Elena Poniatowska - Background

Background

Poniatowska was born with the name of Helène Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor in Paris, France, in 1932. Her father was Polish-French, Jean Joseph Evremond Sperry Poniatowski, born to the family distantly related to the last king of Poland (who had no direct descendants), Stanisław August Poniatowski . Her mother was France-born heiress María Dolores Paulette Amor Yturbe, whose Mexican family lost land and fled Mexico after the outster of Porfirio Díaz during the Mexican Revolution. Poniatowska’s extended family includes an archbishop, the primate of Poland, a musician, several writers and statesmen including Benjamin Franklin . Her aunt was the poet Pita Amor. She was raised in France by a grandfather who was a writer and a grandmother who would show her negative photos about Mexico, including photographs in National Geographic depicting Africans, saying they were Mexican indigenes, and scaring her and her siblings with stories about cannibalism there. Although she maintained a close relationship with her mother until her death, the mother was unhappy about her daughter being labeled a “communist” and refused to read Poniatowska’s novel about political activist Tina Modotti.

The Second World War broke out in Europe when Poniatowska was a child. The family left Paris when she was nine, going first to the south of the country. When the deprivations of the war became too much, the family left France entirely for Mexico in 1942 when she was ten years old. Her father remained in France to fight, participating later in D-Day in Normandy .

She began her education in France at the Vouvray on the Loire. After arriving to Mexico, she continued at the Liceo Franco-Mexicano, then at Eden Hall and high school at the Sacred Heart Covent in the late 1940s. In 1953, she returned to Mexico, where she learned to type, but she never went to university. Instead, she began working at the Excélsior newspaper.

She is trilingual, speaking Spanish, English and French.

She met astrophysicist Guillermo Haro in 1959, when she interviewed him, and married him nine years later in 1968. She became the mother of three children, Emmanuel, Felipe and Paula, and the grandmother of five. Her husband died in 1984.

She lives in a house near Plaza Federico Gamboa in the Chimalistac neighborhood of the Coyoacán borough in Mexico City. The house is filled chaotically with books. Spaces which do not have books in or on them contain photographs of her family and paintings by Francisco Toledo. She works at home, often forgetting to do other things like go to the gym as she gets involved in her writing. Although it takes time away from writing, she does not of her domestic chores herself, including paying bills, grocery shopping and cooking.