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Madrinas Part II: An artist, activist and a Nobel laureate
By Carmen Tafolla

There has never been a time in U.S. history when Latinas were not an important part of this country.

From the very first years of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples on this continent to the 21 st century, Latina scholars, writers, artists, political activists, community organizers and thinkers have contributed an essential part of this nation's energy, creativity and productivity. In our December issue, we described the significant lives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, La Malinche and Mariana Bracetti. There are many more names we would like to mention, but the three below should give you just a taste of who we are and what we have accomplished.

4. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) An icon in the worlds of art and feminism, Frida Kahlo has captured the imagination and the spirit of the globe. Born in Mexico in Coyoacán, young Frida suffered from a bout with polio at age 6 but overcame her disability. At 15, she entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico but was gravely injured in a trolley/bus collision in 1925, when an iron handrail on the bus she was riding impaled her, breaking her spine, shattering her pelvis, collarbone and ribs, and exiting through her vagina. Her feisty spirit helped her to survive and, after more than a year in bed, to walk again. But despite more than 30 operations, relapses of extreme pain followed her throughout her life.

During her recovery, Kahlo began to paint, and the harsh depictions of pain and women's suffering were shocking and filled with personal symbolism. Her paintings showed the influence of the indigenous Mexican folk art she loved, and she portrayed Mexican culture and graphic anatomical references in bright colors and a flat, naïve style reminiscent of the art of Mexican villages.

When she was 22, she married famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, with whom she shared a lifelong love affair that outlasted marriage, divorce, remarriage, infidelities, and professional and health difficulties. "I am not sick," said Kahlo, "I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint."

Kahlo met many luminaries of the political and artistic worlds, and her work enjoyed much success in the 1940s, and a huge resurgence of interest in the 1980s and 1990s. She died of a pulmonary embolism in 1954, after a year of illness and a leg amputation because of gangrene. Museum scholar Janet Landay has said, "Kahlo made personal women's experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content. . They demand that viewers – men and women – be moved by them."

5. Emma Tenayuca (1916-1999) So far ahead of her time that the media knew not what to make of her, but called her, in turn, a fiery orator, a troublemaker, a brilliant organizer, a communist, a dangerous radical, a well-read intellectual, and a little Mexican who didn't know her place, Emma Tenayuca was a native-born San Antonian whose grandfather taught her to read political editorials in the paper.

A voracious reader by the time she graduated from high school, she had already been involved in organizing activities and was seriously searching the public libraries and the writings and speeches of world thinkers for an answer to the problems of starvation, poverty and social injustice.

In 1938, at age 21, she organized 12,000 pecan shellers, many of them women and children, in what historian Don Carleton calls the first successful action in the Mexican-American search for political and economic justice in the United States . Their monthlong strike against abusive practices of company owners gained them an increase in wages and the knowledge that community action, even by the lowest-paid of the disenfranchised, could be successful. Fearlessly outspoken and San Antonio's most controversial figure, at a time when neither women nor Mexican-Americans were expected to speak boldly, Tenayuca soon became a target for vicious attacks on one side and a champion of hope on the other, and was jailed numerous times for her beliefs and her involvement with unions, strikes and community organizing. In 1939, what has been called the worst riot in San Antonio history broke out while Tenayuca was speaking inside the Municipal Auditorium to a group of communists and labor activists, arguing for such radical concepts as social security, unemployment benefits and the right to unionize, while a mob of 5,000 descended on the building with bricks and stones. For years after, Tenayuca was blacklisted and had difficulty finding employment, departing in the late 1940s to California , where she eventually worked her way through college, then returning in the late 1960s to her native San Antonio as a reading teacher to migrant children, still searching for a way to empower the poor and bring social justice to America .

6. Rigoberta Menchú (1959- ) Born in Chimel , Guatemala , and a member of the indigenous Quiche Maya group, Rigoberta Menchú Tum was the recipient of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. As a child, she and her family helped pick coffee on the big plantations, and she became aware of the tremendous need for reform. She received a junior high school education and then worked as an activist campaigning against human rights violations committed by the Guatemalan army during a civil war that lasted decades.

Her father, a member of the CUC (Committee of the Peasant Union), was imprisoned and tortured by a guerilla organization. In 1979, she too joined the CUC and worked for social reform and women's rights. Her father was killed, and her mother was arrested, tortured, raped and died soon after. Menchú taught herself Spanish and other Mayan languages, and figured prominently in a farmworkers' strike the CUC organized. In 1981 she was forced to go into hiding and eventually to flee Guatemala , to which she has returned three times, being forced each time by death threats to return to exile. In 1991 she participated in the preparation of a declaration of the rights of indigenous people. More recently she has worked with the Mexican pharmaceutical industry to help offer affordable medicines to indigenous peoples. In her 1992 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, she urged the many peoples of this earth to "make life on this planet less unequal, a better distribution of the scientific and cultural treasures accumulated by humanity, flourishing in peace and justice."

Carmen Tafolla is a native of San Antonio , where some of her ancestors have lived since it was part of the Republic of Mexico , and before. Winner of the Art of Peace Award by the President's Peace Commission of St. Mary's University for "writing which contributes to peace, justice and human understanding," she also travels internationally to perform her one-woman show.

Su Conexión

Frida Kahlo:

* National Museum of Women in the Arts at www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=471
* "The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait," Carlos Fuentes.
* "A Biography of Frida Kahlo," Hayden Herrera.

Emma Tenayuca:

* "Red Scare" by Don Carleton
* www.sanantonio.gov/library/collections/latino/
resTenayucaE.asp?res=1280&ver=true

Rigoberta Menchú:

* nobelprize.org/peace /laureates/1992/tum-bio.html
* Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum at www.frmt.org/