Nellie Campobello

Nellie (or Nelly) Francisca Ernestina Campobello Luna (November 7, 1900 – July 9, 1986) was a Mexican writer, notable for having written one of the few chronicles of the Mexican Revolution from a woman's perspective: Cartucho, which chronicles her experience as a young girl in Northern Mexico at the height of the struggle between forces loyal to Pancho Villa and those who followed Venustiano Carranza. She moved to Mexico City in 1923, where she spent the rest of her life and associated with many of the most famous Mexican intellectuals and artists of the epoch. Like her half-sister Gloria, a well-known ballet dancer, she was also known as a dancer and choreographer. She was the director of the Mexican National School of Dance.

Biography

Campobello was born María Francisca Moya Luna in Villa Ocampo, Durango, to Jesús Felipe Moya Luna and Rafaela Luna. She was born in 1900, though she would later sometimes say that she was born in 1909, 1912, or 1913. She spent her childhood in Parral, Chihuahua, and her youth in the city of Chihuahua, where she attended the Inglesa de la Colonia Rosales college. After her father was killed in the Battle of Ojinaga in 1914, her mother remarried the physician Stephen Campbell from Boston, whose last name the children assumed, and which Nellie altered to Campobello. In 1921, her mother died.

In 1923, after the Mexican Revolution, she came to Mexico City, where she and her younger sister Gloria (baptized as Soledad Campobello Luna) studied dance. Under the direction of Nellie, Gloria was considered the Prima Ballerina of Mexico. She was later (from 1937) director of the national school of dance at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. In 1942, along with Gloria, as well as the writer Martín Luis Guzmán and the painter José Clemente Orozco, she founded the Mexico City Ballet.