Working as a journalist opened her eyes and ears to the realities of poverty, she said. Propelled by what she learned about poverty and government scandal as a reporter, Poniatowska became a prominent contemporary writer in Mexico.

Being a journalist went against the grain of Poniatowska’s family. Her grandfather is descended from the last king of Poland. He married an American living in Paris, Elizabeth Sperry Crocker, who founded the Crocker Art Museum in San Francisco. Their son, Poniatowska’s father, Yvan Evremont Poniatowski Sperry, married Paulette Amor Iturbide, a woman from a prosperous Mexican family. The family lived in Paris until 1941. Then Poniatowska moved to Mexico at the age of nine with her mother and sister while her father stayed behind to fight in the war.

In 1953, after an education that included high school at a Catholic school in Pennsylvania, she approached the newspaper Excelsior with an idea for a profile of the U.S. ambassador. The editors snapped it up and hired her to do more. Poniatowska later joined the Mexican daily newspaper Novedades. Her relatives were appalled. They reminded her of her upbringing, she recalled; their view was that “you only appear in the newspaper if you have something to sell or something to exhibit and that it was a very bad thing.”

That didn’t deter her. At first, she covered high society events, producing celebrity interviews almost every day. These celebrity interviews proved a hit. Everyone read them. Including, it turns out, prisoners in the local jails. They began pleading with her to interview them.

“The people who wrote and called were just ordinary people,” she said. “They were poor Mexicans in jail and had read my articles. They tried to get me to come talk to them, to write about them.”

Starting in 1958, Poniatowska did just that. Getting the interviews with prisoners printed, however, was where it got tough. “They wouldn’t publish anything about poverty in the newspaper,”she said. Poniatowska kept the interviews and used them later in books about the poor and marginalized.

One person she stumbled upon in the same neighborhood as the Lecumberri Prison was Jesusa Palancares, a woman who had fought in the Mexican Revolution early in the 20th Century.

In 1971, Elena wrote what many critics consider her best book: Hasta no verte Jesus mio (Here’s to You, Jesusa), about camp followers during the revolution such as Jesusa. The Mexican conventional wisdom “is that those who followed were considered sluts and whores,” Poniatowska said. “My idea was to change all of this.”

Poniatowska wanted to do these women justice. “They were very poor, very brave women,” she said. “When their husbands died in battle, they took over and started shooting. Many had children in the trenches. And they were feminists: When they stopped liking a man, they could very well go away with another man.”

Poniatowska’s book, La Noche de Tlatelolco (Massacre in Mexico), remains today the definitive account of the 1968 student movement that ended with the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians. In 2006, Luis Echeverria, who was Mexico’s president during the student movement, was officially named as the person who gave the order for the Army to fire on the students. Poniatowska’s book still is in print, but she says justice is far from done. “He still can run from the consequences,” she said. “He’s in his house. Nothing will happen to him.”

Literary analysts say that Poniatowska broke new ground with La Noche de Tlatelolco and a later book, Nada nadie: las voces del temblor (Nothing, No One: Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake). Her technique, chronicling events using eyewitness interviews, is called “testimonial literature” She doesn’t take credit for inventing that genre. “No, no – it’s like Truman Capote: he interviewed people and wrote about events,” she said. I do the same...it is something very natural. I use the voices of the people.”

Poniatowska had no role models when she became a journalist but says that, as an émigré, she brought a different set of eyes and ears to the job. “I think it helped me a lot,” she said. “It gave me another view of things.”

Poniatowska never let herself be hemmed in by Mexico’s machismo attitudes, any more than she heeded advice from her prestigious family. She said she became a feminist “just by seeing how women lived and worked, in the streets in Mexico. …When I saw all these women having no opportunities at all, I decided it would be very good to fight for them. That was about 30 years ago.” Part of fighting for Mexican women was writing for Fem, a feminist magazine she helped found that folded several years ago.

Poniatowska translates U.S. Chicana fiction into Spanish, partly because she admires them for being “the first to say that they would be lesbians. In Mexico, a woman doesn’t speak out and say that she’s a lesbian….I was surprised that they would do that.”

Poniatowska’s life has defied stereotypes. She was an outspoken feminist and always worked. In addition, however, “I have three children and 10 grandchildren and I was married to a great Mexican astronomer, Guillermo Haro.”

Haro was 21 years older than Poniatowska and traveled often for his work, but he understood her. “I suppose he was special,” she said. Poniatowska wrote about her husband in a celebrated, lyrical book, La piel del cielo (The Skin of the Sky).

Today, she sees much progress for women and notes that among some, “women are considered more honest than men.” Women are making strides, professionally, including at the newspaper she helped found, La Jornada, where the director is a woman.

Still, there is massive poverty which disproportionately affects women, Poniatowska said. There also are the unsolved murders of dozens of women working in the northern border towns such as Juarez. “They treat them like trash,” she said. “You have to think of them like women of value. This is a racist country. We are racists against ourselves. I hope it will change.”

Poniatowska has written more than 25 books, as well as short stories, a play and hundreds of articles. Her early celebrity profiles have been collected and published – in 10 volumes to date. She helped found many of Mexico’s cultural institutions including Cineteca Nacional (National Film Archives) and the publishing house Siglo XXI. Her books are translated into many languages, including her ancestors’ homeland of Poland, and she went to China recently to receive yet another honor for La piel del cielo.

Poniatowska acknowledges she’s probably not as well-known as her friends and contemporaries, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I know them very well...But they’re celebrities and I’m not,” she said. “I work in the streets, mostly. I don’t live like a celebrity -- or feel like one.”

For the past 18 months, Poniatowska has worked in the presidential campaign of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whom Mexican election tribunals say lost by a narrow margin. She saw his candidacy as “a fight against corruption, for the poor people [against] the rich Mexicans who really use the country as [if it were] property of their own, like all of the Latin American upper class.”

She is drawing criticism for her support, but it doesn’t bother her.

“That means I’m being read,” she said.