Noemí Atamoros, the Sorjuanista of Excelsior

On May 19, 1953, Noemí Atamoros Zeller, a graduate of the Women's University of Mexico, began working in the Society and Various Events section of the newspaper. Excelsior, under the protection of its then director Manuel Becerra Acosta. In March 2006, he signed his last note in this newspaper. The journalist and writer, she died at the age of 91.

At the beginning of her career, Atamoros Zeller was an editorial partner of journalists such as Julio Scherer García, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Cecilia Treviño Bambi. She was born on September 19, 1932 and at a very young age she made the decision, says her daughter Claudia Pérez Atamoros, to change her date of birth to the 13th, which was her lucky number.

Noemí Atamoros projected an indecipherable simplicity through the glass that formed the walls of Section B of Excelsior, where the journalist became a polyglot and writer. She specialized in Sor Juna Inés de la Cruz, long before the Tenth Muse became fashionable.

From that suigéneris editorial office of mechanical typewriters, Remington, Olivetti—a tunnel between Paseo de la Reforma and Bucareli and between the intellectuality and the workforce of journalism before the age of computers—Atamoros strengthened her desire as a promoter of journalism and women's literature and was a pioneer of gender parity, precisely with her scholarship on Sor Juana.

The researcher at the Metropolitan Autonomous University Lilia Granillo Vázquez takes up a reference from Blanca Martínez —with whom Atamoros published the book in 2004 Dialogue between cultures—, who remembers that the reporter from Excelsior She coordinated the first exhibition of women's journalism in 1972, at the Women's University of Mexico. Together with Lilia Báez Macías, Noemí Atamoros formed the magazine Renewal, first made absolutely by women. In March 1975, Atamoros presented her first book, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Mexico City; It is a study of the life of the nun Hieronima and the environment she lived in the country's capital.

On May 29, 1992, on the VLIII anniversary of the Carlos Septién García School of Journalism, Atamoros participated with the presentation The mission of women in today's journalism. “In this profession there is no difference between men and women; only the professionalism they demonstrate in his work,” he said.

A new book by Atamoros Zeller appeared in October 1996, this was New iconography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. As head of information for Section B, Atamoros, a tireless world traveler, was the architect of the change that Scherer García, as director of Excelsior, promoted the treatment of so-called social information, which, in the case of this newspaper, went from the puffy dresses of 15-year-old parties, birthdays and baptisms, to a more cultural treatment, pictorial exhibitions, book presentations, cocktails at embassies. Noemí Atamoros tempered the criticism against the social information by saying that the reader could appreciate the context of the national reality in the writing of those facts. He said – Pérez Atamoros recalled what his mother said – that, between drinks and drinks, wedding and wedding, the dressmaking classes were about politics and affiliation. Socialite events gave rise to crude deals and juicy decisions.

On the fiftieth anniversary of her journalistic work, Noemí Atamoros received the Tlacuilo Prize. In November 2003, Atamoros, editor of Section B of Excelsior —responsibility he had for the death of Bambi—, received the recognition in the Manuel M. Ponce Room of the Palace of Fine Arts.

During the presentation of that award to Atamoros – who is survived by her children Francisco, Lorena and Claudia Pérez Atamoroes –, the playwright Hugo Rascón Banda defined her as “a discreet woman, of deep intelligence and quiet work, she is a Sorjuanista at heart, not of six-year terms or occasionally, generously disclosing from the pages of Excelsior to known and unknown artists and writers.”

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