Elena Poniatowska
Elena Poniatowska was born in Paris to upper-class parents and moved to Mexico at ten to escape the Second World War; her mother's family had fled Mexico during the revolution a generation earlier. At eighteen she began writing for the newspaper Excelsior, doing interviews and society columns, and she turned that access into a career of documentary literature about people with no access at all. La noche de Tlatelolco, her account of the 1968 student massacre assembled from testimony, is the book that defined her. Novels, chronicles and biographies followed, consistently about women, the poor and the disenfranchised.
Movies (1)
Books (16)
- Dear Diego (1986)
- La herida de Paulina (2007)
- Dos veces única (2015)
- El universo o nada (2013)
- Leonora (2011)
- Hasta no verte, Jesus mio! / Here's to you, Jesusa! (2004)
- La piel del cielo (2001)
- Octavio Paz, Las Palabras Del Arbol/ Octavio Paz, The Words of the Tree (Ensayo-Literatura) (1998)
- Paseo de la Reforma (Ave F?enix. Serie Mayor) (1997)
- Tinisima (1996)
- La "Flor de lis" (1988)
- Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, y otros cuentos (1987)
- De Noche Vienes (48845) (1985)
- Fuerte es el silencio (1982)
- La noche de Tlatelolco (1968)
- Lilus Kikus (1954)
Where to start with Elena Poniatowska
La noche de Tlatelolco is the essential one, a chorus of voices about 1968 that reads like evidence because it is. Hasta no verte, Jesus mio! / Here's to you, Jesusa! is the great novel, built from years of interviews with a working class woman who is nobody's idea of a victim. Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, y otros cuentos is short and bitter and the easiest way in. Leonora and Tinisima take the same method to two other lives.