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.
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 1923, after the Mexican Revolution, she came to Mexico City, where she and her younger sister Gloria (baptized as Soledad Campobello Luna) studied dance.
[3] 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.
She was a classmate of the Costa sisters (Adela, Amelia, and Linda), Lettie Carroll, Carmen Galé, Madame Sanislava Potapovich, and Carol Adamchevsky.
[citation needed] It was also reprised for President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1935 at the Estadio Nacional de México to commemorate the Día del Soldado (Veterans' Day).
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.
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”.
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.
Each one is made up of short stories or episodes about characters of Parral and of Villa Ocampo, told from the point of view of Nellie as a young girl.
It is said to be a feminist version of the Revolution, because it is narrated within private spaces, from the house of the author and from the neighborhoods of the Segunda de Rayo street in Parral.
[5] She was one of the few women involved in the center of Mexico's intellectual groups and was also great friends with Federico García Lorca and Langston Hughes, who translated her poetry into English.
Her novel Cartucho is considered a classic literary work of the Mexican Revolution, showing the Villistas in a favorable light at a time when most of the literature was criminalizing them.
[7] In 1998, the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District [es] ruled that Nellie had died on July 9, 1986, and that she was buried in an unnamed grave in a cemetery in Progreso de Obregón, Hidalgo.