Castellanos read constantly. She wrote and published her first poems. She spent hours talking in coffee shops with her poet friends. She studied Filosofía y Letras at the National University. Her intelligence and sharp wit were no longer a source of shame, and although she would later title a book of essays Mujer que sabe latín . . . from the Spanish saying, “A woman who knows Latin will not find a husband or a good end,” the fact was that she could now write this truth, rather than simply suffer it.

Castellanos joined the National Indigenous Institute—founded under the aegis of Lázaro Cárdenas, the same president whose active social reforms had so affected her family—and worked there writing and producing scripts for didactic puppet shows that were staged on market day in the most inaccessible villages in Chiapas. Back in Mexico City, she taught at the National University. For several years^ she wrote a lengthy weekly column in the newspaper Excelsior. She published eleven volumes of poetry. Her numerous essays include the first feminist texts ever published in Mexico. For Mexican women, “[Castellanos] opened wide the door of feminine literature, and began it. In a certain way it is thanks to her that those of us who now attempt to do so are able to write,” Elena Ponitowska states. “Before her no other woman except Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz . . . truly committed herself to her vocation.”

But Castellanos would never be happy. Indeed, the many friends who loved her felt that she was rarely anything but deeply depressed. Late in life, and unhappily, she married. She had a child. Eventually she was named ambassador to Israel.

Unsparingly, she summarized her life, and the inevitability of her writing career, in an Excelsior column:

To recapitulate: first, I was an only daughter, who never attended any school or childhood institution on a regular basis that would allow me to develop friendships. Abandoned to the resources of my imagination during adolescence, it seemed logical to me that I would suddenly be left utterly orphaned. I remained single until the age of thirty-three, during which time I reached an extreme degree of isolation, confined in a tuberculosis asylum, and [then] working in an institute for Indians.

I then entered a marriage that was strictly monogamous on my part and totally polygamous on my husband’s. I had three children, of whom two died [through miscarriage], I received my divorce papers when I was in Tel Aviv.

Add to this that I am shy, and that, as long as I had no obligation to do so, I never went to parties, out of fear that I would lose myself in others, abolish that distance that kept me so safe from any emotional contact.