Let me first tell you that I have a hardcopy of this book (for posterity) and a paperback (for late night, bed-reading abuse). This book, which I found while browsing in my local library, is by far the most powerful book I have ever read. Now, that may sound so typical of reviews.."5 stars..really great!" and all of that. The depth of this book goes far beyond that of any "ratings" guide.

OK, now for the content. Women, we will certainly identify with this book more than our male counterparts. Not because this is a "woman's book" which it is not. I always thought that was an ignorant term to begin with, but because most of the characters (both antagonist and protagonist) are female. This book deals with very strong themes of erotic love, evil, loss of innocence, and religious hypocrisy. All of that may sound 'juicy' but Arredondo has a way with words. Her writing is halfway between poetic prose and contains an eloquency beyond anything I have ever read in my short, yet hopefully long and fufilling life. Worth every penny.

As a lover of poetry and literature, I have found this book to be at the very pinnacle of both. The first time that you read this book, you are going to be overwelmed. Different than other books that paint imagery and scenery into your mind, Ms. Arrondondo brings to us a world of experience and emotion that lies dormant until awakened. We then realize--these passions live in all of us.

La Sunamita, es un análisis profundo de las relaciones familiares tradiconales en México, combinado con la influencia religiosa de "lo que debe de ser", a costa de la dignidad humana. La protagonista termina con sentimientos de culpa, con su soberbia desecha y con el rencor perpetuo a la vida que la obligó a perder su pureza. Mariana enfrenta al lector con la "anormalidad" de la pasión-locura, y con todos los prejuicios de una sociedad provinciana, que nunca entiende a la protagonista por ser "diferente" de los demás. La Señal es quizás el mejor cuento que jamás escribió Inés. La señal de la humillación, en un episodio religioso, es genial. Año Nuevo es una de las joyas literarias, que en seis líneas narra toda la historia de una mujer que sufre. Río Subterráneo trata también de la locura como la "anormalidad" de un ser, y la fatalidad de enloquecer para entender a la locura. Las Palabras Silenciosas es un cuento en el que se resumen los problemas de incomunicación entre dos culturas muy alejadas entre sí, y la importancia de la palabra en esta comunicación. Orfandad es un cuento también dedicado a la incomunicación, a través de una anécdota espeluznante. Las Mariposas Nocturnas refleja, con singular maestría, no sólo las costumbres de una época, sino los problemas íntimos de la homosexualidad (Don Hernán)y de los valores de la satisfacción artística (Lía). Dos cuentos preciosos (Los Hermanos y De Amores), precisamente sobre el amor en su máxima expresión. Los Espejos, (el último cuento que escribió) es un retrato de familia llevado a sus últimas consecuencias literarias, proustianas, de una ternura inmensa, y, creo, es una joya del romanticismo. Por último, Sombra entre Sombras, es un verdadero ensayo sobre la pureza y la concupicencia, analizándolas desde varios puntos de vista, pero que tienen un fundamento único, que es el amor (otra vez) llevado a sus últimas consecuencias. Hay otros cuentos traducidos al inglés, en diversas revistas universitarias, que! es muy recomendable buscar, para disfrutar de la obra completa de esta escritora singular en las letras latinoamericanas. Gracias por leerla.

Superb black and white photographs by a premier photographer, displaying the lives of ordinary people and the native customs of various parts of Mexico. A real bargain at the price.

This book contains some of the most extraordinary photographs taken in Mexico. The camera travels through the country capturing images of people, their art, and their environment.

This cookbook is more than a cookbook! I've been working on a historical novel about Mexico circa 1850 and of several cookbooks I've purchased, found this one to be far and away the best history book. The recipes are proceeded with whole chapters which outline the education of women in Mexico in the 19th century, what cooking was like in the convents, on farms, and lots of other detailed information- even with old photos, letters and newspaper clippings. I recommend this book highly, not only as a cookbook but as a delightful read!

This is an amazing book because it makes a real combination of Mexican traditional tastes with the mexican history

Hasta no Verte Jesus Mio, es la historia contada por una mujer comun y corriente. Elena Ponietowski hace un trabajo excelente con la literatura testimonial dando a conocer la historia de Mexico. Jesusa Palancares ,la protagonista, es una mujer tipica mexicana en en un mundo donde el machismo sobresale y en otros aspectos, ella es feminista, con gracia y mucho humor. This novel is a most. It is not an easy novel to read because uses typical mexican words, and slang but you will enter to a world most of us are not too aware of it.

The pictures are gorgeous and I liked Elena Ponitowskas essay in the book so much that I translated it into Swedish (my mother tongue), and now I'm illustrating it!

ok, it's such a cliché, but frida kahlo herself is as fascinating as her art, and here are the pics to prove it. if it's out of pirnt, well, it's a good chance to take the trip to mexico and buy it, really worth it.

Here's to You Jesusa is an excellent book with a story of bravery, history, despair, adventure, survival - everything except love and that is what made it such a sad story. The
author did an excellent job of creating a real person with very human faults and weaknesses, but also incredible strengh. It
was a story and a character that I kept thinking of long after I had finished reading the book. I highly recommend it.

Jesusa is a soldadera, a woman soldier, in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. She describes her experiences in life
from childhood to old age-- the choices she made and the problems she had-- the effects of chance and fate.

She is the wild woman who drinks in bars, the suffering laborer and servant. She is a spiritualist right under the nose of the Virgin. She occupies a Mexico few tourists have ever seen, a terrain of wonder and terror and the shocks and blows of the unexpected events that make up her life.

If you enjoy beautiful photography for its own sake, this book is gorgeous; but if you want to see photographs of Mexican houses, interiors and folkcrafts, save your money. A big disappointment.

Oh, this book was fun to look at. Looking at the ever so daring colored homes brings a sence of jealousy..Why can't I do that :-)but this book is for entertaining, not for educating. It has lovely photos, great colors of bulidings and walls. Text does accompany the photos mind you, if gives you a brief background to the style, but When you are going to paint your porch orange, and your stairs blue, and your walls exterior fushia, do you need an explaination?? Have some fun!

"Mexico, a resting place for the rainbow" writes essayist Elena Poniatowska in this book centered on the subject of color. What makes the wonderful photographs by Amanda Holmes special and interesting is her way of seeing through the camera lens...in close-ups and unique angles. Categorized into themes, chapter # 1 is "The New World", with the fabulous wall paintings at Cacaxtla and Teotihuacan. # 2: "People of the Sun" focuses on some beautiful churches, as well as a few walls and doors. # 3: "A Sky Blue Balcony", has close-ups of brilliantly hued walls, balconies and building details. # 4: "The Brown Madonna", has everything from church niches to marketplace candies and more muli-colored walls. # 5: "The Space of Light", on modern Mexican architecture, and the colors that bring so much warmth to its clean, stark lines...with some of my favorite combinations, like apple green and bright pink...and that deep yellow that contrasts so well with the blues and aquas.

The essays that are with these photographs are interesting and strangely poetic. At first I found the writing somewhat peculiar, then realized it's translated from the Spanish (by Aurora Camacho de Schmidt) in an almost literal manner...but once you get into the rhythm of it, is excellent.

This hardback edition seems bigger than 160 pages because of its weight, with good quality thick pages, it's a sturdy volume. This book is much more about color than it is about Mexico, and for those of us who love color, it's a satisfying volume.

Elena Poniatowska is a fervent, eloquent, and important writer in Spanish about the plight of the disenfranchised. In "Tinisima," Poniatowska uses 1,000 pages of interviews, collected over 16 years, to imagine dialogue and interior monologues and from them to create a portrait of Tina Modotti and her times.

Modotti was Edward Weston's most beautiful model. For a few years in the late 1920s, until she lost her nerve (or maybe her artistic sensibility), she was herself a photographer of note. Later she labored in the vineyard of the Communist revolution, first in Moscow and later in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Yet if Modotti -- if, indeed, anyone -- is a fitting subject for an imagined biography, it is not because she was a larger-than-life character. As Poniatowska tells it, throughout her brief 45 years Modotti, the daughter of poor immigrants to Northern California from Northern Italy's poorest region, held unwaveringly to anarcho-syndicalist views, empathized with the poor and the victims of war, and searched for love in all the wrong places. So far, nothing exceptional. What makes her life interesting, of course, was her involvement, albeit at the edges, of sea changes in photography and painting, politics, totalitarianism, and war.

The writing style veers from accomplished dialogue to flat narrative, with little insight to the characters' motivation, to magic views of the cosmos, to cinematic stream of consciousness, as during Tina's death scene. This is a decent vacation read, full of local color, but you may come away from "Tinisima" wondering what justifies the superlative in the title.

Elena Poniatowska loved Tina Modotti with a supernatural passion. Despite that she was able to write a panoramic epic with historical accuracy and scope that is breathtaking. I have read everything written about Tina Modotti that is available without special library or collection access, and this is clearly one of the best references.
But it is dangerous. There is a rapture here that might exceed the small frame of the tormented subject. Perhaps the almost religious raptures with which Poniatowska paints the prose story are better suited for hagiography than the life of a mere mortal.
For me, the aching emptiness in the middle of Tina's life is precisely mortal. She was a pilgrem on a very earthbound path, who had lost sight of any supernatural calling early in her childhood, if in fact it ever was a motive. Tina took care of everyone, and still managed to be brilliantly selfish. She found a place for every ambition and passion she felt, except for the desire for a family of her own.
It is difficult to tell her story right now. The true extent of Stalin's monstrosity has been overshadowed for fifty years by Hitler and the holocaust. It is only within the last few years that the enormity of betrayal underlying the outcome of the Spanish Civil War has begun to be understood and discussed in fair proportion. In the context of over-politicizing the external circumstances of women in the century, and the failure to understand Stalinism, the true story of Modotti can barely be heard above the clamor of militant mythologies.
Even if Poniatowska errors on the side of a romantic, impossibly representative 20th century woman at the expense of the true, earth bound person, it is worth the trouble trying to keep things in perspective. This is wonderful writing, and wonderful writing always threatens to obscure its subject. Caveat Lector, but if you have any interest in any aspect of this story, read the book.

Before reading this novel, what I knew of Tina Modotti came from a single Edward Weston photograph. A beautiful woman with penetrating eyes.

Once I began to read "TINISIMA", I became utterly captivated with the life of Tina Modotti. Elena Poniatowska has a way of making the narrative read as if Tina Modotti herself were relating various happenings from her life to the reader, while the author adds her own commentaries as a supplement.

The more I read of this novel, the more I found myself curious about this woman and her life. It got to the point that I could hardly tear myself away from finishing this novel, though it pained me to see how Miss Modotti was manipulated and abused both by some of her friends/compatriots and the Stalinist system she once served so faithfully. I believe it was a mistaken faith, but I respect Miss Modotti for the courage of her convictions. She had good intentions, a big heart, but was prone to blind herself to the evils of Stalinism. Therein lies the ultimate tragedy of her life.

Tina Modotti could have gone on to become one of the greatest photographers of the last century had she not threw herself wholly into Marxist/Stalinist politics. Perhaps it is for that reason that she is not widely known today.

I wish I could have known Tina Modotti. I would have loved to have had lots of conversations with her in some café or small restaurant. While I'm sure we would not agree on a number of issues, I like to think we would have become close friends.

Thank you, Elena Poniatowska, for a beautiful book.

This book has incredible stories that have hidden meaning in them. The stories are fun to read and very engaging. The stories are humorous if read just for leisure.On the other hand, for a serious literature student or person, the stories have a lot to offer when critically analysed. They talk about women and how they fit in the society. Overall, I think Beyond the Border is a great book and people should definately ready it.

I am a student at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. We were required to read a few of the short stories that make up the novel Beyond the Border edited by Nora Erro-Peralta and Caridad Silva. This novel made up of series of short stories by women writers of Latin America. Beyond the Border was one of the chosen readings for our class because we are studying about the history of women and how things have changed for them in Latin America. Before each story, a brief bibliography is given of the author, which helps give insight as to where the writer is coming from. It is also helpful in the fact that it gives specific details about the culture that you are going to read about. This is helpful for those of us who may not know a lot about other cultures so we can see into other's lives. Each short story is a twisted web of events that all incorporates the lives of females in Latin America. Stories come to us from Peru, the Dominican Republic, and many other countries, all showing uniqueness in their individual stories. To read this book, you have to be open-minded and adopt a new way of reading books. Many of the stories have several stories found within them, and as a class, many had difficulty with complexity of the stories. Although I have yet to read all the stories found in Beyond the Border I feel that this is a book that I will hold onto.

Beyond the Border, a collection of short stories by number of Latin American women authors, is an excellent source of hints to the culture of Latin America. I was very fortunate to read a number of short stories from this book for my Women's Culture from Latin America class at ISU in Normal, IL. After some time of study of Latin America's culture, I was able to get more meaning out of what I read. For example, the short story Mercedes-Benz 220SL, by Rosario Ferre, tells the story that teaches us about the impact of patriarchy and materialism on the family. Ferre uses punctuation, narriation, reoccurring themes, and imagery to paint a picture of the role of men and women in Latin America. Another short story, The Wedding, by Lucia Fox, takes the reader through the thoughts of a friend of the bride, who doesn't seem to be a clueless as everyone else. She points out how her friends fall blindly into typical female roles found in Latin American culture. In this story, Fox uses flashbacks and imagery to leave a lot of room for interpretation. The reader is forced to use their creativity to create their own interpretation. These two stories are just examples of the powerful stories found in the book. I highly recomend Beyond the Border to those both fammiliar and umfammiliar with Latin American culture.

25 years after the Tlatelolco tragedy, Luis González de Alba, then jailed and interviewed in prison by Poniatowska, said she ought to make several amendments to her now-classic book to make it more historically accurate and less militantly oriented. Turns out to be, Poniatowska credited many others for things González de Alba told her in his cell. He thought that was O.K. then for propaganda reasons, but now history demanded a more straightforward approach.

What happened next? Poniatowska resigned her seat in NEXOS magazine -where González de Alba writes- and threatened to do the same thing to La Jornada, Mexico City's main leftist paper, unless they sacked him on the spot, which they promptly did.

So, all that talk about freedom and liberty and tolerance and stuff you read in the book has to be taken with a big grain of salt, since it seems the author can't even take one single comment, not to mention a critic!

Elena Poniatowska re-creates and recollects in this book the events leading up to, during, and after the massacre of civilians in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City, in October 1968. Divided into three parts, Poniatowska's book provides a fascinating insight into the general mood in Mexico City at the time. The author conducts a range of interviews with the students involved in the demonstrations and with their families and friends both before and after the event. Their voices are heard in the form of stories which tell the tale of Tlatelolco. Doctors, nurses, residents of the Plaza where the killing took place, servicemen and soldiers, all bear witness to an event which has up until recently, been obscured in Mexican history books. A compelling read.

This book is incredibly moving. Because it's a compilation of quotations from various participants and observers it takes on the quality of a film or poetry. The reader is not scarred by the writer's bias. The book puts forth a collective emotion that comes directly from those interviewed. As to the truth of the facts, I don't know, perceptions vary, but I highly recommend this book.