Translations:Emma Reyes/4/en

Emma Reyes was born in Bogotá on July 9, 1919. The most relevant events of her childhood are found in her book 20Emma,%20&tab=Colecciones_fisicas&search_scope=LibraryCatalogOnly&vid=57BDLRDC_INST:57BDLRDC_INST&offset=0 Memoria por correspondencia, a series of twenty-three letters addressed to the historian Germán Arciniegas and written between 1969 to 1997, in which he recounts in a detailed and casual way his memories and experiences that most marked the first years of his life. She lived in the San Cristóbal neighborhood in Bogotá in a small room without windows, with her sister Helena and a woman named María, who she acted as her caregiver. In Her Memoirs she says that she never met her parents or any other close relative. Only her sister Helena, older than her, accompanied her in this time characterized by economic hardships, the mistreatment received by Mrs. María and by the hard trips undertaken to Guateque and Zipaquirá, which would mark, according to her, "the debut of a life that would have as its sign and as its school the inclemency of the hard roads of America and later the fabulous roads of Europe” (Reyes, 2012).