Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi

Abstract

“Adriana” is one of the most famous characters of Mexican literature. She first appears in José Vasconcelos’s Ulises criollo and later in La tormenta (volumes 1 and 2 of his four-part biography). A stunning woman, intelligent and sensual, a modern compañera for Mexico’s premier revolutionary intellectual, Adriana is almost the “perfect” lover — that is, until she leaves him. Then, this “glorious Eve” is transformed into a devourer of men, the femme fatale of Mexican literature. Now, thanks to the exhaustive historical research, deft analysis, and fluid prose of Gabriela Cano, we have a biography of the real Adriana with excellent photographs. As the title establishes, her name was Elena Arizmendi, and she was a woman to be reckoned with.Arizmendi was born in 1884 into a comfortable family, granddaughter of Liberal general Ignacio Mejía. She spent her early years at her grandfather’s Ayotla sugar mill in Oaxaca and was later sent to Mexico City for a suitable education. She went on to study nursing in San Antonio, Texas, where she was befriended by Francisco and Sara Madero. Arizmendi founded the Cruz Blanca Mexicana Neutral (Mexican White Cross, equivalent of the Red Cross) while Madero was president. When problems arose in that organization, the Maderos sent her to get legal advice from the young Maderista lawyer, José Vasconcelos; thus began one of the most famous love affairs in Mexican history.A passion for literature and music along with an intense erotic relationship united this modern couple. Snubbed and slighted by the gente decente for carrying on an illicit love affair with a married man, Elena confidently defied her middle-class upbringing. She traveled with Vasconcelos to the United States when he was forced into exile during the revolution. As she developed intellectually, she tired of being la otra and broke off the relationship in 1916. Infuriated, Vasconcelos published a short story in 1920, “The Torment,” in which he proclaimed: “The serpent that has been coiled around my heart for some years, finally, has slithered off, leaving me only venom” (endnote, p. 209). Dominican writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña later observed: “Vasconcelos pursues her with horrendous threats and accusations to people from whom she is seeking employment. He seems to have lost his mind, crazed by her flight [ . . . ] Poor woman!”(p. 121).But Elena Arizmendi was anything but a poor woman or a femme fatale; she was a resourceful and independent woman who was determined to chart her own course. She married and separated from an American businessman, Robert Duersch, and moved to New York City in the 1920s to be on her own. She made a living by teaching music and writing articles for newspapers and journals. She focused her major energies on promoting the Liga de Mujeres Ibéricas e Hispanoamericanas, also known as the Liga de Mujeres de la Raza, and edited Feminismo Internacional, the first international journal dedicated to Hispanic feminism.As Cano underlines, “within modernist conventions, woman is only a theme and receptacle of masculine desire” (p. 23); for Vasconcelos, Adriana was the “best booty of the Revolution.” Facing these stereotypes, Arizmendi struggled to represent her own life and opinions on women’s capacities. She published a short biographical novel in New York City in 1927, Vida incompleta: Ligeros apuntes sobre mujeres en la vida real, in order to explain her vision of male-female relationships and feminism. It is unclear if this work was responding directly to Vasconcelos’s 1920 short story or to gossip, since Ulises criollo was not published until 1935 (by 1938 it had gone into 22 printings). Nevertheless, it was Elena Arizmendi Mejía’s attempt to set the record straight and to gain recognition as a mujer moderna. Given its limited diffusion, this novel failed to challenge the powerful literary figure of the femme fatale. Ironically, her later years paralleled those of Vasconcelos: although a pioneer of Hispanic feminism, Arizmendi, too, became Conservative, anti-Semitic, and a Falangista fellow traveler.Previously, Gabriela Cano’s skill in unraveling contradictory representations of female revolutionaries (who unfortunately leave no personal papers to make the historian’s task less arduous) provided readers with her provocative study of Amelio Robles, the transgendered Zapatista colonel (in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Gabriela Cano, Duke University Press, 2006). Now, Arizmendi’s biography, accessible to academic as well as popular readers of Spanish, facilitates not only a better comprehension of changing gender norms and the limitations of middle-class feminism in revolutionary Mexico but also the ongoing struggle of women to represent their own lives.