Among the notable Teachers College alumni, there are some names you’ve heard many times before. For anyone who isn’t a scholar of international education or an expert on 20th-century Mexican history, Elena Torres Cuéllar (MA ‘1926) probably isn’t one of them.

After studying under Mabel Carney, a rural education specialist at the College – a pioneer in her own right – Torres Cuéllar returned to Mexico, where she will continue her career in education, advocacy and public service amid changes post-revolutionaries in the national identity and structure of the country.

Here are eight things you might not have known about Torres Cuéllar, who researchers consider a notable force in the history of education in Mexico.

1. She co-founded and directed the school breakfast service in Mexico in 1921.which welcomed approximately 12,000 students per day by its second year. “At that time, studies in biology and chemistry, such as those of the chemist Roberto Medellín, drew the attention of educators to the effects of nutrition on children’s academic performance,” writes Marco Calderón in his article on Torres Cuéllar published in a special issue of 2022. question of Teachers’ College file.

What made the program innovative for the time, in the words of Louise Schoenhals in Spanish-American Historical Review“was a recognition of the government’s obligation not only to educate the children of the lower classes, but also to relieve their physical suffering.” A version of the program still exists today in Mexico.

2. While working for the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, before joining TC, Torres Cuéllar would develop ideas around rural education which she would continue to work on at TC and throughout her career. Through cultural missions, groups of teachers and social workers sent to indigenous regions, Torres Cuéllar imagined a way to provide learning opportunities through food, culture, mindfulness and much more, to help support the development of rural communities. Torres Cuéllar would run these operations on a trial basis for less than a year before parting ways with the education office, then returning to collaborate on the project with fellow TC alumni Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez on the project beginning in 1926. Soon after, she served as its director for six months. Although Mexican authorities continue Torres Cuéllar’s work, she “has not received sufficient credit in official history,” notes Calderón, who considers her contribution essential to this effort, which continues to influence education rural.

3. Supported by a grant from the World Peace Foundation, Torres Cuéllar studied rural education while attending Teachers College. under the direction of Mabel Carney. The two stayed in touch for decades, with Carney and a group of TC students even traveling to Mexico to visit his former student in 1935, according to Carney’s own papers.

4. She was a politically active feministand participated in international suffragette activities after the United States ratified the 19th Amendment, like many other Latin American women studying at TC at that time. In Mexico, Torres Cuéllar helped found the Mexican Feminist Council, created the Mexican section of the Pan-American League for the Advancement of Women, and organized the first women’s congress in Mexico in 1923.

5. Torres Cuéllar believed that education was essential in Mexicothe political and economic stability of the country. A self-described socialist, Torres Cuéllar fled her position in the Mexican government in 1926 for fear of being assassinated for her pro-union beliefs.

6. During this period, Torres Cuéllar was employed as a social worker in St. Louis, Missouri.for two years before returning to Mexico in 1929, when she went to work assessing the challenges of their rural schools and advanced the implementation of the home economics curriculum, which she saw as essential to rural life for all students. She also conducted research on these topics until 1940.

7. In 1945, Torres Cuéllar participated in a commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is dedicated to helping promote educational equity in the post-World War II landscape. Their work would result in part in the creation of an organization that remains at the heart of rural education today, now known as the Center for Regional Cooperation for Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (or CREFAL, the Centro Regional de Educación Fundamental para la América Latina).

8. She died at age 77, in Mexico City, on October 13, 1970.just six years after the publication of his autobiography, Fragments. Despite greater recognition in recent years, scholars like Calderón have called for additional research to further illuminate the complexities and contributions of his research to the Mexican educational landscape.

Additional research support and fact-checking provided by Marco Calderón and Amanda Earl.