Frida Kahlo - Research Paper Example

Her mother on the other hand, was a devout Roman Catholic of mixed Amerindian and Spanish ancestry (Herrera, 12-18). Guillermo married Matilde soon after the death of his first wife during birth of their second child. They had four daughters, though their marriage was a particularly rocky one. Frida was the third. They were raised together with their two other half-sisters from their father’s previous marriage. Kahlo later claimed that she was born in 1910, three years after her actual birthday, so that people would associate her with the Mexican Revolution that started that year.

She recalls in her works the events of the Revolution and the echoes of gunfire that filled the streets of Mexico. In her 6th year, Kahlo was diagnosed with Polio which left her right leg thinner than the left. Later, it was deduced that she had been born with spina bifida which could have impaired her spinal and leg development. It is a result of this misfortune in her legs that she often wore long skirts to conceal the anomaly. However, this did not deter her from undertaking in physical activities as she often participated in boxing and other sports (Herrera, 20-45).

Kahlo joined Preparatoria in 1922 which at the time was one of Mexico’s finest schools. At this point, she joined a group of politically and intellectually like-minded students. She became romantically involved with one of them, Alejandro Gomez Arias. On September 17 1925, as Kahlo and Arias were riding in a bus, they collided with a car. The accident left her in great pain and she spent three months recovering in a full body cast. She had a broken collarbone, a broken spinal column, broken pelvis, broken ribs, and eleven fractures in her right leg, a dislocated shoulder and a crushed and dislocated right foot.

An iron and a hand nail pierced her abdomen and uterus during the accident, thereby leaving her incapable of having children. Later on in