Prudencia Ayala
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Prudencia Ayala | |
|---|---|
 Ayala in 1920 | |
| Born | 28 April 1885 Sonzacate, El Salvador |
| Died | 11 July 1936 (aged 51) San Salvador, El Salvador |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, social activist |
Prudencia Ayala (28 April 1885 – 11 July 1936) was a Salvadoran writer, social activist, and pioneer campaigner for women's rights in El Salvador, as well as the first woman to run for president in El Salvador and Latin America.
Prudencia Ayala was born on 28 April 1885, to a working-class Indigenous family in Sonzacate. Her parents were Aurelia Ayala and Vicente Chief. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Santa Ana City, where she attended María Luisa de Cristofine's elementary school.[1] Despite never finishing her studies due to the lack of resources of her family,[2] she progressed through self-teaching.
She learned to sew and worked as a seamstress along with her future activities. She assured she had the capacity of predicting the future through messages she received from "mysterious voices". This allowed her to gain some relevance among her close relatives, making her gain fame and recognition despite the unlikely truth of her predictions. This statement also provoked criticism and mockery from some social groups.
Her predictions were published in Santa Ana's newspapers, where she's referred to as "la sibila santaneca". In 1914, she predicted the fall of Germany's Kaiser and the involvement of the United States in the war. From then on, her name would take relevance because of her feminist approaches and her esoteric character.
Social activism
From 1913 she began to publish opinion pieces in Diary of the West, when she traveled to the west region of El Salvador. She was active in movements of anti-imperialism, feminism, and Central American reunification. She protested the United States' invasion in Nicaragua. She also published poems in many newspapers in El Salvador.
In 1919 she was put in jail for the criticism in one of her columns, the mayor of Atiquizaya and also, in Guatemala, she was put in jail for many months for accusations of collaborating with the planning of coup of state. In 1921 she published her book Escrible. Adventures of a trip to Guatemala, in which she narrated her trip to Guatemala during the last months under the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera. In addition she published the books Immortal, Amores de Loca (1925) y Fumada Mota (1928). During the final of the 1920s, she funded and ran the newspaper Rendencion Femenina, where she expressed her stance on the fight of women's rights.[3]
