Gaby Brimmer

This English-language translation of the autobiography of Gabriela Brimmer (1947-2000) tells an amazing story in three voices. Gaby, who had cerebral palsy, communicated largely by typing with her left foot on an electric typewriter, and also by using that foot to point at letters and numbers on an "alphabet board" at the base of her wheelchair. She gained admission to Mexico City public schools, attended the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico, and became a key figure in launching Mexico's disability rights movement. Brimmer was raised by her parents, Austrian Jews who fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, and a devoted Mexican caregiver, Florencia Morales Sanchez. Renowned writer Elena Poniatowska structured this text by alternating Gaby's voice with those of her mother, Sari, and Florencia. Memorable not just as the memoir of an extraordinary woman, but as a unique and imaginative form of autobiographical writing, the volume opens with a foreword by Judith E. Heumann and Jorge Pineda, and features a new introduction by Lauri Umansky and afterword by Avital Bloch providing additional context about Gaby's life and writing, as well as disability, women's, and Jewish/Mexican history.

ELENA PONIATOWSKA is one of Mexico's foremost writers. TRUDY BALCH, who translated the original volume from the Spanish, is a writer, editor, and Spanish- and Ladino-to-English translator. JUDITH E. HEUMANN and JORGE PINEDA are longtime disability-rights experts and activists; LAURI UMANSKY is professor of history at Suffolk University and co-editor of The New Disability History: American Perspectives; and historian AVITAL BLOCH is research professor and director of the Center for Social Research, University of Colima, Mexico.