Elena Garro

Garro trained as a dancer and choreographer before turning to journalism and playwriting, and married the poet Octavio Paz in 1937, a union that placed her inside Mexico's literary elite while her own work was frequently read, dismissively, only in his shadow.

Recollections of Things to Come (1963) let the town of Ixtepec itself narrate its slow destruction under military occupation and a Cristero-era massacre, folding ghosts, prophecy, and collective memory into a single voice, published four years before García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, though it went comparatively unnoticed at the time.

Her public denunciation of student leaders after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre made her a pariah in Mexican literary circles, and she spent nearly two decades afterward in impoverished exile in Spain, Paris, and New York before returning to Mexico shortly before her death in 1998.