Guadalupe Dueñas

Guadalupe Dueñas (Guadalajara, Jalisco, 19 October 1910 – México, DF, 13 January 2002) was a 20th-century Mexican short story writer and essayist.

Biography Dueñas was the first-born daughter from the marriage between Miguel Dueñas Padilla (Spanish descent) and Guadalupe de la Madrid García, first cousin to former president of Mexico Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado and Enrique O. De la Madrid's granddaughter.

Her father was a student at the Catholic Seminary. On a trip to Colima, he met the fourteen-year-old teenager of Lebanese origin, Guadalupe de la Madrid, and left the seminary. He had her placed in a school, since she was still too young to marry. When she was of age, they married and moved to Guadalajara.

Childhood While there is scant a bibliography for the second years of Dueñas' life, the archive of the National Coordination of Literature houses a photocopy of an interview published just after the author's death, but which took place in 1993 at Dueñas' house on avenida Universidad, in front of the Viveros de Coyoacán.

Leonardo Martínez Carrizales, the interview's author, had had the goal of obtaining enough material to elaborate a biography similar to the manner in which Víctor Díaz Arciniega written on Alejandro Gómez Arias, the director of the strike for university autonomy.

Carrizales' wishes were frustrated: after Easter, Dueñas did not see him again because she had to prepare, she said, silently for her death.However, before the silence, the words collected in that interview managed to give an intimate profile of the writer. For example, a father who:

From one confinement to the next, between identities with which she did not feel identified ("neither on one side nor the other"), is where Guadalupe Dueñas began to write:

The first person who read this notebook, and the poems it contained, was her uncle, the priest and humanist Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, her father's cousin on the maternal line of the surname Padilla. The importance of this first criticism is crucial, since his advice defined Dueñas' preference for prose. When he read her poems he said: "this will be very useful to you! As a basis for your writing. But never publish a verse. You are not for poetry, you belong to prose, which you write quite poetically already."

Career Dueñas never published a poem or verse, but she continued to write, wherever; "notebooks and notebooks of nonsense". It was not until she returned to Mexico City from the United States, "with a different heart, with a totally different mind," that she wrote her first short stories.

Carballo was the first to print Dueñas' work, followed by Alfonso and Gabriel Méndez Plancarte brothers in their magazine, Ábside, revista de cultura mexicana. Janua The stories "Las ratas", "El Correo", "Los lojos" and "Mi chimpancé" were included in the July–September 1954 issue and later distributed as a separate plaquette. Dueñas was a regular contributor after these first published texts, including "El moribundo", "Digo yo como vaca" and "Diplodocus Sapiens" in 1955, "La hora desteñida" in 1956, "Autopresentación" in 1966 and "Carta a un aprendiz de cuentos" in 1960. In addition, she also published essays such as "La locura de Emma" in 1970 and a text giving homage to Emma Godoy in January 1974. Tiene la noche un árbol, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Letras Mexicanas, 1958. No moriré del todo, Mexico, Joaquín Mortiz, 1976. Imaginaciones, Mexico, Jus, 1977 (brief literary-biographical portraits of writers and intellectuals). Memoria de una espera. Novel. (2017)

Anthologies "Pasos en la escalera", "La extraña visita" y "Girándula", en Girándula, Mexico, Porrúa, 1973. "The Guide Through Death" and "The Fat Lady," English translation by Josie Hough in Translator's Corner (2020). "In Heaven" and "Shoes for the Rest of My Life" in Short Stories By Latin American Women: The Magic and the Real. Modern Library pbk. ed. New York: Modern Library (2003). "Mariquita and Me" in Pyramids of Glass: Short Fiction from Modern Mexico. Corona Pub Co. (1994). "A Clinical Case" in The Muse in Mexico: A Mid-Century Miscellany. Texas: Univ of Texas Press (1959). Fellowship at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME) from 1961 to 1962.