Post by blackcrowheart on Jan 15, 2008 11:39:47 GMT -5
Andrés Henestrosa Morales, 101; writer promoted Zapotec Indian
culture
Andrés Henestrosa Morales, a prolific poet, essayist and
journalist whose lyrical writings helped raise the cultural profile of
Mexico's indigenous people, particularly the Zapotec Indians of southern
Oaxaca state, and whose wide circle of friendships and intellectual
partnerships included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Langston Hughes,
died Thursday at his Mexico City home after a months-long battle with
pneumonia.
He was 101, the same age attained by his Zapotec mother, who was the
subject of one of Henestrosa's two best-known writings, "Retrato de mi
madre" (Portrait of My Mother), published in 1940.
His single most influential work, "Los hombres que dispersó la danza"
(The Men Scattered by Dance), is a folkloric collection of Zapotec
legends and fables that Henestrosa had learned while growing up in the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Oaxaca.
First printed in 1929, the book caught the spirit of post-revolutionary
Mexico, in which the nation, following the violent social upheaval of
the 1910-20 civil war, was attempting to forge a new cultural and
political identity that tapped into the country's pre-Columbian past.
Prior to the revolution, Mexico's indigenous people were treated as
lower-class citizens; their native culture was disparaged as primitive
and worthless by Mexico's light-skinned elites.
Henestrosa, like artists Rivera and Kahlo, turned for inspiration to
Mexico's indigenous traditions, helping make them fashionable both
abroad and within segments of the country's leftist intelligentsia.
Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, who knew Henestrosa since the
1950s, called him "a memorialist of the legends of his people" who
"believed in the beauty" of the Zapotec language and whose work argued
that Indian culture was still a vital presence, not a dead artifact, and
should be treated with respect."
"He decided to remember," Monsiváis added. "That was, let's say, his
claim to fame. He was always in remembrance of things past."
Henestrosa was born Nov. 30, 1906, into a farming family in a village
near the city of Juchitán, which for centuries has been marked by its
distinctive matriarchal culture. Until his mid-teens, when he left
Oaxaca to seek his fate in Mexico City, Henestrosa spoke only indigenous
languages.
The Zapotec are known for having fiercely resisted both the dominating
influence of other Indian cultures in the pre-Columbian era and, later,
that of the Spanish conquistadors. Zapotec has long been a tongue of
resistance, and Henestrosa joked to friends that he always cursed in
Zapotec.
In a 2005 interview with Americas magazine, he described his ancestry as
Spanish, black, Zapotec, Huave (another indigenous group) and "even a
little Jewish." That diverse background fed his lifelong interest not
only in Indian cultures but in Mexico's Spanish heritage and in the
period of Mexican liberalism associated with the mid-19th century
presidency of Benito Juárez, himself a Zapotec, often called the
"Abraham Lincoln of Mexico."
One of Henestrosa's early sponsors was José Vasconcelos Calderón,
the powerful Mexican education secretary who placed the young Henestrosa
in school and gave him copies of classic books.
Even as his renown grew as a writer among Mexico's intellectual classes,
and he received a Guggenheim grant to study Zapotec culture in the
United States, Henestrosa maintained a bohemian flair and the
unpretentious charm of a "man of the street," said Adolfo Castañón, a
writer and member of the Mexican Academy of Language. In the 1940s, he
would sometimes show up in cantinas and take off his shoes to dance.
In the course of his long life, Henestrosa collaborated with the artist
Francisco Toledo and the photographer Graciela Iturbide and briefly
shared a room with Hughes, the African American poet. He never tired of
accompanying friends such as Rivera and Kahlo and the photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson on tours of Tehuantepec, or regaling them with endless
tales of La Llorona, the mythical grieving woman of Mexican folklore.
Kahlo in particular became close friends with Henestrosa's wife and
companion of 55 years, Alfa Ríos, whom he outlived; the couple had
one daughter.
In addition to the dozens of books he wrote, Henestrosa penned articles
and columns for several Mexican newspapers.
He also served as a federal deputy and senator for the state of Oaxaca
as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that dominated
Mexico for 71 years.
But his reputation finally transcended partisan politics, as has been
evident in recent days from the outpouring of tributes from conservative
Mexican president Felipe Calderón and the leftist Mexico City
newspaper La Jornada, among many others.
"Henestrosa is a man of several bloodlines, a man of several worlds and
a man of several cultures," Castañón said. "The story of Andrés
Henestrosa is in a certain fashion the story of the Mexican age."
culture
Andrés Henestrosa Morales, a prolific poet, essayist and
journalist whose lyrical writings helped raise the cultural profile of
Mexico's indigenous people, particularly the Zapotec Indians of southern
Oaxaca state, and whose wide circle of friendships and intellectual
partnerships included Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Langston Hughes,
died Thursday at his Mexico City home after a months-long battle with
pneumonia.
He was 101, the same age attained by his Zapotec mother, who was the
subject of one of Henestrosa's two best-known writings, "Retrato de mi
madre" (Portrait of My Mother), published in 1940.
His single most influential work, "Los hombres que dispersó la danza"
(The Men Scattered by Dance), is a folkloric collection of Zapotec
legends and fables that Henestrosa had learned while growing up in the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Oaxaca.
First printed in 1929, the book caught the spirit of post-revolutionary
Mexico, in which the nation, following the violent social upheaval of
the 1910-20 civil war, was attempting to forge a new cultural and
political identity that tapped into the country's pre-Columbian past.
Prior to the revolution, Mexico's indigenous people were treated as
lower-class citizens; their native culture was disparaged as primitive
and worthless by Mexico's light-skinned elites.
Henestrosa, like artists Rivera and Kahlo, turned for inspiration to
Mexico's indigenous traditions, helping make them fashionable both
abroad and within segments of the country's leftist intelligentsia.
Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, who knew Henestrosa since the
1950s, called him "a memorialist of the legends of his people" who
"believed in the beauty" of the Zapotec language and whose work argued
that Indian culture was still a vital presence, not a dead artifact, and
should be treated with respect."
"He decided to remember," Monsiváis added. "That was, let's say, his
claim to fame. He was always in remembrance of things past."
Henestrosa was born Nov. 30, 1906, into a farming family in a village
near the city of Juchitán, which for centuries has been marked by its
distinctive matriarchal culture. Until his mid-teens, when he left
Oaxaca to seek his fate in Mexico City, Henestrosa spoke only indigenous
languages.
The Zapotec are known for having fiercely resisted both the dominating
influence of other Indian cultures in the pre-Columbian era and, later,
that of the Spanish conquistadors. Zapotec has long been a tongue of
resistance, and Henestrosa joked to friends that he always cursed in
Zapotec.
In a 2005 interview with Americas magazine, he described his ancestry as
Spanish, black, Zapotec, Huave (another indigenous group) and "even a
little Jewish." That diverse background fed his lifelong interest not
only in Indian cultures but in Mexico's Spanish heritage and in the
period of Mexican liberalism associated with the mid-19th century
presidency of Benito Juárez, himself a Zapotec, often called the
"Abraham Lincoln of Mexico."
One of Henestrosa's early sponsors was José Vasconcelos Calderón,
the powerful Mexican education secretary who placed the young Henestrosa
in school and gave him copies of classic books.
Even as his renown grew as a writer among Mexico's intellectual classes,
and he received a Guggenheim grant to study Zapotec culture in the
United States, Henestrosa maintained a bohemian flair and the
unpretentious charm of a "man of the street," said Adolfo Castañón, a
writer and member of the Mexican Academy of Language. In the 1940s, he
would sometimes show up in cantinas and take off his shoes to dance.
In the course of his long life, Henestrosa collaborated with the artist
Francisco Toledo and the photographer Graciela Iturbide and briefly
shared a room with Hughes, the African American poet. He never tired of
accompanying friends such as Rivera and Kahlo and the photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson on tours of Tehuantepec, or regaling them with endless
tales of La Llorona, the mythical grieving woman of Mexican folklore.
Kahlo in particular became close friends with Henestrosa's wife and
companion of 55 years, Alfa Ríos, whom he outlived; the couple had
one daughter.
In addition to the dozens of books he wrote, Henestrosa penned articles
and columns for several Mexican newspapers.
He also served as a federal deputy and senator for the state of Oaxaca
as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that dominated
Mexico for 71 years.
But his reputation finally transcended partisan politics, as has been
evident in recent days from the outpouring of tributes from conservative
Mexican president Felipe Calderón and the leftist Mexico City
newspaper La Jornada, among many others.
"Henestrosa is a man of several bloodlines, a man of several worlds and
a man of several cultures," Castañón said. "The story of Andrés
Henestrosa is in a certain fashion the story of the Mexican age."