Brenner, Anita (1905–1974)
Brenner, Anita (1905–1974)
Anita Brenner (b. 13 August 1905; d. 1 December 1974), journalist, author, and editor who lived in Mexico. Born of American Jewish parents in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Brenner matured in Mexican, Jewish, and North American cultures. She was a member of the cosmopolitan intellectual community in Mexico City in the 1920s and did key archival research for Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (1928). Her first book, Idols behind Altars (1929), emphasized the Indian component of Mexican art and culture. In the 1930s Brenner worked as a journalist and completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University. She wrote the text to accompany George Leighton's photographs for The Wind that Swept Mexico (1943), an overview of the Mexican Revolution. From 1955 to 1971 she was editor of Mexico This Month, an English-language magazine based in Mexico.
See alsoJournalism in Mexico .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anita Brenner, Idols behind Altars (1929) and The Wind that Swept Mexico (1943). See also Ernest Gruening, Mexico and Its Heritage (1928), esp. pp. 393-493, in which Brenner's research appeared.
Additional Bibliography
Glusker, Susannah Joel. Anita Brenner: A Mind of Her Own. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
John A. Britton