BUENOS AIRES SITS NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD BUT THRIVES IN EVERY WAY

 

Tango Attire in Buenos Aires

LOVE LETTER TO BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires is a thriving, elegant city situated at the end of the world. It doesn't seem possible that this phenomenon of a metropolis exists on the outset of the North American time zone (five hours earlier than San Francisco) so very far away from everything. It's like it just popped up, with lavish Paris style buildings, lush and well-thought out parks, magical tree buttresses the size of Volkswagens, fast drivers but patient citizens, grocery stores with vegetable sections that could vie for a Bon Appetit centerfold, each tomato, avocado, head of lettuce meticulously placed, tempting a caress.                 

                                                                               

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RESTAURANTS

Restaurants, too many to count, serving grass fed beef you can cut with a spoon, salads with up to five 'gustos' or additions: tomatoes, onions, corn, peas, carrots, beets. Old world waiters in starched white shirts, black bowties and waist-high aprons—even at the smallest coffee shops—seating you with a nod or a flourish, then standing by as you ponder the menu. The city's fixated on food, with the popular parrilla leading the way, followed by a concentration of Italian eateries from high end to pizzeria. Every other food appears too, with plentiful choices. Argentina's turn of the century melting pot had no limits: Italian, Greek, Spanish, Irish, French, Chinese, Indian, English, German, and now the occasional gringo.

Rio Alba Restaurant (by author)

                                                                                                

ARCHITECTURE

Ultra modern high-rise apartments intertwine with ancient buildings, some in disrepair like the sidewalks, where busy passersby go about their daily routines. Trees line the streets, stretching stories high, home to birds singing lovely solos, too melodic to seem real. Buses, subways and taxis move the active locals from Point A to B. Average stature, thin and trim, intelligence level high. Everyone has an opinion and you'll hear it if you ask. A common phrase: God is everywhere but serves in Argentina. There's a quick wit and readiness to laugh. Strangers help with questions, no rebuffs.

Summer weather (north of the equator's winter) borders on godly—mid-eighties with light humidity, just enough to make my hair have a little tweak. Short sleeves and sandals, the clothing of choice.

Flea markets appear in countless parks on weekends in contrast to high-end stores like Hermes and Yves Saint Laurent in various chic parts of town. Elderly women walk with doting daughters on their elbows, afternoon strolls to who knows where.

The peso fluctuates constantly, with two deep cuts on the heels of the 2000 debacle that brought this thriving country to its knees. But still, the Porteños find time to tango.

TANGO

La Boca, where tango was born, still compels locals and tourists alike to throng El Caminito, to watch non-stop street tango performed by tango dancers extraordinaire. La Boca, which means 'the mouth' in Spanish, was once literally the mouth of Buenos Aires as it's located in what used to be the city's biggest port. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants set up shop in the surrounding vicinity, working the docks, earning a wage, while yearning for their far away homelands. From these cravings was born the tango. The haphazard shanty houses, still standing, line the streets, made from sheet metal and wooden planks and painted in bright colors. 

La Boca streets (by author)

While strolling through La Boca, we took a seat at an outdoor cafe to have a café and watch street tango. This conversation floated my way.

"We're not American," I heard the guy next to me tell the waiter in Spanish as he looked over his check. 

Every restaurant table was filled in La Boca. The sun was out and so were the tourists."Why are you charging me to use a fork?"

That was a new spin. I'd lived in Mexico for years and had a knack for detecting certain discrepancies. But using a fork carried a surcharge? That was a new spin. The discussion heated up as his girlfriend got involved. I tuned out.

Time to watch the passersby and the street-side tango. What legs she had, the dancer, in an off-blue high slit backless dress. Dark hair with high sheen, pulled back in a low bun. I'd heard the sad lonely song from the bandoleon somewhere before. Her partner, black suit, white shirt, Cuban hat, moved along with her ignoring the crowd.

Tango Dancers (by author)

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy. 

Wood Mural in La Boca, Buenos Aires (by author)

DID 2012 MAYA CALENDAR'S LONG-COUNT END DATE USHER IN AN EPOCH OF CHANGE?

 

Scribe on Maya plate

Have we entered a new epoch that began in 2012? You may recall the 2012 Maya calendar kerfuffle. First off, the media got it wrong. The Maya never predicted the world would end on the last day of their thirteenth baktun in the Maya Long Count cycle. But Maya elders did say we were in for a time of transition. Is that transition now?

As a Mayaphile and student of Maya culture, I wrote Maya 2012 Revealed: Demystifying the Prophecy, to quash false information about the supposed "end date" in their Long Count calendar, one of 28 in the time-obsessed Maya system, that was being dangled like a piece of fresh meat before a pack of hungry wolves. The calendar simply rolled over into a new cycle and they started counting anew.

Maya Calendar (Historyonthenet.com)

But old habits die hard and just over a year ago a ruckus erupted over a tweet that suggested the Maya 2012 end of the world prophecy was off by a good eight years. That catapulted said end date smack dab into the cross hairs of 2020 —what a year that ended up being. 

The prediction however was not made by an eminent Maya academic or even a calendar researcher, but by plant biologist and Fulbright scholar at University of Tennessee, Paolo Tagalogquin. His Twitter account has since been deleted.

With ongoing global events, that very possibility—the world ending—may have crossed your mind.  And for the beginning of "the end" to start in 2020? Well, we've lived through two years of continuous threat from a raging pandemic still not fully in check. Let it be said some of us may have considered that to be a precursor of things to come. But it looks like we're still standing.

END OF 13TH BAKTUN

To explain biologist Tagalogquin's reasoning, apparently he did a math re-do on the Julian calendar that dates back to 8 CE and was used until the Gregorian or Christian calendar came into being in 1752. After his calculations, he came up with this tweet: "Following the Julian calendar, we are technically in 2012. The number of days lost in a year due to the shift into the Gregorian calendar is 11 days. For 268 years using the Gregorian calendar (1752 - 2020) times 11 days equals 2,948 days / 365 (per year) equals eight years."

The subtext: I assume you have your affairs in order.

Dresden Codex providing clues to Maya calendars (NGS photo)

Back in 2012, some believed December 21, 2012, might be the end. The media blared non-stop that this was when the Maya Long Count calendar completed a 5, 125 year cycle known as the 13th baktun. The ancient Maya, an advanced culture of mathematicians (they invented zero) and naked eye astronomers, viewed this moment as consequential.

CALENDAR SHUFFLE

Why is this even important? If the Maya code had not been deciphered a few decades ago, we wouldn't even have known that an end date to the Long Count calendar existed.

In researching the Maya end date, I realized that converting both Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Maya calendar had been no easy task. Spanish speaking priests were used for the conversion and needed to interact with the Maya who had their own language. Not only was there room for error in language differences, but the Julian calendar had gone through several trial runs over the centuries as the world coped with a one-time-fits-all calendar system.

During the conversion, some countries used different calendar renditions simultaneously, and some time in the 1500s while trying to play catch-up, eleven days were lost in a single month. My overall impression: whoever had been relegated to configure dates from Julian to Gregorian to Maya had stared down an impossible undertaking. And furthermore, who was their fact checker?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ CHEN

As the end date blossomed into a full-on media phenomenon, I took a wider view of the "Maya prophecy" as it came to be known. Great change doesn't happen overnight and can span decades or even centuries, and as with all things Maya, the present is determined by the past. Everything repeats. Everything is a recurring pattern.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Nobel Laureate

In 2012 Nobel laureate and author Rigoberto Menchú Tum, a Ki'che' Maya from Guatemala who was forced to leave her country when her government disappeared thousands of indigenous Maya, said this, "There are a lot of people speaking for the Maya with little respect for the sacred Maya calendar or the culture.

TIME DOES NOT EXIST

"For us, the Maya, during this phase, time does not exist. Time is completely dispersed. It is 'disordered time,' when the greatest breakdown of humanity will occur, plagued by loneliness, stress and fear.

"The Maya elders say if we do not take right action today, one-quarter of the people of the earth will perish."

Tum said this in 2012. Flash forward to 2020—especially the "plagued by loneliness, stress and fear" part of her quote and we can cast her as a Cassandra-like figure in light of the Covid pandemic. And we can all agree that in the past several years numerous issues have caused hardship: floods, hurricanes, raging fires, wars, racial inequality and unwarranted deaths. The stark reality of all the above drives away any hope for a soon to be bright future.

A MOMENT OF CHAOS

Maya Renaissance film by PeaceJam

In a documentary film, 2012: The True Mayan Prophecy, Dawn Engle and Ivan Suvanjieff, film makers and founders of the non-profit PeaceJam, interviewed Maya elders along with Menchú Tum. In the interview, Menchú Tum said we're living in a moment of chaos, and though there is global disorder, 2012 would usher in a more balanced period, if only we allow it.

DISORDERED TIME

"A new time is drawing near so it is important to maintain the light shining in these days, and our personal and collective light," she said. "We are passing through a period of disordered time which began in 1992 and will last forty years. There are things that happened that are not merely caused by people. It is the age, the energy, the cosmos."

TRANSITION TAKES TIME

In the film, Menchú Tum references her spiritual advisors, Maria Faviana Chocoy Alva and Pedro Celestino Pac Noy, who state that apocalyptic predictions misrepresent the true meaning of the end of the Maya Long Count cycle known as the thirteenth baktun. Their position is that this would be a time of great transition.

Calendar cycle cogs (By DK)

Who cannot agree that this is a time of transition, said Menchú Tum. "For humanity, it is the darkest of times. Humanity is being called to a great respon-sibility, affected by our actions. We call them natural disasters but they are not natural. Much pain is already occurring."

Again, Menchú Tum's sagacious predictions are synonymous with what we are presently living with—the human pain endured by the Covid pandemic, the earth's pain due to our disconnect from Mother Nature, and the atrocities humans have unleashed on the planet. Time, as the Maya might say, will tell.

                         **************

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy. 

                      

FRIDA AND DIEGO'S CROSS-COUNTRY JOURNEY CREATED ART, CONTROVERSY AND FAME

Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States 1931

PART 2 

Frida Kahlo's travel to the United States began in San Francisco where she and husband Diego Rivera lived in 1930 and 1931. Rivera, the most famous artist in the world at the time, bigger even than Picasso, had been commissioned to paint two murals in the city. If ever there was a working vacation, this was it. On the project's completion, they traveled from the west coast briefly back to Mexico, and from there, caught a ship via Cuba to New York, the second leg of their stateside journey. Kahlo and Rivera were no doubt the most artistically involved couple the world has ever seen. Both fed off the other's imagination, work, and inspiration, dove-tailing their way into making art that revered their native land. 

During that time, scholars credit 23-year old Kahlo's creative breakthrough to an over abundance of input, not uncommon for an emerging artist in new surroundings. Her world had expanded and she was able to paint with other artists while experiencing the sights of San Francisco which she called "the city of the world." Her art also drew on a vast body of knowledge rooted in her Mexican upbringing, which she then synthesized with experiences she gained in California—a perfect storm for an emerging talent such as Kahlo.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Frida and Diego in New York, 1932

In New York they stayed at the Barbizon-Plaza on Central Park South, the first music-art residence center in the US, complete with art studios, only two blocks from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Soon after they arrived they were swept up into the social lives of many prominent people. Everyone wanted to meet Diego Rivera and his wife Frida. Though Rivera was quite the social butterfly, Kahlo not so much.

Rivera would exhibit at MoMA and had also been commissioned by John D. Rockefeller's wife, Abby, to re-create a mural in their home titled Wall Street Banquet, which had featured Rockefeller, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan. After consideration, Rivera declined as it was quite controversial, casting the scions of industry in a bad light.

CLASS STRUGGLE

In New York, Frida observed the huge disparity between the wealthy and the poor. At first she and Rivera, though surrounded by well-heeled patrons, kept "witnessing the horrible poverty and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires who greedily grab everything," she wrote her mother. 

New York City Out-of-Work Dock Workers 1932

They visited a homeless shelter where they saw people sleeping "like dogs in a pen," she wrote. With the Depression in its third year, grim reality had set in and Rivera was inspired to paint Frozen Assets, where bodies were placed in morgues hidden away beneath cranes of industry. They witnessed a multitude of encampments nicknamed "Hoover Valley" for the president.

HARLEM SHUFFLE

After Diego's lengthy workaholic days at MoMA, at night they gravitated to Harlem for the jazz clubs, speakeasies, and dance halls though Kahlo noticed disparity there, too. While the world teetered on economic collapse, shrewd Frida noted the white and middle class headed to Harlem where the main draw was dancing and drinking while "feeling superior in whites-only clubs featuring black entertainers," wrote Celia Stahr, author of Frida in America.

Outspoken Frida called it out. Women of color pleasing the masses. "Everything here is pure show but down deep it's all real shit.  By now I'm completely disappointed in the famous United States," she wrote her mother. She said near Central Park where they lived, it was beautiful with fancy shops and restaurants while the working class lived in areas reeking of garbage. New York, she said, presented a "new level of poverty."

FRIDA PAINTS

In New York she stewed about injustice and in a new painting, she encapsulated a world where everything was pure show, titled Window Display on a Street in Detroit (though she began the painting in New York, she finished it in Detroit, 1931). Meanwhile Rivera sweated out finishing his last murals for the MoMA exhibit with five Mexican-themed murals—Indian Warrior, Sugar Cane, Liberation of the Peon, Agrarian Leader Zapata, and The Uprising.

Window Display a Street in Detroit, Frida Kahlo

For the opening, Rivera had painted 23 murals, 56 oil paintings and would display 89 water colors, sketches, and drawings (some on borrow). In many ways, Rivera and Kahlo were the social conscience of the country they visited. They saw things from unblemished eyes and painted their truths. (Below: Agrarian Leader Zapata and Sugar Cane, by Diego Rivera for DIA, from www.diegorivera.org).

MEETING GEORGIA

At the MoMA opening, Kahlo met famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz, husband of rising star Georgia O'Keefe. In O'Keefe she saw a woman who mirrored her in many ways—a painter married to a successful artist twice her age, a lover of nature and Indian culture, and a sexually free being, wrote author Celia Stahr. It's well known that O'Keefe and Kahlo had a relationship, though neither of them spoke about it openly.

Georgia O'Keefe (by Alfred Stieglitz)

Meanwhile the world of fashion contributed to the blurring of distinctions between labels such as bi-sexual and New Woman. Both Frida and Georgia, said Stahr, utilized the androgynous look to defy stereotypical norms and to assert their own independence and power as artists. 

Though Kahlo and Rivera only spent six months in New York, it was a stepping stone for Kahlo. She made closer friends than in San Francisco, including getting re-acquainted with old friends from Mexico. During her last months in the city she made two drawings, both titled The Dream. They had a surrealistic quality that the art world took note of, and the second one turned out to be prophetic—it showed her being impregnated by Rivera's "seed." Later that month she discovered she was pregnant.

MOTOR CITY

The train to Detroit took 14 hours from New York, long enough to transition from the world's most vibrant city into the city of technology and manufacturing, and the midwest—a far cry from the hub of activity and style she had just left. But Detroit's train station, beautifully constructed in the Beaux Arts style, cheered Frida's heart. Upon entering Detroit proper, however, the couple was soon to find out the city, in the depths of the Depression, was 50 percent unemployed. Poverty in Detroit was worse than NYC. 

Michigan Central Station (Vintage Michigan)

The U.S. manufacturing capital proved to be more alien to Frida's Mexican heart than either San Francisco or New York. In a city of 1.5 million, only 15,000 were Hispanic. She'd never felt more alone. And they'd arrived shortly after a five thousand people protest in front of Ford Motor had ended in gunfire, killing four.

She'd entered a war zone. Poor, unemployed people, no jobs, no housing, as Ford had provided company housing for many of his workers. Not to mention the city was anti-Semitic and she had Jewish blood. She was in hell. Things were going from bad to worse. Plus she was pregnant, and with problems left over from the accident in her broken body, she didn't know if she could sustain a pregnancy. She considered abortion but was talked out of it. Eventually her Detroit obstetrician performed a C-section, but the child did not live.

BAD NEWS BACK HOME

Trouble however, was not yet done with her. Shortly after the disaster of losing the child, she learned her mother was desperately ill in Mexico and a last minute trip to see her had to be arranged. With Diego commissioned for murals to both Ford and the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA), he wouldn't be able to accompany her. Luckily artist/photographer Lucienne Bloch, Rivera's assistant and Frida's friend, said she'd go along. Tickets were booked for the daunting train ride and border crossing. They arrived September 9, nearly three days later in Mexico City, slowed by enormous flooding in Laredo. Her sisters met her at the station as her father was not in good condition either. 

Guillermo Kahlo and Matilde Calderón, Frida's mother

Frida's mother had breast cancer and died a day after an arduous surgery. Frida's entire family was beyond distraught. When she told her father about Matilde's death, "he was done for," said Lucienne Bloch.  Kahlo returned from Mexico six weeks later to a city she despised and to a husband she feared was having an affair with one of his benefactors. Getting back into a routine and finding a rhythm with Diego proved challenging, wrote Stahr. When she met mythologist Joseph Campbell years later, he would tell her she had embarked on the classic Hero's Journey: Bus accident, miscarriage, mother's death. After all this, she returned to Detroit a changed person.

Disgusted with everything, she demanded DIA allow her to have a studio at the museum. Being away from patrons and society matrons who wanted to only talk clothes and gossip, this would give her the freedom to concentrate on her art with no interruptions. Her painting, My Birth, was born at this time. It was a painting that allowed her to release her fears and was considered another breakthrough.

MURALS ON DISPLAY

Diego's hectic schedule proved successful. He completed 77 panels for the DIA's Garden Court in March 1933, though not without controversy regarding his Communist leanings, written about by a Time magazine reporter. Doubts failed quickly though as the DIA opened the courtyard to early onlookers for ten cents a ticket to preview the murals for themselves. In three days 13 thousand people paraded through and were thoroughly impressed. All malicious thoughts fell away, and Edsel Ford was quoted as saying, "I admire Rivera's spirit. I believe he was trying to express his ideas about the spirit of Detroit." 

Detroit Industry Mural Panel by Diego Rivera (photo Lucienne Bloch)

Shortly before the formal opening of the murals at the DIA, Frida and Diego left for New York. He had been given a prestigious commission by Rockefeller to paint at the RCA Building in the new Rockefeller Center. Both were on a high: Rivera for his Detroit murals and Frida happy as she'd completed five paintings while in Detroit. A working holiday indeed. 

FIERY CRUSADER OF THE PAINT BRUSH

On Rivera's arrival, New York Times reporter Anita Brenner called him, "the fiery crusader of the paint brush." He began his murals at RCA Building, titling them Man at the Crossroads. As Hitler was heating up in Germany, Rivera wanted to make the rich take notice with his mural. He planned to contrast a scene of fascist warfare on the upper left side of the wall to a May Day demonstration in Moscow on the right, featuring Leon Trotsky, the exiled Russian revolutionary who had played a major role in the new government of the Soviet Union before being ousted by Stalin when he came to power in the twenties. Lenin was also in the mural, and not as a bad guy. Rivera planned to paint great wealth alongside desperate poverty— beauty turning to ugliness. In his murals workers would hold signs that read, "Divided We Starve—United We Eat." 

Man at the Crossroads, by Diego Rivera

As art critics, reporters, and onlookers strode in to take a look, the impression began to take hold that Rivera had a political ideology in mind for his mural. Things reached a crescendo when in April a reporter from New York World Telegram checked in at RCA. He posted a story about the mural with this headline, "Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Rockefeller Foots the Bill.'' 

On May 4, days before the mural was to be presented, Rockefeller wrote Rivera a letter asking him to tone down the Communist influence in the painting. Rivera did not defer, and on May 9, police entered the building and were told to shut down the work if Rivera did not paint Lenin out of the mural. Rivera would not concede and was presented with a check for his work and ushered out of the building in his coveralls. The work was boarded up and the only known photographs of it were taken by Lucienne Bloch, photographer and Rivera's assistant.

RIVERA FIGHTS BACK

Fired up, Diego, Frida and their group of workers decided how to counter the RCA shutdown and suppression of his work. Diego would paint murals at three "Communist" schools in New York. The next day the book burnings took place in Germany to "cleanse the German spirit" and this brazen act overrode the brouhaha at RCA Center. Because of Rockefeller's decision to can the murals, Rivera lost the commission to paint at the Chicago World's Fair. He shifted his vitriol against Rockefeller to painting a mural at the New Workers School instead of at the three Communist schools as pay back. 

Because of Rockefeller's act, both Frida and Diego threw themselves into workers' rights protests and political issues for the summer months that year. Rivera, still angered by the brushoff from Rockefeller, wallowed in indecision on how to proceed. Back in Mexico, a mural for a medical school commission awaited him. To soothe his wounds, he'd resorted to an affair with a young sculptress, and didn't keep standard hours at the New School mural. His antics were causing trouble in his marriage and he knew it, plus money was running out. 

A CHAPTER ENDS

Self Portrait With a Necklace, by Frida Kahlo

Frida apparently worked well in adverse situations as she created two more important paintings in their last months in New York: My Dress Hangs Here and Self-Portrait With a Necklace. When they finally boarded the Oriente in New York harbor in December 1933 to return to Mexico, both hoped to restore some balance in their relationship. Stahr wrote Frida had no idea what the future would hold. On leaving Gringolandia, she realized during her time there she'd created her best art. She had gripes about the States and had suffered the trauma of double death in Detroit, but the U.S. was a place where her creative spirit broke through to new heights, allowing her genius to soar. 

In Mexico, things between Kahlo and Rivera would continue to heat up, but as for art, Frida was on her way. 

Quote from Kahlo: "Perhaps it is expected that I should lament how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape."

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy. 

 

HOW SAN FRANCISCO IGNITED THE RIGHT STUFF IN EMERGING ARTIST FRIDA KAHLO

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Monkeys

THE EVOLUTION OF FRIDA

Though much has been written about Frida Kahlo, one of the most celebrated women artists of our time, little is mentioned of her travels in the United States and specifically San Francisco in the 1930s, a period that shaped her voice as an artist. Her year in San Francisco also made a lasting impact on the city's local art scene.

Frida in America*—The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist, by Celia Stahr, documents her time in Gringolandia, as Kahlo nicknamed her neighbor to the north. According to Stahr, no other author has explored her body of work while living in the States in depth and there hasn't been a major Kahlo biography since Hayden Herrera's in 1983. However, Suzanne Barbezat's 2016, Frida Kahlo At Home, does an excellent job portraying key aspects of the artist's life and works with many visuals. 

BY TRAIN TO SAN FRANCISCO

Shortly after her marriage in 1929 to Diego Rivera, known for both his art and politics, they traveled from Mexico City to San Francisco. Rivera had been commissioned to paint a mural at the Pacific Stock Exchange, now the City Club. This would be Frida's first trip outside Mexico. After a stop to see friends and art dealers in Los Angeles, they headed to San Francisco by train. The tracks followed the Pacific, and sitting in the train car she sketched a picture of San Francisco which she had dubbed long before seeing it, "the city of the world." This drawing, now lost, included a city scene with rectangular skyscrapers and the ocean along with a self-portrait.

In Montgomery Street Apartment by Paul Juley

At 23, more than 20 years younger than her world famous husband, she was a novice painter while Rivera was at the height of his creative powers. When they stepped off the train, Rivera recalled he was "almost frightened to realize her imagined city was the very one we were now seeing for the first time."

FAMILY TIES

Frida Kahlo's Parents, Guillermo and Matilde 

Born to Guillermo Kahlo, her German father, and Oaxacan/Tehuantepec mother, Matilde Calderón, Frida had long planned to go to medical school and studied at the Prepa in Mexico City. Her university plans changed abruptly in September 1925 while riding a city bus that was hit full speed by a trolley on her way home from a shopping trip. In the accident, a metal pole impaled her pelvis, leaving her spinal column broken in three places along with a broken collarbone, pelvis and some ribs. She was in the hospital in a full plaster body cast for a month, but returned home six weeks later. Though told she would never walk again, with fixed determination, she began to walk haltingly in three months. No doubt part of her rapid recovery after the excruciating accident was due to the strength training she received with her father's help after contracting polio at age six. Guillermo trained her to be a strong athlete which provided her the freedom that usually only came to males in that era.

THE ACCIDENT'S EFFECTS

Sketch by Frida Kahlo of Bus Accident, 1926

Kahlo's horrifying accident irreversibly changed the course of her life—from a former student studying medicine to a budding player in the creative world of art. After the interruption of her medical studies, her drawing and painting took on greater significance as her physical movements were curtailed. Before the accident, Frida always accompanied her father, a professional photographer, on his photo shoots. He suffered from epilepsy and Frida's presence was a safeguard for both her father and his equipment should a seizure occur while he was working. It created a very close father-daughter bond. While her father tested out various settings, she would often serve as a model and learned to pose at an early age which served her well in the future as she gained fame.

The Bus by Frida Kahlo, 1929

Because of her physical limitations from the accident, she could no longer assist her father. Her mother realized the girl needed a creative outlet and hired a carpenter to create a lap easel. Matilde also suggested placing a mirror atop the bed's canopy for self-portraits. Soon after, Frida began applying pigment to small canvases and began drawing what she knew best—her friends and family. One of her early influences was the art of Leonardo Da Vinci and she tried using his techniques and symbolism in her paintings and iconic retablos.

COMRADE FRIDA

Frida Kahlo Painting in Bed (Artzocam)

After the accident she was introduced to the Communist party through a friend, Tina Modotti, an Italian American photographer and political activist who'd lived in Mexico since 1923. Through Tina's influence, Kahlo committed herself to communism after extensive reading about the Russian Revolution. In Tina's group, she was re-introduced to muralist Diego Rivera. She'd previously met him while he was painting a mural at the Ministry of Education where she goaded him to come off his scaffold and look at one of her paintings. He was duly impressed and later said her painting revealed "an unusual energy of expression and precise delineation of character."

By 1928 they began seeing each other after his divorce from second wife, Lupe Marín. Though he was a notorious womanizer, something about Frida kept him coming back. It could have been her blunt honesty or her raw talent as an untrained artist, Stahr writes. Along with that, her unconventional beauty was combined with a quick mind and sharp wit. Their interest in both art and politics ignited the relationship, plus they were attracted to the importance of creativity, black humor, and a passion for social justice.

Diego Rivera's Murals in Ministry of Education
Where He Met Frida

MEXICANIDAD 

They'd see each other at Tina's meetings and Rivera would take her home. There they'd discuss painting and its importance to a new post-revolutionary indigenist movement, Mexicanidad, which was often a topic in Tina's magazine, Mexican Folkways, where Rivera served as art director. Mexican Folkways' articles discussed excavations of Aztec sites, regional crafts and music traditions, children's art, and photos of diverse people and regions in Mexico.

In 1929, as her relationship with Rivera evolved, she joined the Communist Youth League. It was at this time she went into her full gender-neutral fashion look, wearing overalls or work outfits, no dresses, completed by a little black iron and sickle pin she wore on her collar.

Frida's Casa Azul, Coyoacán

A NEW LOOK

But when they married late that summer, Frida stepped out with a new look. Her wedding ensemble was a long ruffled skirt, white peasant blouse, and rebozo shawl, considered to be simple street clothes. To Frida, this outfit aligned her with working class indigenous women, indicating she was part Indian, thanks to her mother's family roots. Soon after, she began wearing a prominent jadeite necklace engraved with an Aztec symbol, the olin, found on the carved Aztec Calendar Stone. The carved glyph represented movement or the movement required to shift from one world into another, said Stahr. 

METAPHYSICS AND SYMBOLISM

Kahlo was a student of metaphysics and revered alchemy, the transformation of matter. She was well aware of symbolism and how it could stir the masses. Her peasant blouse emphasized her leftist leanings as a woman of the people as well as her purity as a young bride. She identified as a mestiza who was proud of her country's revolutionary ideals. In her marriage dress and in her first portrait painted as a married woman, Self Portrait, Time Flies, she laid out an intricate mythic framework of her desired alchemical union with Rivera, author Stahr stated. Rivera came to mysticism through his father, a Freemason and Rosicrucian. Kahlo came to it through her studies in all schools of philosophy at Prepa and through books friends shared with her. Metaphysics was at its height worldwide in the 1920s and 30s and the inquiring mind of an intelligent teen was like a sponge in water. Frida soaked it up and went on to use many symbolic principles in her paintings and retablos.

In San Francisco, from the moment they stepped off the train, she literally stopped traffic. Her ensemble had locals halting mid-street to stare at her in her huaraches under a long peasant skirt, green striped shawl, and dangling earrings as they made their way to Montgomery Street, part of the old Barbary Coast where the artists' co-op they'd live in was located. "Even in this bohemian section of San Francisco," remarked photographer and friend Edward Weston, "the sight of this unknown Mexican woman created excitement."

Allegory of California by Rivera in the Pacific Stock Exchange, 1931

LA INDIA BONITA

Weston's photos of Frida during her San Francisco stay along with those of Imogen Cunningham would come to be known as the best taken of her in that period. Weston captured her physical strength in strong arm and back muscles, along with her political strength as an indigenous woman. His photos helped establish this important symbol of her identity. She proudly wore her rebozo which conveyed allegiance to indigenous women throughout Mexico. His photos showed a striking, thoughtful, indigenous woman.

"Frida was creating a new persona of the indigenous Mexican woman by combining the traits of beauty and intelligence," Stahr wrote.

Frida in Rebozo (Toni Frissell, 1937)

Some of Kahlo's caricature can be attributed to a beauty pageant that took place in Mexico when she was 15. A newspaper sponsored a beauty pageant for indigenous women called La India Bonita. Publisher Felix Palavicini, a former revolutionary, wanted to validate Indian female beauty and the pageant was the thing. A young Nahuatl-speaking 14-year old woman from Sierra Norte de Puebla won, becoming the new face for Mexican indigenous women. This inspired Kahlo. In San Francisco she solidified her "La India Bonita" persona and brought together indigenous pride with a modern twist. Her long peasant skirts also served another purpose: they covered up her right leg and injured foot.

Diego's studio was on the top floor of the co-op where he worked daily on sketches for his new mural. With Diego absent, Frida painted "quite a lot, almost all day long," she wrote her mother. She wanted to have an exhibition in San Francisco and worked hard to create enough paintings for one. From the beginning of their relationship, said Stahr, they related to each other as painters and things didn't change in San Francisco.

WOMEN ARTISTS

Frida in San Francisco
(Imogen Cunningham)

Rivera and Kahlo hung out with artists, rubbing shoulders with prominent writers and photographers. Kahlo met and bonded with Dorothea Lange shortly before her Depression era photographic journey through America. Meeting women artists was an additional benefit to Kahlo on their west coast sojourn. These friendships became a great source of strength. She made art weekly with two women from the co-op where they painted wildly inappropriate things, swore, smoked, and laughed. For Kahlo, this was a time of creative freedom allowing her to delve into taboo topics, helping her to find her own voice. San Francisco's MOMA stated "Her style moved from a broad, mural-like handling to a folkloric mode based on 19th century Mexican portraiture."

In that era, women had to take advantage of any opportunity that came their way. Soon Frida's experimentation would pay off. Though women were banned from the Bohemian Club where male artists gathered, they formed the San Francisco Society of Women Artists with organized exhibits at the Legion of Honor. Though not a member, Frida benefited. Her American art debut took place at one of the society's annual exhibitions and in it, she displayed her marriage portrait.

A PHYSICIAN WITH HEART

"Frieda" and Diego Rivera (Marriage Portrait)

During their time in the city which included long meandering walks, late nights, and hours of painting, her leg began to ache more and more. At this time she met Dr. Leo Eloesser, who from day one would become a stabilizing force in her life. He gave her thorough examinations and recommendations that proved beneficial to her physical and mental well being. The doctor clicked not only with Kahlo but with Rivera as well and their friendship was lifelong. Frida said he had the heart of a musician, which he was. With a medical practice by day, he played viola at night. He also spoke fluent Spanish making communication easy. 

Frida's most profound experiences on the west coast would occur north of the city. When neighbor and sculptor Ralph Stackpole and his girlfriend Ginette whisked the two away to Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, 70 miles north, she was in awe. Though off limits to women, Stackpole would have been able to get Frida in as a guest. She wrote her mother that she felt reverence when she stepped onto the grounds, in the presence of thousand year old sequoia redwoods.

Frida and Diego at Luther Burbank's Gardens

LUTHER BURBANK'S INFLUENCE

Shortly after that adventure, Stackpole and Ginette took them to Luther Burbank's house in Santa Rosa. Though the horticulturist had been dead four years, his widow Elizabeth discussed at length her husband's legacy. Burbank had created more than eight hundred varieties of hybrid fruits; he had been inspired by Charles Darwin, writing, "Nature selected by a law the survival of the fittest...the fitness of the plant to stand up under a new or changed environment."

Luther Burbank by Frida Kahlo

They walked his gardens to feel his presence. The grounds were "magical," Frida said. Already an avid admirer of alchemy, "Luther must have seemed an alchemist, transforming existing varieties of plants into new ones," wrote Stahr. Back in her studio, Kahlo's mind went to work painting Burbank. Her 1931 Portrait of Luther Burbank shows him partly as soil and partly human, a major departure from any of her paintings up to that time. Many art scholars consider this work to be her creative breakthrough.

PERFECT STORM

Scholars also say that by living in a foreign country as she was beginning to define her artistic path, she was being exposed to a kaleidoscope of new sights, experiences, artists, and ideas. Her encounters at the Bohemian Grove's ancient redwoods and viewing Luther Burbank's gardens had a profound affect on her, along with the weekly creative experimentations she enjoyed with her women artist friends. Though her art drew upon a vast body of knowledge rooted in her Mexican upbringing, she synthesized it with new experiences she'd gained in California. It was the perfect storm for a creative-inventive-intuitive like Kahlo. Not only did San Francisco have the right stuff, but so did Frida Kahlo. 

Part 2 of Frida in America explores the next step in their U.S. journey as she and Rivera head to New York and Detroit.

*Frida lived in Mexico which is North America. The author Stahr's Frida in America refers to the United States of America.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my other works, Where the Sky is Born: Living in the Land of the Maya. It's available on Amazon with tales of expat life and living within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites. Also, check out my website at www.jeaninekitchel.com. Books one and two in my Mexico cartel trilogy, Wheels Up—A Novel of Drugs, Cartels and Survival, and Tulum Takedown, are available on Amazon where you can find my overview of the 2012 Maya calendar phenomenon, Maya 2012 Revealed—Demystifying the Prophecy.