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 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.

Her folk choreographic work includes Cinco pasos de danza o danza ritual, Danza de los malinches, El coconito, Bailes istmeños, Ballet tarahumara, and Danza de los concheros. With the Mexico City Ballet, she choreographed Fuensanta, Obertura republicana, Ixtepec, El sombrero de tres picos, Vespertina, Umbral, Alameda 1900, Circo Orrín, La feria, and many others.

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.

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.

Campobello was born María Francisca Moya Luna in Villa Ocampo, Durango, to Jesús Felipe Moya Luna and Rafaela Luna.

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.

In 1923, she started her career as a ballerina, together with her sister Gloria, in Mexico City.

She was a classmate of the Costa sisters (Adela, Amelia, and Linda), Lettie Carroll, Carmen Galé, Madame Sanislava Potapovich, and Carol Adamchevsky.

To commemorate the start of the Mexican Revolution, the Mexican government commissioned a choreographed dance that would represent the armed movement and its previous successes (public education, peace, etc.).

In 1928, Campobello published her first book of poetry under the name Francisca (her birth name).

Entitled Yo, the book was edited by LIDAN, Gerardo Murillo's editorial.

Yo is composed of five poems, considered by Doris Meyer (a North American literary critic) as “necessary precursors in the formation of the spirit of social critique”.

Irene Matthews described them as “[...] verses whose rhythms are at once childish and dance-like.

Much of the poetry “dances” rhythmically”.

Alongside poetry Campobello wrote during her time in Havana as a ballerina, some of the poems from Yo were published in the Cuban magazine Revista de La Habana.

This collection was titled “Ocho poemas de mujer” (Eight poems of womanhood).

“Ocho poemas de mujer” was also published under her birth name.

Some of these poems were translated into English by Langston Hughes in his anthology of Dudley Pitts.

In November 1931, Campobello presented the Ballet de masas 30-30 (Ballet of the Masses 30-30) in the Estadio Nacional de México.

This included student performers from the Escuela Plástica Dinámica (today known as the Escuela Nacional de Danza Nellie y Gloria Campobello) and elementary school students (who symbolized the common people).

Nellie, dressed in red, representing the Revolution.

The Ballet de masas 30-30 would later go on to travel throughout the country as part of Las Misiones Culturales (Cultural Missions).

In 1931, she published her most well-known novel, Cartucho, relatos de la lucha en el norte de México, financed by Germán List Arzubide.

Campobello described her motivation to write Cartucho as one of “avenging an injury”.

After the end of the armed movement, some revolutionaries were tried against the group in power, including Francisco Villa, a childhood hero of Campobello.

She continued to write about this fight in her work Apuntes sobre la vida militar de Francisco Villa.

Cartucho was narrated in three sections: “Men of the North”, “The Executed”, and “Under Fire”.

It was also reprised for President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1935 at the Estadio Nacional de México to commemorate the Día del Soldado (Veterans' Day).

She was later (from 1937) director of the national school of dance at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.

In 1937 Campobello was designated the director of the Escuela Nacional de Danza (National School of Dance), a role which she occupied until 1984.

Several famous Mexican dancers and choreographists have egressed of the school as Amalia Hernández.

Together with Martín Luis Guzmán and José Clemente, she founded the Mexico City Ballet, which she presented in the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in collaboration with artists such as Carlos Chávez, Julio Castellanos, Carlos Orozco Romero, and Romero Montenegro.

In addition to the Ballet de masas 30-30, her body of dance work includes La virgen de las fieras, Barricada, Clarín, Binigüendas de plata, and Tierra.

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.