society was a major theme in Carolina’s work, one of her earliest published poems condemned wife beating (El marido verdugo). After she became a well known poet, Carolina promoted other female poets through a newspaper series. Through her poems she also repeatedly condemned slavery, both in the US and Spanish controlled Cuba.
Carolina suffered from catalepsy which induces a catatonic state and may explain her unusual way of dealing with grief. In 1873, Carolina’s teenage daughter Carolinita passed away. Carolina had her body embalmed and stored in a Madrid convent. Eight years later while living in Portugal, Horatio died and Carolina had his body embalmed and placed in a chapel beside her bedroom. She visited him daily for the next twenty years until she too passed away. After Carolina died, her son in law had the bodies of Carolina, Horatio, and Carolinita buried.
From the education section, links to NYT resources for Hispanic culture, history, and politics.
