2013 Essays

Cándida Beltrán Rendón

Márquez, Kenya; Vázquez, Luis Bernardo Jaime

Around 1914, at the age of sixteen, Cándida Beltrán Rendón wrote the film story El secreto de la abuela/The Grandmother’s Secret. A copy of this story can be found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Fourteen years later, in 1928, Beltrán Rendón, at thirty years of age, directed her first and only motion picture—a feature—from a script based on her story and became the last of the five women who directed during Mexican cinema’s silent period. Granddaughter of José Rendón Peniche (1829–1887), an important political figure in the southeast region of Mexico during the nineteenth century (Ciuk 2000, 69), Cándida’s full name was Candelaria Beltrán Rendón. Although she was not the firstborn of the siblings, after her parents died, she took charge of a large family composed of at least seven girls and two boys.