Stuff of Memories; Con Garro y Sin Paz

 La Bloga-Tuesday welcomes Guest Reviewer Rey Rodriguez and a book adding insight to a story of a neglected daughter-famous father, in this case Mexican Nobelist Octavio Paz’ daughter. Today’s lead article celebrates things found in the ruins of the Eaton fire.

 

 

Stuff Not Lost In the Fire: Treasures of Memory

Michael Sedano

 

Stuff that goes through fire and dug from the ashes come back like a scarred phenix, changed in its passage through the crucible into renewed versions of their essential selves, the memories they hold impervious to the firestorm.

 

My father’s strong box held his WWII memorabilia along with Dad’s high school graduation watch, treasures from his courtship of my mother, precious times of his days on this earth. The warped lid rests uncomfortably on the contorted blistered box. 

 

Barbara’s heart collection featured a colorful ceramic corazón that was born in fire and emerges from fire in two pieces, its bright contours coated with an orange oxidation sweated out of the glaze the clay’s second firing. I hesitate to wash away the sweat.

 

A Review: Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop at Beyond Baroque.

 

Rey Rodriguez

 

Iván Salinas continues to curate important events that transcend borders and draw on our Latino past to inform the present.

 

On December 5, 2025, I attended his latest entitled, Con Garro y Sin Paz, presented by Todos Santos Writers Workshop and held at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/). This event was a reading, conversation, and book signing of Marcela Magdalena Deschamps’ latest book, Con Garro y Sin Paz. It is an extraordinary story inspired by the life of Helena Paz Garro, the daughter of the famous Mexican literary couple of Octavio Paz and Elena Garro. 

 

Helena Paz Garro often talked about the distance that she felt from her father following the events of 1968 in Tlatelolco, where soldiers shot down hundreds of students, when she and her mother were accused of orchestrating the student movement. Ultimately, though, Paz Garro forgave him despite his abandonment of her. Elena Garro was considered one of Mexico’s finest writers, but because she was a woman, she did not receive the acclaim she deserved. Paz and Elena Garro were married in 1937. They had one daughter, Helena, and divorced in 1959.

 

It is with this backdrop that Professor Marcela Becerra García, California State University Channel Islands, interviewed Deschamps to discuss her fascinating book, which tells the tale of a forgotten house in Cuernava where Paz Garro lives the last days of her life among feral cats and ghosts of the past. Paz Garro is a complicated character who could not have children because she was raped at the age of three and contracted syphilis. The disease and its treatment ensured that she would never bear children. The rape likely led to a life of deep mental illness, which was largely left untreated. 

 

Nevertheless, Paz Garro was surrounded by books and literature and was extremely well educated in European boarding schools. As a result, her great legacy is her poetry, which Deschamps keeps alive in her novel by including unedited versions of some of her most lyrical verses. 

 

It is important to note that Octavio Paz often did not even mention his daughter’s existence. This absence is notable and makes Deschamps' work even more important than ever to ensure that both Elena Garro and Helena Paz Garro are studied and remembered. Any discussion of Mexican literature and Paz’s legacy is incomplete without a discussion of these two important female writers. Deschamps revives their memory and honors them by writing this extraordinary book that becomes a must-read if we are to truly understand Mexican literature and the unsung role that women played in it.

About Rey Rodriguez: 

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.