Diario De Ana Frank

Frida Kahlo Biography
Childhood and family

Self Portrait With Necklace

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon, as her name appears on her birth certificate was born on July 6, 1907 in thehouse of her parents, known as La Casa Azul (The Blue House), in Coyoacan. At the time, this was a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Her father, Guillermo Kahlo (1872-1941), was born CarlWilhelm Kahlo in Pforzheim, Germany. He was the son of the painter and goldsmith Jakob Heinrich Kahlo and Henriett E. Kaufmann.
Kahlo claimed her father was of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry, but a 2005book on Guillermo Kahlo, Fridas Vater (Schirmer/Mosel, 2005), states that he was descended from a long line of German Lutherans.
Wilhelm Kahlo sailed to Mexico in 1891 at the age of nineteen and,upon his arrival, changed his German forename, Wilhelm, to its Spanish equivalent, 'Guillermo'. During the late 1930s, in the face of rising Nazism in Germany, Frida acknowledged and asserted her Germanheritage by spelling her name, Frieda (an allusion to "Frieden", which means "peace" in German).
Frida's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was a devout Catholic of primarily indigenous, as well asSpanish descent. Frida's parents were married shortly after the death of Guillermo's first wife during the birth of her second child. Although their marriage was quite unhappy, Guillermo and Matildehad four daughters, with Frida being the third. She had two older half sisters. Frida once remarked that she grew up in a world surrounded by females. Throughout most of her life, however, Fridaremained close to her father.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three years old. Later, however, Kahlo claimed that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with therevolution. In her writings, she recalled that her mother would usher her and her sisters inside the house as gunfire echoed in the streets of her hometown, which was extremely poor at the time....