Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor (born May 19, 1932), known professionally as Elena Poniatowska (), is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered disenfranchised, especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents. Her mother's family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape World War II. When she was 18, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she wrote about social and political issues in newspapers and both fiction and nonfiction books. Her best-known work is La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (The Night of Tlatelolco: Testimonies of Oral History, whose English translation was titled Massacre in Mexico), about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. Due to her left-wing views, she has been nicknamed "the Red Princess". She is considered "Mexico's grande dame of letters" and is still an active writer.
Poniatowska was born Helène Elizabeth Louise Amelie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor in Paris, France, in 1932. Her father was Prince Jean Joseph Évremond Sperry Poniatowski (son of Prince André Poniatowski), born to a prominent family distantly related to the last king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanisław August Poniatowski. Her mother was French-born heiress María Dolores Paulette Amor de Yturbe, whose Mexican family lost land and fled Mexico after Porfirio Díaz was ousted during the Mexican Revolution. Poniatowska's extended family includes an archbishop, the primate of Poland, a musician, French politicians, and 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 showed her unflattering photographs of Mexico, including some in National Geographic depicting Africans, saying they were Mexican indigenes, and scared her and her siblings with stories about cannibalism there. Although she maintained a close relationship with her mother until her death, her mother was unhappy about her being labeled a communist and refused to read Poniatowska's novel about political activist Tina Modotti.
World War II broke out when Poniatowska was a child. The family left Paris when she was nine, going first to the south of the country. But the deprivations of the war became too much and the southern part of France, the Zone libre, was invaded by Germany and Italy in 1942, so the family left for Mexico when she was ten years old. Her father remained in France to fight, participating later in D-Day in Normandy.
Poniatowska began her education in France at Vouvray on the Loire. After arriving in Mexico, she continued at the Liceo Franco-Mexicano, then at Eden Hall and the Sacred Heart Convent 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.
Poniatowska is trilingual, speaking Spanish, English, and French. French was her primary language and was spoken the most at home. She learned Spanish from her nanny and people on the streets during her time in Mexico as a young girl.
Poniatowska and astronomer Guillermo Haro met in 1959 when she interviewed him, and they married in 1968. She is the mother of three children, Emmanuel, Felipe, and Paula, and the grandmother of five. Poniatowska and Haro divorced in 1981, and her ex-husband died in 1988.
Poniatowska lives in a house near the Plaza Federico Gamboa in the Chimalistac neighborhood of Mexico City's Álvaro Obregón borough. The house is filled with books. Spaces without books contain photographs of her family and paintings by Francisco Toledo. She works at home.
Poniatowska has published novels, nonfiction books, journalistic essays, and many forewords and prologues to books on Mexican artists. Much of her writing has focused on social and human rights issues, especially those related to women and the poor.
Poniatowska began her writing career in 1953 with Excélsior and the next year with the publication Novedades de México, both of which she still occasionally writes for. Her first writing assignments were interviews of famous people and society columns related to Mexico's upper class. Her first published interview was with the ambassador of the United States. She says she began "like a donkey", knowing nothing and learning on the job. She was first published under her French name, Hélene, but later changed it to Elena, and sometimes used Anel. Poniatowska published her first book, Lilus Kikus, in 1954, and since then has done both journalism and creative writing. The years from the 1950s to the '70s offered limited opportunities for women, but she eventually moved from interviews and society stories to literary profiles and stories on social issues. She emerged as a subtly present female voice in a patriarchal society, even as she was called "Elenita" (little Elena) and her work was often dismissed as naïve interviews and children's literature. She progressed by persistence rather than direct confrontation.
Poniatowska most influential work has been "testimonial narratives", writings based both on historical facts and accounts by people normally not recorded by the media. She began writing on social issues after a visit to Lecumberri, a prison, to interview several incarcerated railway workers who had gone on strike. She found prisoners eager to talk and share their life stories. She interviewed Subcomandante Marcos in 1994. Much of this work has been compiled into seven volumes, including Todo México (1991–1999), Domingo siete (1982), and Palabras cruzadas (1961). Her best-known book of this type is La noche de Tlatelolco, which contains testimony of the victims of the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City.
Poniatowska is one of the founders of La Jornada newspaper; Fem, a feminist magazine; Siglo XXI, a publishing house; and the Cineteca Nacional, the national film institute.
Poniatowska's works have been translated into English, Polish, French, Danish, and German, starting in the 1990s. She translated Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street into Spanish. She wrote a play, Meles y Teleo: apuntes para una comedia, a year after the birth of son Emmanuel. In 1997 her novella De noche vienes (You Come by Night) was made into a feature film directed by Arturo Ripstein and starring María Rojo and Tito Vasconcelos. She has also published biographies of the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and artist Juan Soriano.
Poniatowska often gives presentations and is especially sought for talks and seminars in the United States. She is considered to be Mexico's "grande dame" of letters but she has not been recognized around the world like other prolific Latin American writers of her generation. She has also not been fully integrated into Mexico's elite, never receiving diplomatic appointments, like Carlos Fuentes, and turning down political opportunities. Nor has she spent much time in Mexico's elite literary circles. Fuentes once said that Poniatowska was too busy in the city's slums or shopping for groceries to have time for him and others. She says that such remarks show that she is considered more of a maid, a cook, or even a janitor in the "great House of Mexican Literature".
For over 30 years, Poniatowska has taught a weekly writing workshop. Through this and other efforts, she has influenced a generation of Mexican writers, including Silvia Molina and Rosa Nissán.
Her work is a cross between literary fiction and historical construction. She began to produce major works in the 1960s and her work matured in the 1970s, when she turned to producing works in put herself in solidarity with those who are oppressed politically and economically against those in power. Her work can be compared to that of Antonio Skármeta, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Marta Traba, Sergio Ramírez, Rosario Ferré, Manuel Puig and Fernando del Paso. Although most of her fame is as a journalist, she prefers creative writing. Her creative writings are philosophic meditations and assessments of society and the disenfranchised within it. Her writing style is free, lacking solemnity, colloquial and close. Many of her works deconstruct societal and political myths, but they also work to create new ones. For example, while she heavily criticizes the national institutions which evolved after the Mexican Revolution, she promotes a kind of "popular heroism" of the common person without name. Her works are also impregnated with a sense of fatalism.