by Elena Garro

Elena Garro (1920–98) was born in Puebla, Mexico, to a Mexican mother and a Spanish father, but she spent most of her childhood in the nearby southern state of Guerrero. As a young woman she worked briefly as a reporter and took on the cause of society’s poor and marginalized. Garro showed particular concern for Mexico’s Indian population and, for one notable story, even had herself incarcerated in a women’s prison in order to expose the substandard living conditions endured by the inmates. In 1937 Garro married the Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz, with whom she spent much of the 1940s and 1950s abroad, traveling through Europe and the United States. It was sometime around 1950, while weathering an illness in Switzerland, that Garro wrote Recollections of Things to Come. Set after the Mexican Revolution of...