Call Number:

C0994

Repository:

Princeton University Library: Manuscripts Division

Extent:

• 2 boxes
• 0.63 linear feet

Language:

Spanish; Castilian and English

Preferred Citation:

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Gabriela Mora Collection of Elena Garro, Box and Folder Number; Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Date:

1974-1980 (bulk) and circa 1940s-1990s (inclusive)

Creator:

Mora, Gabriela.

Form:

Audiocassettes. -- 20th century, Correspondence -- 20th century, Interviews. -- 20th century, photographs -- 20th century, and Reporters and reporting.

Abstract:

The collection includes correspondence to and from Mexican author Elena Garro and Chilean American critic and scholar Gabriela Mora, a handwritten testament by Elena Garro, and photographs of Gabriela Mora, Elena Garro, and Garro's family, friends, and colleagues. Also includes audio recorded interviews of Elena Garro conducted by Gabriela Mora in 1974 and 1979.

Elena Garro was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1916. She studied at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) where she was enrolled in the College of Philosophy and Letters. She married the Mexican writer Octavio Paz in 1937. Paz and Garro had one child, a daughter Helena Laura Paz Garro, born in 1939. According to Garro's memoirs, Octavio Paz initiated divorce proceedings with her in 1959, though it was not until some years later that the Mexican government acknowledged the divorce as legal.

In the early 1950s, Elena Garro lived in Bern, Switzerland, where she recuperated from a serious illness and wrote her novel Los recuerdos de porvenir ( Recollection of Things to Come). In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, she oscillated between Paris, Mexico, New York, and back to Paris, remaining there for 23 years before returning to Mexico in the early 1990s. Elena Garro and Helena Paz Garro lived in Cuernavaca until Garro's death in 1998.

Gabriela Mora is a feminist literary critic and author. She is Professor II Emerita at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University. She specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish American literature, modernism, and female writers. Her books include El cuento modernista: Gutiérrez Nájera, Darío, Lugones, and Díaz Rodríguez y Clemente Palma. She lives in New York.

The collection consists of correspondence (1974-1980) to and from Elena Garro and Gabriela Mora, a handwritten testament by Elena Garro, and numerous photographs of Elena Garro, family, friends, colleagues, and sites. Additionally, the collection includes eight audiocassette taped interviews and readings of Elena Garro conducted by Gabriela Mora in New York, New York in 1974 and Spain in 1979.

Organized in the following series: Series 1: Correspondence, Series 2: Photographs, Series 3: Various Documents, Series 4: Audio Recordings.