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ately declared her a Surrealist - and was entranced by the woman herself.
Swarthy and appealing, her mestizo features highlighted by the peasant
dresses she wore, the thirty-year-old Kahlo (as one Surrealist later said)
"fit completely the Surrealist ideal of woman. She had a theatrical qual–
ity, a high eccentricity. She was always very consciously playing a role
and her exoticism immediately attracted attention." Kahlo, however,
found Breton pompous, arrogant, and boringly intellectual. "The trou–
ble with El Senor Breton is that he takes himself so seriously," she told
friends, and privately referred to him as the "old cockroach." Nor did
she entirely appreciate his labeling her a Surrealist. "I never knew I was a
Surrealist until Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one,"
she archly wrote . "I myself still don't know what [ am." She appears to
have felt more solidarity with Jacqueline, another woman artist in a dis–
tinctly male world.
If Breton's presence in Mexico barely made an impression on French
Embassy functionaries, this was not the case with the local journalists.
From the moment of his arrival, he was asked to grant interviews to the
newspapers, giving him the chance once again to define Surrealism's ob–
jectives for a new audience, while other periodicals ran capsule histories
of the movement and translations of Breton's writings. "Breton has been
here for a few days, full of admiration for the country, Diego's paintings,
for all the beautiful things in this country. On the other hand he goes
from banquets to official receptions, he is beset by a multitude of peo–
ple," Trotsky's private secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, wrote to Pierre
Naville in Paris.
Even more attentive were the Stalinists, who regarded Breton's visit
with evident suspicion. As Breton later recounted, one French Commu–
nist organization had preceded his arrival with a letter to the major
Mexican writers and artists, calling him a "propaganda envoy from the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs." Apparently, Aragon also wrote a letter
urging the Mexican Stalinists to "systematically sabotage any work which
[Breton] might undertake in Mexico." Breton shrugged off these charges
as an annoyance, one that his past record would easily belie, but his
Mexican hosts took the implied threat quite seriously.
Trotsky himself, meanwhile, greeted the news of Breton's visit with
high interest. Increasingly isolated, he knew that Breton had strategic
value as one of the few French intellectuals openly to endorse him at the
time; he later told a friend, who was surprised by the Russian's welcome
of the Surrealist poet, that "he could not afford to be sectarian in ideo–
logical matters when allies were so hard to come by." But Trotsky also
seems to have been genuinely touched by the admiration Breton had
shown over the past years, and impressed in turn by the man's intellectual
