The writer Mercedes Pinto, a native of San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife, 1883), is the daughter of the renowned writer Francisco María Pinto and from a very young age she was known in the literary environment of the Island for her creative skills and the early publication of her poems. in the island press. In the 1920s she arrived in Madrid and made friends with personalities such as Ortega y Gasset and Carmen de Burgos, among others. She collaborates in prestigious Spanish newspapers and magazines and publishes her first book of verses: Brisas del Teide.
There he will also dictate his controversial conference, Divorce as a hygienic measure, the direct reason for his exile under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
In 1924, Mercedes went to Uruguay, where she would experience success and where she began a brilliant and diversified career. In 1926 she published her best-known work El, later made into a film by Luis Buñuel.
In 1930, he published one of his most recognized dramatic works, Un Señor… Anybody. A year later he published his collection of poems, Cantos de many ports in 1931.
“The smell resides in the very essence of the soul, permeates everything in a pertinacious way and has the ability to open the doors of the unconscious, from which the most pleasant and the most painful scenes sneak in,” wrote the journalist, speaker, lecturer, pedagogue, writer, founder of her own theater company and actress.
Her literary work, as well as her intense cultural outreach work (she founded the Student House and the Theater Writers Association in Montevideo) and her work for education, freedoms and rights (she was a recognized feminist leader, participated in the design of modern educational plans and defended the rights of women, workers, children and Jews) will be developed in different Latin American countries such as Uruguay, Chile, Cuba and Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1976.
In 1953 he returned to the Canary Islands to participate in a cycle on Contemporary Art at the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He also lived for some seasons in Madrid.
The Government of the Canary Islands held a film series on Mercedes Pinto in May 2009, an initiative framed within the Day of Canary Letters, which took place in the Public Libraries of the State of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The films He, by Buñuel; The Corpse Collector, by Santos Alcocer; Days of old color, by Pedro Olea; and Elle, by Valeria Sarmiento.
