Mercedes Pinto

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Architecture · Subcategory: Squares, streets & markets · Year: 1883-1976

In the upper part of the Ofra neighbourhood, we find a street named after one of the most interesting figures that, from a cultural and social point of view, the Canary Islands have produced: Mercedes Pinto.

María de las Mercedes Josefa Francisca del Pilar Pinto Armas de la Rosa y Clós (La Laguna, 1883 – Mexico City, 1976) was born into a well-off family from Tenerife. She stood out from a very young age for her creative and artistic talents. She was awarded various literary prizes as a teenager, publishing her work in local newspapers.

In 1909 she married a lawyer who, like her, belonged to the highest class of island society. The marriage would deeply mark the rest of her personal and artistic life. After separating from her husband, a scandalous event at the time in society, Mercedes moved to Madrid at the beginning of the 1920s, where she mingled with the most active intellectual circles of the moment. She collaborated then with national magazines and newspapers and published her first poetry collection Brisas del Teide in 1924. But, without doubt, it was her lecture at the Central University of Madrid given in November 1923 entitled El divorcio como medida higiénica (Divorce as a hygienic measure) that shaped her life path, since the innovative ideas she defended and the controversy they generated led her into exile during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.

In 1924 she arrived in Uruguay where she worked as a journalist, speaker, lecturer, educator, writer and founder of her own avant-garde theatre company. In Montevideo she founded the famous «Casa del Estudiante» (Student House), from where she freely spread culture among all social classes of the city. She vigorously defended women and the disadvantaged in general. In 1926 she published her best-known work Él , in which she narrates her unhappy life alongside her first husband and the family and social isolation she suffered as a victim due to the strong social impositions of the time that forced her to resign herself as the only way out of her painful situation. This magnificent novel was later adapted into a film by Luis Buñuel.

During the 1930s Mercedes Pinto travelled through various countries in Latin America (Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Cuba). From this period stands out her work Ella of 1934 and an extensive collection of articles and journalistic collaborations grouped under the title Ventanas de colores (Coloured Windows). 

In 1943, after the death of her second husband, Rubén Rojo, she settled permanently in Mexico. In 1953, about to turn seventy, she returned to Santa Cruz de Tenerife invited by the Círculo de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Circle) to participate in a cycle on Contemporary Art.

Mercedes Pinto died on 21 October 1976 in Mexico at the age of ninety-three after an intense life of constant struggle in her social commitment expressed in her varied literary production. She was ahead of her time, a defender of women and of the role they must play as active subjects in society.

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