“Stylistically, Marjorie Becker has developed a truly fabulous way of simultaneously weaving and unraveling narratives so that time braids with and upon itself, and her meditations on the past become also, therefore, meditations on the present. Marjorie Becker’s poetic lines are like strings of silver web thrown out into the world until a full tapestry is spun that is so delicate and so dense that we are able to see within its shimmerings, its mirror, our own reflections alongside those multiple images of the speaker herself.”
—David St. John
Marjorie Becker is author of the historical monograph, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution. A fifth-generation Macon, Georgia Jewish native, she was trained in Spanish beginning in childhood. She studied in Spain and served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay. As a professional journalist, she wrote about race relations in the Deep South. A Yale-trained historian of Latin American cultural history, much of her historical writing focuses on the Mexican revolution, Frida Kahlo, the power of dance, the worlds of longing. She is an associate professor of Latin American History at the University of Southern California. She lives in Santa Monica.
