Nicholasa Mohr

Nicholasa Mohr (born November 1, 1938) is one of the best known Nuyorican writers, born in the United States to Puerto Rican parents. In 1973, she became the first Nuyorican woman in the 20th century to have her literary works published by the major commercial publishing houses, and has had the longest creative writing career of any Nuyorican female writer for these publishing houses. She centers her works on the female experience as a child and adult in Puerto Rican communities in New York City, with much of writing containing semi-autobiographical content. In addition to her prominent novels and short stories, she has written screenplays, plays, and television scripts. == Life and career == Mohr was born in 1930 to Puerto Rican immigrant parents during the tail end of the Great Depression. She was raised in East Harlem at a time when the neighborhood was transforming from the Italian enclave it has been earlier in the century to the Puerto Rican and African-American neighborhood it would be during Mohr's childhood. During Mohr's early childhood, East Harlem included high concentration of retail and thrift stores and a collection of expensive homes and lower income housing, including the East River Housing Project. Mohr lived in a four-bedroom apartment with eleven members of her family and extended family. Mohr grew up in a bilingual household where she used Spanish with her parents and English with her siblings. She came to understand Spanish as a private language of her Puerto Rican heritage and English as a language of survival in the public sphere. Much of the writing she would do throughout her life would be in English. Her father died when she was eight years old, leaving her mother with seven children, and Mohr as the only female and the youngest amongst her siblings. In order to escape the poverty that surrounded her, Mohr used her imagination to express her feelings. Her artistic talents and eagerness for learning flourished when she was a young student, but weren't always appreciated by her teachers, who saw her Puerto Rican heritage as a weakness. Since Mohr's parents saw her schooling in America as a privilege, Mohr learned to adapt to her surroundings, while spending her free time volunteering in the library and reading, learning what she wasn't able to attain in school. After graduating junior high school, she got a job as a page girl in the New York Public Library. Mohr studied fashion illustration in high school and graduated in 1953, then went to study at the Art Students League, an art school located in New York. Here she discovered the works of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco which inspired her to study art and travel to Mexico City to study at the Taller de Gráficos for a semester. After a year she returned to the United States and attended the New School for Social Research. Then in 1959 she went to Brooklyn Museum of Art School and Pratt Graphics Center. Throughout her studies Mohr was drawn to artwork because of it