This book consists of a collection of essays by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in their first English translation, and a critical introduction. The highly engaging essays explore the lives of seven transformational figures for Mexican feminism. This includes Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, and Nahui Olin, three outstanding artists of the cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century, and Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Pita Amor, forerunner writers and poets whose works laid a path for Mexican women writers in the later twentieth century. Poniatowska’s essays discuss their fervent activity, interactions with other prominent figures, details and intricacies about their specific works, their scandalous and irreverent activities to draw attention to their craft, and specific revelations about their lives. The extensive critical introduction surveys the early feminist movement and Mexican cultural history, explores how Mexico became a more closed society by the mid-twentieth century, and suggests further reading and films. This book will be of interest both to the general reader and to scholars interested in feminist/gender studies, Mexican literary and cultural studies, Latin American women writers, the cultural renaissance, translation, and film studies.

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernandez and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

For this fictionalized account of the life of Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Elena Poniatowska devoted ten years of research to fully understand the woman who was so caught up in the social and political turbulence of the pre-World War II decades.

At different times in her life, Modotti was a silent screen actress, a model for Diego Rivera's murals, and a lover of photographer Edward Weston. She was also a champion for the Mexican people who lovingly referred to her as Tinisima.

In 1929, Modotti was accused of the murder of Julio Antonio Mella, her Cuban lover. She fled to the U.S.S.R. to escape the Mexican press and then to Europe, where she became a Soviet secret agent and a nurse under an assumed name, returning to Mexico to meet an early death at the age of forty-five.

"Poniatowska has made an art form of blending journalism and fiction. She tells this novel in an urgent present tense, segueing among short, vivid scenes with cinematic virtuosity. Ten years of research and a thorough knowledge of the currents of history contribute to this portrait, but equally important is Poniatowska's intuitive appreciation of a woman shaped and destroyed by her tumultuous times."--"Publishers Weekly"

"Poniatowska's profoundly moving evocation of her heroine's boundless soul flows like blood through the carefully erected factual structure of the real Modotti's astonishing life story. . . . A tour de force, "Tinisima" is a work to treasure."--"Booklist"

Jesusa is a tough, fiery character based on a real working-class Mexican woman whose life spanned some of the seminal events of early twentieth-century Mexican history. Having joined a cavalry unit during the Mexican Revolution, she finds herself at the Revolution's end in Mexico City, far from her native Oaxaca, abandoned by her husband and working menial jobs. So begins Jesusa's long history of encounters with the police and struggles against authority. Mystical yet practical, undaunted by hardship, Jesusa faces the obstacles in her path with gritty determination. Here in its first English translation, Elena Poniatowska's rich, sensitive, and compelling blend of documentary and fiction provides a unique perspective on history and the place of women in twentieth-century Mexico.

Ines Arredondo (1928-1989) published just three slim volumes of stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, "a necessary writer," is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality.

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in Underground River and Other Stories focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo's adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in "The Nocturnal Butterflies" and "Shadows in the Shadows" and the dying uncle in "The Shunammite," who is kept alive by incestuous lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices-along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church-in the sordid age-old traffic in women.

"Underground River and Other Stories" is the first appearance of Arredondo's stories in English.

Despite the Mexican government's projected image of prosperity and modernity in the years following World War II, workers who felt that Mexico's progress had come at their expense became increasingly discontented. From 1948 to 1958, unelected and often corrupt officials of STFRM, the railroad workers' union, collaborated with the ruling Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI) to freeze wages for the rank and file. In response, members of STFRM staged a series of labor strikes in 1958 and 1959 that inspired a nationwide working-class movement. The Mexican army crushed the last strike on March 26, 1959, and union members discovered that in the context of the Cold War, exercising their constitutional right to organize and strike appeared radical, even subversive.

"Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico" examines a pivotal moment in post-World War II Mexican history. The railroad movement reflected the contested process of postwar modernization, which began with workers demanding higher wages at the end of World War II and culminated in the railway strikes of the 1950s, a bold challenge to PRI rule. In addition, Robert F. Alegre gives the wives of the railroad workers a narrative place in this history by incorporating issues of gender identity in his analysis.

In September 19, 1985, a powerful earthquake hit Mexico City in the early morning hours. As the city collapses, the government fails to respond. Long a voice of social conscience, prominent Mexican journalist, Elena Poniatowska chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit. As a transformative moment in the life of Mexican society, the earthquake is as much a component of the country's current crisis as the 1982 debt crisis, the problematic economic of the last ten years, and the recent elections. In masterfully weaving together a multiplicity of voices, Poniatowska has reasserted the inherent value and latent power of people working together. Punctuated by Poniatowska's own experiences and observations, these post disaster testimonies speak of the disruption of families and neighborhoods, of the destruction of homes and hospitals, of mutilation and death the collective loss of a city. Drawing the reader dramatically into the scene of national horror through dozens of personal stories, Poniatowska demonstrates the importance of courage and self-reliance in redeeming life from chaos. Elena Poniatowska, a prominent and prolific Mexican journalist and novelist, has written twenty-five books. Several have been translated into English, including "Massacre in Mexico" about the 1968 student/worker uprising in Mexico City, and the forthcoming "Tinisima", which centers upon the life of Tina Modotti. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College. She has worked as a writer and as the National Representative for the Mexico-U.S. Border Program of the American Friends Service Committee. Arthur Schmidt is Associate Professor of History and former Director of the Latin American Studies Center at Temple University. He is the author of "The Social and Economic Effect of the Railroad in Puebla and Veracruz, Mexico, 1867-1911".