Breathe
By Claudia Pérez Atamoros
There was a good time in our country when the name of María Enriqueta Camarillo sounded loudly in the literary salons of Mexico and Europe. She was admired, awarded, translated. She was the first Mexican, and to this day the ONLY Mexican woman nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951.She was the first novelist translated into French, decorated by the King of Spain with the Encomienda de Alfonso X el Sabio; she received the Cross of Alfonso XII and the Academic Palms in France. And yet, today, today she is a fading figure; she is a distant echo, barely remembered in some anthology...
What happened to María Enriqueta? Why was her name cornered by critics and history? Perhaps because her work was not rabid or scandalous. Perhaps because her feminism was subtle, and her rebelliousness was wrapped in poems of tenderness and novels dedicated to childhood. Perhaps simply because she was a woman of her time and wrote with the sensitivity of her environment. And that, in the eyes of those who write literary history, has historically been a double condemnation.
A brilliant trajectory... and forgotten
Born in that Veracruz paradise, world renowned for its coffee, Coatepec, Veracruz in 1872, María Enriqueta Camarillo was a storyteller, poet, journalist, educator and cultural promoter. Her work ranged from children's literature to poetry, novels, short stories and articles in renowned cultural magazines and newspapers.
At the age of 22, on July 22, 1894, he published his first poem "Hastío" in the literary section of the newspaper El Universal. He did so under the name of Iván Moszkowski, according to Esther Hernández in her book Romantic Corners. Already without a pseudonym, but only as María Enriqueta, she published her first book in 1902 entitled The Consequences of a Dream and in 1908 the collection of poems Rumors from my orchard.
Her novel El Secreto, published in 1922, was a publishing phenomenon in Mexico and Europe. Later, her school book series Rosas de la infancia was part of the learning of entire generations. She was also editor of the magazine La Mujer Mexicana, where she promoted women's writing and education with a gender perspective... before those words even existed. Luis Lara Pardo Special Correspondent of EXCÉLSIOR in Paris, sent the following text: "Brilliant triumph of the Poetess MARÍA ENRIQUETA. PARIS. January 2- The French translation of Maria Enriqueta's novel "The Secret" has just come off the presses. This publication marks an important date, because it is the first time that a Mexican novel has been translated into French and published not only at the expense of the publishing house, but also by paying the author the same rights as French writers. I am aware of the details of the operation, having been involved in the contract.
In exile in Madrid during the government of Venustiano Carranza, she continued her work as an educator, directing a boarding school. She also wrote articles for El Imparcial, El Mundo Ilustrado, El Universal and other publications in Mexico and Europe.
The poet Gabriela Mistral admired her greatly. "Deep and pure joy to be able to totally admire a woman!.... Many years ago I found lost in a women's magazine the poem Thus said the water by María Enriqueta, I did not even know of references to the poetess, no critic had pointed out this name to me. The infinite purity that is the background of these short stanzas was as if it washed my sick soul that composition so perfect in form and so thoroughly beautiful... since then in every conversation with writers I asked for this name until I learned that it was that of a Mexican woman very popular in Spain almost unknown in Chile...".
And yet, when she returned to Mexico after exile, she found a changed country. Post-revolutionary Mexico had no room for a writer who did not embody anger, but gentleness. She was branded as conservative, as "old-fashioned", as not responding to the "new times". As if beauty and gentleness were crimes.
His poetry was intense without stridency. Her narrative spoke of human emotions, of childhood, of women, of affections. But that was not enough to be included in the canon.
Perhaps that is why, when in 1951 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the gesture went almost unnoticed. Hardly a few voices recognized her. She was not celebrated as a writer would have been. There were no tributes, no reeditions, no speeches. María Enriqueta slowly faded away in the national memory, as if she had never been the figure she was.
And yet, her life was a silent conquest. She was a cultured woman, a traveler, a polyglot. Certainly privileged and coherent with her being and acting. She was a writer when women barely had access to reading. She was a teacher, editor and intellectual. That is to say, she was much more than what the Mexico of her time -and perhaps the Mexico of today- was willing to recognize above all because of her feminine stance: that of the good manners of that time, that of the tender and very feminine woman...
Today, when we talk so much about inclusion, about historical justice, about the recovery of women's voices, it is urgent to read María Enriqueta Camarillo again. Not from condescension, but from a deep understanding of her context. Not from the easy judgment of modern times, with the inquisitive finger, but from the gratitude of knowing that, if today we write freely, it is also because women like her wielded the pen before us, because we must recognize that she wrote in her own way and in her own time.
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