4 reasons to fall in love with Frida Kahlo.

Do you ever wonder why do we love her? I do, almost every time that I watch a picture of her and notice something particular and mysterious about her face, her beautiful hair and all the cultural legacy that she carried in her back. 

To explain my love I could enumerate one hundred millions of reasons, but one of the biggest is the fact that she was a passionate woman, and that is the way we all should live our lives.

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón was a Mexican artist from the early 20th century. Her legacy comes to us through her portraits, her paintings and her beautiful ideas throughout her years. Yes, she had a hard life, but also she had an extraordinary way to live the love, one of the most inspiring emotions in her life.

Do you want to know 4 reasons to love her even more?

1. She was intense: Her feelings were the main source of inspiration (just as we should inspire our lives too right?). Her first portrait in the 1926, was also her first “serious” step into the painting as a tool to express her emotions, then she became unstoppable. Her first marriage with Diego Rivera was the top and the also the heart of the new Frida, a woman much more confident but unfortunately (as many of us) with a big sorrow that she always reflected in her art, she couldn’t gave birth any children.

2) She exposed her emotions with no shame: She claimed “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best” and is easy to understand her emotions through her words, as clear as we can see her colored flowers over her hair. Further she said about her art “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality”. Analyzing this, we can see how she showed her real feelings, no caring how openly exposed she would be to the world’s eyes.

3) A woman with an opinion: She was constantly involved with the political scene of her country. Mexico was living serious changes, and she decided to join the process as an activist. Besides that, she also had some famous friends like the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso among many others that obviously were the coolest people of her period.

4) Her legacy: Nowadays thanks to Frida and her devises, Mexican women and also people from all over the world can be delighted with all the treasures that she left us, treasures that were more than only colored painting. For example if you go to México you can find “La casa azul” located in Ciudad de México, the house where she lived all her life and later became a museum.

Today we can found her in almost everywhere, and of course we are all blessed to have a part of her inspiration inside of us. She is such the icon that personally I want to recreate everyday, and maybe someday to cooperate with our cultural world as much as she did too. I like to think that we all can have a little bit of  the vivacious Frida inside of us.

By Carla Deppler

Identity

When we ask ourselves about women’s identity, which are the first words that come to our minds? Is our history related with this?

Well, the truth is that we all could have different ideas, and while some people imagine something very traditional, there are also some people thinking about roles, marriage, motherhood, changes or history. And this last word is definitely one of the most powerful words to describe how we are building our lives everyday.

So, how Latin-American's women have been changing over the years? Where is the beginning of our identity?

Through the past two centuries, Latin-American women for example, have experienced a kind of accelerated process. First they were born from a mix between the native and Hispanic culture, and then they grew up going trough different roles. Some of them, the “luckiest” girls were part of the Hispanic descendants, a privileged group in charge of the colonies and kind of “workers of the Hispanic kingdom”. And on the other side were the native women, most of them enslaved and subservient to the Spanish rules.  At that point we could not talk about “Latin-American identity”, because both sides were completely polarized. Moreover Indian women were undergoing a mixing process, when many of them gave birth to children of European men.  Until this new generation was born, no one could have been considered Latin-American.

When “criollos” appeared on the colonial scene, the feelings of a new identity started to emerge, and of course that many women shared it and felt very involved in this new group of people claiming their rights on  these new lands. On this point we need to be very careful, because native people were not considered in many places of Latin America here we are only talking about “mestizos” (racially mixed people).

During that period women assumed new roles, especially inside their families. That is a very important issue, considering that the most part of their lives were committee to them and restricted to private life, and only if we understand their lives inside their families we will catch the feminine essence of that period. No matter if they were rich or poor, their little decision was building who we are today, our great grandmothers, and their great grandmothers were in charge of our destinies and we can’t ignore them.

The women’s identity was a mix of different ingredients, obviously there is the blend of both cultures, and then the lifestyle that they set up inside criollo’s feelings once they felt part of the new continent. After that, and only when those emotions were incorporated to the everyday life and to their hearts, we are able to understand that our identity was not born overnight and that, we are always related to our past. Who we are today began long time ago.

Identity is changing every day, and we are part of it wherever we are.  Therefore, we cannot forget our roots, and of course that we are the owners of our history.

Written by Carla Deppler