Her parents defined her condition as an outsider early on. Her founding memory, as it were, was of the day one of her aunts burst into the room, saying she had just had a vision, and that one of Mrs. Castellanos’ children would not live to adulthood. “Not the boy!” Rosario’s mother exclaimed, rising from her chair in terror. (The boy did indeed die soon after.) Rosario was thus reduced to insignificance, and in the years that followed she was ignored and yet simultaneously overprotected: another childhood memory also involves her mother, this time instructing a servant to swab with alcohol the area on which Rosario was about to perform a school dance routine. The combination of her character, her intelligence and her upbringing left the girl completely unprepared for ordinary social intercourse, and the writer Castellanos remembers the child Rosario, painfully, as neither outgoing nor charming. To be present in the world was in itself a difficulty, and so in her happiest fantasies she reduced herself to nothing more than an eye. “It must be so lovely to be always like a balcony, all empty and carefree, only looking!” she wrote in the opening pages of her first, autobiographical, novel Balún Canán [1956, Fondo de Cultura Económica].

That such a childhood would produce such a novel was probably inevitable, although Castellanos did not begin her writing career as a novelist. Strictly speaking, she began writing as a teenager in a dismal “young ladies’ school” in Comitán, the coffee-trading Chiapas town where she grew up. Here, she drafted highly successful mash notes for her classmates, and thus bought herself a degree of popularity, although one can imagine that she might have preferred to have the boyfriends. The door to real writing was opened in the late 1930s, as a result of a confrontation with the modern world that the wealthy landowners of Chiapas had long resisted—often by force—and which was finally imposed on them by President Lazaro Cárdenas: he decreed a program of land reform and peasant emancipation that greatly diminished the Castellanos family holdings; embittered, the family left Chiapas for Mexico City when Rosario was sixteen.

In interviews, Castellanos described her encounter with this rude, noisy city as traumatic. Much more so were the deaths, in quick succession, of both her parents, a year later. But in high school she met a gentle and luminously intelligent girl by the name of Dolores Castro, and, with her, fell in with a group of young poets. At last she saw a face in the mirror that suited the person she could be. The Nicaraguan poet/priest Ernesto Cardenal was part of this group, and so were Dolores Castro, the Guatemalan short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, and a fellow Chiapaneco, the great Mexican poet Jaime Sabines.