Author Biography

Blanca Luz Brum, extraordinary, free, passionate, captivating. Talented, striking sympathy and beauty and insurgent temperament. Great even in her defects. Writer, journalist, poet and painter, she belongs to the pleiad of the great women of Latin America, to that current of experience and literature in which Gabriela Mistral, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juana de Ibarburú, Alfonsina Storni, among others, stand out. Of those women whose life is a legend of courage, of dedication and whose names appear in the pages of Latin American intellectualism. Uruguayan by birth, Peruvian by marriage, Mexican by love, Argentinian by passion, Chilean by heart and descent. Highlighted by the American governments for her literary and social work, Chile awarded her the Bernardo O'Higgins medal of merit and Paraguay the Honor y Patria award. From her dreamy, Creole youth, Blanca Luz begins her pilgrimage through Latin America. Her first destination was the University of San Marcos in Lima, where she graduated in philosophy and literature. In Peru she was a member of the editorial staff of the literary group Amauta and the magazine Poliedro, wrote for Miró Quesada's newspaper El Comercio and published her poetic book Levante in 1927. He expresses love and pain through his verses. His poetry is inspired by two eternal sources: nature and pain. In 1921, at the age of 16, fascinated by her poetry, to marry the Peruvian poet living in Uruguay, Juan Parra del Riego, she escaped or was abducted from the Convent of the Sisters Adorers, Slaves of the Blessed Sacrament, in Montevideo, Uruguay, a boarding school for vulnerable women and girls who were victims of exploitation or in need of support: discipline, prayer, study, work; to reintegrate socially. Her family and the nuns were opposed to the girl's marriage to a poet suffering from tuberculosis. On 16 November 1925, her son Eduardo was born and on the 22nd of that month, her husband Parra del Riego died. The widow of the already famous poet, at the age of 20, she left for Lima so that the boy could get to know the land and the family of his father. There, she met José Carlos Mariátegui and wrote glowing articles in the magazine Amauta. He edited a small magazine, Guerrilla - Atalaya de la revolución, which published groundbreaking poetry with a social content. From her dreamy, Creole youth, Blanca Luz begins her pilgrimage through Latin America. Her first destination was the University of San Marcos in Lima, where she graduated in philosophy and literature. In Peru she was a member of the editorial staff of the literary group Amauta and the magazine Poliedro, wrote for Miró Quesada's newspaper El Comercio and published her poetic book Levante in 1927. At the age of 23, in 1928, he returned to Montevideo, an experience he described in the book "Blanca Luz contra la corriente" published in 1936: "I was born in this South American city, I went out to sing in all the streets of the universe, I cried loudly, I loved loudly. I have fought and I have returned to this South American city and everything was the same". Towards the end of 1928, he managed to publish a weekly section in the Communist Party's journal Justice under the title "Art for the Revolution", which proclaims the desire to put an end to "art for art's sake in order to put it at the service of the revolution". At the age of 24, in May 1929, the already famous Mexican revolutionary muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros arrived in Montevideo as a delegate to the Congress of Trade Unionists. Siqueiros was 33 years old, the meeting between the two was passionate; Blanca Luz took her son Eduardo and they left with him for Mexico, where they married and lived through difficult times: the couple and Blanca Luz's young son were imprisoned for two months. They were released, but Siqueiros was imprisoned for another six months. From this period in 1930, when he was 25 years old, an important part of the book we present today "My life, love letters to Siqueiros" was born; but the book, much more than that, is impregnated with his poetry, and includes even his last years on the island where Alejandro Selkirk lived, immortalised as Robinson Crusoe.