Kathryn Blair

Kathryn Skidmore Blair never met her husband’s mother. But if ever there has been a dutiful daughter-in-law, she is it.

Admittedly obsessed with her mother-inlaw’s story, she dug the details of Antonieta Rivas Mercado’s life out from the very back of the family closet, and spent over twenty years researching and writing her biography. At a ceremony in Bellas Artes on July 24, Blair watched as President Felipe Calderón called Rivas Mercado a national hero.

Her husband Donald’s family “had not talked about his mother in thirty years when I married him,” says Kathryn, 88. “It was taboo.”

Her book, In the Shadow of the Angel (Grupo Patria Cultural) was published in Spanish in 1995. The title makes reference to Antonieta’s father, who designed the most famous landmark in Mexico City, the Ángel de la Independencia on Reforma. Blair’s book chronicles the early 20th century life of a young woman who founded Mexico City’s symphony orchestra, opened an avant-garde theatre, promoted education through the arts, and was the de rigueur hostess among Mexico’s cultural elite.

She threw her support behind 1929 presidential candidate José Luis Vasconcelos, who was promising the vote to women. A divorced mother, Antonieta put her heart and her bank account on the line for Vasconcelos; he lost the presidency and rejected a romance with her. At 31, she was nearly broke, living in a boarding house in Bordeaux with son Donald, when she carried Vasconcelos’s pistol into Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and took her own life.

“[Donald] felt as though I was writing a story about someone he didn’t really know,” says Kathryn, although she “really began to feel that I understood her.”

The lives of subject and author converge at points, though there is a sharp departure from the depression and despair that afflicted Antonieta.

Where her mother-in-law saw no way out, Kathryn recounts her life as a series of doors that led her down a path to Don, and to Antonieta. “When I think about the mess I could have made of my life at certain points, something always saved me,” she says.

She was born to American parents in Cuba and grew up in Mexico City. Her mother died when she was six, and her father, a director of the National Type & Paper Company, raised her until she left Mexico to study art history at UCLA .

After the war, Kathryn married and divorced. She was living in New Haven, Connecticut with her son, and had no intention of returning to Mexico: “divorcees didn’t have [their] own place in society.”

But an old friend coaxed her back to Mexico to open an interior decorating business. She met Don and fell for his quiet steadfastness, and they were married within six months. “In these curious, unfathomable, mysterious bits of destiny,” Kathryn says, “I think Don and I were meant to meet for me to write this story.”