Thinkers Timeline

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) was a poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun of colonial New Spain, widely regarded as the finest writer of the Spanish Baroque in the Americas. She was born Juana Ramírez de Asbaje in San Miguel Nepantla, a village near Mexico City, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Creole woman of Spanish descent. She taught herself to read at the age of three, devoured the books in her grandfather's library, and begged her mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend university — which was closed to women. At sixteen she became a lady-in-waiting at the viceregal court of New Spain, where she astonished scholars with her learning. Rather than marry, she entered a convent in 1669, first the Carmelites and then the Hieronymites, where she could continue her studies and writing. Her cell became one of the great intellectual centres of the Americas, filled with books, musical and scientific instruments, and a stream of visitors. She wrote love poetry, religious verse, philosophical essays, plays, and comic dramas in Spanish, Latin, Nahuatl, and the Afro-Mexican creole of her time. In the early 1690s, church authorities pressured her to abandon secular studies. She signed a statement of submission in her own blood, sold her library of some four thousand books, and died in 1695 while nursing her sisters through an epidemic.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954) was a Mexican painter whose intensely personal and politically engaged work has made her one of the most widely recognised artists of the twentieth century. She was born in Coyoacan, then a village outside Mexico City, in the Blue House her parents had built and where she would live most of her life. Her father was a German-born photographer of Hungarian Jewish background; her mother was a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indigenous descent. Kahlo later changed her date of birth to 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began, to align her life with the revolutionary era. She contracted polio at six, which left her right leg permanently weakened. At eighteen she was in a streetcar accident that broke her spine, pelvis, collarbone, and right leg; a metal rod pierced her body. She spent months in bed recovering and began painting seriously during this period, using a mirror mounted above her bed to paint self-portraits. In 1929 she married the muralist Diego Rivera, twenty years her senior; their tempestuous relationship, including divorce and remarriage, lasted until her death. She painted more than 140 works, about a third of them self-portraits. She had a single solo exhibition in Mexico during her lifetime, in 1953, when she was carried to the gallery in her hospital bed. She died in 1954 at forty-seven, with her diary reading: I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a Chicana cultural theorist, poet, and writer. She was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas into a family of farmworkers, descendants of both the indigenous peoples of the region and the Spanish colonisers, who had been living on the Texas-Mexico border since before Texas became part of the United States. She grew up between English and Spanish, between Mexican and American cultures, between indigenous and Catholic traditions, and between the rural world of agricultural labour and the academic world she eventually entered. She studied at the University of Texas at Pan American, then at the University of Texas at Austin, and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her doctoral work. She is best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a groundbreaking work that mixes prose and poetry, Spanish and English, theory and autobiography to develop her philosophy of borderlands consciousness. She also co-edited This Bridge Called My Back (1981), a landmark anthology of writings by women of colour that helped define the field of women of colour feminism. She died in 2004 from complications of diabetes.