Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska. New York. 1986. Pantheon Books. Translated From The Spanish By Katherine Silver. 90 pages. Jacket airbrushing by Craig DeCamps. Jacket design by Louise Fili. 0394553837. May 1986. Originally published in Spanish as Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, 1978 - Ediciones Era, S. A.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   From one of Latin America’s foremost women writers comes an exquisitely sad and beautiful story of passion, unrequited love, and a lost artistic life. It is 1921 in a bleak, Bohemian Paris, and Angelina Beloff, a romantic young Russian exile and painter, writes words of love and pain to Diego Rivera, her companion of ten years who has returned to Mexico without her. Sent across the ocean from the Old World to the New and never answered, her letters become a kind of monologue, a vehicle through which she explores herself as an artist and a woman alone on the threshold of a new era - perhaps our own - when the old forms are no longer viable and the current ones have not yet taken shape. Angelina does not shirk from her passions for Diego, his art, and her own. And as she becomes more thoroughly convinced that his silence is impenetrable, that she has nothing to lose, she begins to give expression to the anger, disappointment, and then renewed strength that follow unanswered devotion.  

Elena Poniatowski (born May 19, 1932) is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled 'Massacre in Mexico') about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be “Mexico's grande dame of letters” and is still an active writer.