During the thirty-four-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the nation’s course had been largely determined by a group of lawyers, accountants, and intellectuals known as the científicos (“scientific ones"; most of these men were students of the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte). They had looked abroad to “modern” Europe for cultural and economic models, and they placed much of Mexico’s industry and the exploitation of her natural resources in foreign—North American or European—hands. Indigenous Mexican culture was despised, and the Indians who created it were debased. Sophisticated Mexicans preferred imitations: paintings that looked like those of the Spanish masters Murillo or Zuloaga, avenues that copied the Champs-Élysées, and Beaux Arts buildings that resembled French neoclassic birthday cakes. Porfirio Díaz himself powdered his bronze skin to hide the fact that he was a Mixtec Indian with only a little Spanish blood.
It took a decade of revolution to return Mexico to the Mexicans, but by the 1920s the gains of the long battle were being consolidated. There were land and labor reforms, the power of the Catholic Church was severely curtailed, laws were passed decreeing the return of natural resources to the nation. As Mexicans began to forge a proud new identity, they rejected previously prized ideas and fashions borrowed from France and Spain, and they embraced native culture. “Idealists, persist in the salvation of the Republic,” Antonio Caso exhorted his students. “Turn your eyes to the soil of Mexico, to our customs and our traditions, our hopes and our wishes, to what we in truth are!”
Upon his election in 1920, President Alvaro Obregón appointed as his minister of public education José Vasconcelos, a brilliant lawyer and philosopher of the post-científico generation, who had participated in the revolt against Díaz. Vasconcelos’s aim was to make Mexican education truly Mexican: it was, he said, to be founded on “our blood, our language and our people.” Launching a crusade to make Mexico literate, he ordered the construction of a thousand rural schools and then marshaled an army of teachers to take books (and the flag) into the hinterlands. He equipped libraries, constructed playgrounds and public swimming pools, and organized open-air art schools. He ordered classics like Plato’s Dialogues, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Goethe’s Faust to be published at prices the people could afford, and for those who could not read, he arranged free concerts and contracted with painters like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros to work at masons’ wages, decorating public walls with murals that glorified Mexican history and culture. Art, Vasconcelos believed, could inspire social change. His was a philosophy of intuition, opposed to the logic and empiricism that the científicos had revered. “Men are more malleable when approached through their senses,” he said, “as happens when one contemplates beautiful forms and figures, or hears beautiful rhythms and melodies.” His mystical belief in the greatness of Amerindian man was epitomized in his words: “The Spirit Shall Speak Through My Race.”
This, then, was the mood of ardor and activism, anger and reformist zeal, that became Frida’s matrix when she left the protective walls of her patio, broke with the familiar tempo of her barrio, and took the one-hour trolley ride into the city to go to her new school. “We do not speak of a time of lies nor of illusions, nor of daydreams,” wrote Andrés Iduarte (director of the National Institute of Fine Arts in the early 1950s), who knew Frida at the Preparatoria. “That was a time of truth, of faith, of passion, of nobility, of progress, of celestial air and of very terrestrial steel. We were fortunate, together with Frida, we were fortunate, the young people, the boys, the children of my time: our vitality coincided with that of Mexico; we grew spiritually while the country grew in the moral realm.”
The fortress-like colonial structure of reddish-brown volcanic stone that houses the Preparatory School stands only a few blocks from the Zócalo, Mexico’s central plaza (said to be built over the great square and temples of the Aztecs), where the cathedral and government buildings, including the National Palace, are located. In Frida’s day, this was also the university district, and near the Preparatoria were numerous stores, restaurants, public gardens, and movie houses, as well as various other schools, such as the Escuela Miguel Lerdo, outside which Preparatoria boys gathered each afternoon at five to wait for their girl friends to emerge. Street vendors found hungry customers for carnitas (broiled meat) or nieve (sherbet) or churros (fritters), and organ grinders filled romantic young ears with the sweet, sad tunes of Agustín Lara.
The Preparatoria’s arcaded patios were a playground, a podium, and a battlefield. The gymnastics teacher would shout, “One, two; one, two!” as an army of feet jumped together and apart, and the walls resounded with the school’s cry: “Shi . . . ts . . . púm/Jooya, Jooya,/Ca-chun, ca-chun, ra, ra,/Joooya, Joooya,/ PREPARATORIA!" In the patios, too, could be heard the earnest but passionate tones of youthful orators arguing for student rights or declaring their allegiances—right, left, center—while pranksters plotted mischief in dark stairways. The mood of ebullience sometimes spilled out of the school building into the streets; once during carnival season a boy dressed as Cupid hijacked a streetcar and drove the “madhouse on wheels” all over Mexico City. Sometimes bombs exploded, and firemen with hoses were summoned. Guns were fired; on one occasion, a shot blew off the fire chief’s nose. “Formidable Affray at the Preparatory School!” ran the headline. “Aggression Against the Minister of Education!”
When Frida entered the Preparatoria, girls had just recently been admitted; not surprisingly, few attended, and Frida was one of thirty-five in a student body of some two thousand (one father allowed his daughter to enroll only on the condition that she promise not to talk to the boys). Probably Matilde Calderón de Kahlo resisted sending her daughter to such an unprotective place, but Guillermo Kahlo had no reservations. Having no son to fulfill his own disappointed scholarly ambitions, he pinned his hopes on his favorite child. Frida, like the most promising son in time-honored tradition, was to equip herself to enter a profession. That she passed the entrance examinations to the Preparatoria is an indication of her exceptional promise. She selected a course of studies that would lead her after five years to medical school.
At fourteen, Frida was slender and well proportioned—“a fragile adolescent” who radiated a strange vitality, a mixture of tenderness and willful spunk. She wore her thick black hair with bangs cut straight across her forehead (later she cropped it in a style that might have been “flapper” but for unruly curls). Full, sensuous lips, together with the dimple in her chin, gave her an impetuous, naughty look that was enhanced by shining dark eyes under heavy connecting eyebrows. She arrived at the school, where students wore no uniform, dressed like a German high school student, in a dark-blue pleated gabardine skirt, thick stockings, boots, and a broad-brimmed black straw hat with ribbons down the back. Alicia Galant, a friend (and portrait subject) who met Frida in 1924, remembers her in blue overalls with metal clasps bicycling in Coyoacán. This unconventional garb plus her boy’s haircut made bourgeois mothers, who caught sight of her cycling with a group of boys, exclaim: “Que niña tan fea!" (What an ugly girl!) But her friends found her fascinating. Many of them recall that she always carried a schoolboy’s knapsack amounting to “a little world on her back”: texts, notebooks, drawings, butterflies and dried flowers, colors, and books printed in gothic script from the library of her father.
From the outset, the tomboy was seldom seen on the top floor of the Preparatory School’s largest patio, where the girls’ prefect, Dolores Angeles Castillo, held sway and where girls were expected to be when they were not in class. Frida considered most girls to be cursi (corny and vulgar), and irritated by their endless gossiping and pettiness, she called them escuinclas (pejoratively, “kids"; escuincles are hairless Mexican dogs). She preferred to romp in the school’s corridors, participating in the activities of some of the many cliques that gave social life at the school its informal structure. There were groups that engaged in particular activities—sports, politics, journalism, literature, a
rt, philosophy. There were debating groups, groups that went on excursions, and societies involved in social action. Some felt that Vasconcelos’s popular reforms were the equivalent of a national rebirth. Others thought that the democratization of culture meant cultural debasement. Some read Marx; others were embittered by the reforms of the revolution. While radical students rejected religion, conservative ones defended the Catholic Church with zeal and violence. The various factions battled in the school’s hallways and in the pages of innumerable school publications.
Frida had friends in several cliques at the Preparatoria. Among the Contemporáneos, a literary group, she knew the poet Salvador Novo and the essayist, poet, and novelist Xavier Villaurrutia. Later, she would become a close friend of the prominent poet Carlos Pellicer, and of course she knew the critic Jorge Cuesta (who married Diego Rivera’s second wife, Lupe Marín). Known in the annals of Mexican literature as elitist, purist, and avant-garde in a Europeanizing way (they loved Gide, Cocteau, Pound, Eliot), the Contemporáneos were opposed to both social realism and the idealizing of indigenous culture. Another group whose company Frida enjoyed was the Maistros, which included two much-admired pro-Vasconcelos student orators: Salvador Azuela (son of the novelist Mariano Azuela, who wrote The Underdogs, the most prominent novel of the Mexican Revolution) and the radical leftist Germán de Campo.
But Frida’s real cuates (pals) were the Cachuchas, named after the caps they all wore and famous at the Preparatoria for their brains and their mischief. This band of seven boys and two girls—Miguel N. Lira (whom Frida nicknamed “Chong Lee” because he was a respected scholar of Chinese poetry), José Gómez Robleda, Agustín Lira, Jesús Ríos y Valles (Frida called him Chucho Paisajes, “landscapes,” because of his surname, “rivers and valleys"), Alfonso Villa, Manuel González Ramírez, and Alejandro Gómez Arias, along with Carmen Jaime and Frida—went on to become outstanding members of Mexico’s professional class. Today, Alejandro Gómez Arias is a highly respected intellectual, a lawyer, and a political journalist; Miguel N. Lira became a lawyer and a poet; José Gómez Robleda was a professor of psychiatry at the university medical school, and Manuel González Ramírez was a historian, a writer, and a lawyer (he served both Frida and Diego on various occasions).
What united them in their school days was not so much an activity or a cause as an attitude of irreverence. Although they did not involve themselves with politics (they thought politicians acted out of narrow self-interest), they espoused a kind of romantic socialism mixed with nationalism. As followers of Vasconcelos they held high ideals for their country’s future and agitated for reforms at the school. But at the same time they enjoyed creating anarchy in the classrooms, and their escapades were outrageous and sometimes terrible: once classrooms emptied when they rode a donkey through the halls; another time, they wove a web of fireworks around a dog, lit them, and sent the poor beast running and barking through the corridors. One of the group remembers that “it was the joking attitude we had toward people and things that drew Frida to us, not because she had the habit of laughing at other people but because it captivated her, and she began to learn it, and ended by becoming a master of pun and, when they were called for, of cutting witticisms.” From the Cachuchas, Frida also learned a kind of comradely loyalty, a boyish way of handling friendship that she would keep all her life. In their company, her natural mischievousness deepened into a delight in subverting all authorities.
The Cachuchas’ most outrageous “prank” involved Antonio Caso, one of the most revered of university professors, but from the Cachuchas’ point of view an overly conservative thinker. “Linda,” Frida explained to a school friend, “we can’t take it anymore. He talks and talks, very beautifully, but without substance. We’ve had enough of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Bergson, Comte, and he doesn’t dare get mixed up with Hegel, Marx, and Engels. Something must be done!”
While the professor delivered a lecture on evolution in the Generalito, a large assembly hall that had once been a chapel, the Cachuchas placed a six-inch firecracker with a twenty-minute fuse outside the room, on top of the window above the pulpit. They tossed a coin to see who would light it. The lot fell to José Gómez Robleda. He remembers: “Gómez Arias, Miguel N. Lira, and Manuel González Ramírez left the school building. I stayed [and lit the fuse] and sat down in the Generalito next to the prefect of the girl students. After a while came the explosion. Baroom! The glass windowpanes broke, and a hail of glass and stones and gravel fell on Antonio Caso.” The eloquent orator reacted with perfect aplomb. He casually smoothed down his mussed hair and went right on lecturing as if nothing had happened. As usual, the Cachuchas had prepared their alibis well—most of them had either left the building or were sitting innocently in the lecture hall—and thus escaped the fate of “bomb” makers who were caught: summary expulsion.
Legend has it that Frida was expelled once (the reason is unrecorded). Nothing daunted, she took her case directly to Vasconcelos, whose rivalrous animosity to the director of the Preparatoria, Lombardo Toledano, was well known; the minister ordered her reinstatement. “If you can’t manage a little girl like that,” he is reported to have said to the beleaguered Toledano, “you are not fit to be director of such an institution.”
A favorite haunt of the Cachuchas was the Ibero American Library, only a short distance from the school. Although it was housed in the Old Church of the Incarnation, it was a warm and welcoming place, with a maze of low bookshelves to counter the grandeur of the tall, barrel-vaulted nave, which was decorated with murals by Roberto Montenegro and the bright silk flags of the Latin American countries. Two kindly librarians allowed the Cachuchas to use it almost as their private domain, and the “Ibero” became their meeting place. Each one had his or her particular corner. Here they argued, flirted, fought, wrote papers, drew pictures, and read books.
They read constantly—everything from Dumas to Mariano Azuela, from the Bible to Zozobra (published in 1919 by the poet Ramón López Velarde, whose work captured the spirit of the revolutionary years). They devoured the great works of Spanish and (in translation) Russian literature (Pushkin, Gogol, Andreyev, Tolstoy) and kept up with current Mexican fiction. Eventually Frida learned to read in three languages: Spanish, English, German. The imaginary biography of the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello, which she read in a translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, moved her so deeply that she memorized it. Familiar with her father’s collection of books on philosophy, she loved to talk as if Hegel and Kant were as easy to read as a comic strip. “Alejandro,” she would cry, leaning out the window, “lend me your Spengler. I don’t have anything to read on the bus!”
The Cachuchas and their friends had competitions to see who could discover a better book and who could finish it first, and they often dramatized what they read. Adelina Zendejas, one of the girls at the Preparatoria Frida did not consider cursi, recalls being part of a spellbound audience when Angel Salas (a Maistro), Frida, and Jesús Ríos y Valles recounted their imaginary voyages. Improvising on information gleaned from books they had read—H. G. Wells, Victor Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Jules Verne—they told of scaling the Himalayas, wandering through Russia and China, exploring the Amazon and the depths of the ocean. Their stories were full of realistic details: how they gathered the money for the trip, what they packed, how they selected their means of transportation. Angel Salas, who was to become a musicologist and composer, accompanied his inventions with Tarascan songs.
Boy companions, whether Cachuchas or not, Frida called cuates or manis (brothers); girls (except for the escuinclas) were manas (short for hermanas, or sisters). The hermana Frida mentions most often in letters is another high-spirited tomboy, Agustina Reyna (nicknamed “la Reyna” or “Reynita"). The two girls loved to loiter in the public gardens of the university district, where they would listen to the organ grinders and chat with truants and newsboys. From peddlers, Frida won sweets by the toss of a coin—she never lost—and acquired the savvy and argot
of the street. Sometimes Angel Salas went with them to the Loreto Garden; there Frida would hold out her Cachucha cap, “begging” while Angel played his violin.
Frida enjoyed an endless battle of wits with the other female Cachucha, Carmen Jaime, who had read every philosophy book she could find (she grew up to become a scholar of seventeenth-century Spanish literature) and whose company must have been an education in itself. A truly eccentric young woman, she dressed sloppily in dark, masculine clothes, and earned the nickname “James,” or even “vampire,” by sporting a black cape when she went skating at dawn. The private language she invented she shared with the other Cachuchas, saying, for example, “Procedamos al comes"— “Let’s proceed to the eat.”
Although a voracious reader, Frida was not a dedicated student: she was interested in biology, literature, and art, but people fascinated her more. Fortunately, she was able to earn high marks without putting in much effort—she could read a text once and remember the contents. It was her right, she felt, not to attend lectures given by ill-prepared or boring teachers. Instead, she would sit just outside a class she had chosen to cut and read aloud to friends. When she did attend, she enlivened the proceedings. Once, bored by a psychology professor’s exposition of his theory of sleep, she handed Adelina Zendejas a note: “Read it, turn it over, and pass it to Reyna. Don’t laugh, because you’ll be in trouble if you do and they’ll probably expel you.” On the other side of the paper was a caricature of the teacher as a sleeping elephant. Of course, none of the ninety students in the class could stifle his laughter as the drawing passed among them.
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