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María Antonieta Rivas Mercado was born in a mansion in Mexico City on April 21, 1900, the second daughter of Matilde Cristina Castellanos de Rivas Mercado, an educated, loose-living beauty, and Antonio Rivas Mercado, a professor at the San Carlos Academy and the distinguished architect who at the request of President Porfirio Díaz created the famous El Ángel, the monument to independence, on the Paseo de la Reforma.1 In her early years Antonieta was educated by tutors and governesses and by her parents. By the time she was four she could play classical pieces on the piano, dance well, and read and write in both Spanish and French. When she was ten years old, her mother left the family to live in Paris. By the time Cristina returned to Mexico in 1915, Antonio refused to let her move back into the family residence. Antonieta, who had not seen her mother for five years and already felt abandoned, considered the banishment justified.
Between 1915 and 1917 Antonieta was her father's hostess for social affairs and with his indulgence and encouragement expanded her intellectual and artistic pursuits. Intensely interested in philosophers such as René Descartes and Friedrich Nietzsche and writers such as François Rabelais and Maxim Gorky, she flouted Catholic Church doctrine by reading whatever she wanted. She began to hold salons for other like-minded Mexican intellectuals and aesthetes and scandalized the more conventional people in the city. At an amateur gala at which she danced and sang, she met and fell in love with Albert Blair, a young British-born, American-bred engineer who had been educated at the University of Michigan. With Antonio's grudging permission they married within the year.2
Ten years older than Antonieta, the stocky blond Albert had rigid ideas about the proper role of a wife and none of Antonieta's intellectual or artistic interests. Of Scottish descent, he was firmly Calvinist, while she was Roman Catholic, even if unorthodoxly so. Blair had been drawn into the Mexican Revolution by two of his Michigan classmates, sons of Francisco I. Madero, who overthrew Díaz in 1910, whereas the aristocratic Rivas Mercado family had benefited from the patronage of Díaz and after his removal had suffered at the hands of brutal peasant revolutionaries. At the time...