Among the notable alumni from Teachers College, there are certain names you have heard many times before. For anyone who isn’t an international education scholar or expert in 20th century Mexican history, Elena Torres Cuéllar (M.A. ’1926) is likely not one of them. 

After studying under the College’s rural education scholar Mabel Carney — a trailblazer in her own right — Torres Cuéllar returned to Mexico, where she would continue her career in education, advocacy and public service amidst the country’s post-revolutionary shifts in national identity and structure. 

Here are eight things you may not have known about Torres Cuéllar, who scholars regard as a notable force in Mexico’s educational history. 

1. She co-founded and directed Mexico’s school breakfast service in 1921, which served approximately 12,000 students per day by its second year. “At this time, studies in biology and chemistry, such as those by chemist Roberto Medellín, were drawing attention of educators to the effects of nutrition on school performance of children,” writes Marco Calderón in his article about Torres Cuéllar published in a 2022 special issue of the Teachers College Record. 

What made the program innovative for its time, in the words of Louise Schoenhals in Hispanic American Historical Review, “was a recognition of the obligation of the government not only to educate the children of the lower classes but to alleviate their physical sufferings as well.” A version of the program still exists in Mexico today.

2. While working for Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education, before her time at TC, Torres Cuéllar would develop ideas around rural education that she would continue to work on while at TC and throughout her career. Through the Cultural Missions, groups of teachers and social workers sent to Indigenous regions, Torres Cuéllar envisioned a way to bring learning opportunities through food, culture, mindfulness and more to help support the development of rural communities. Torres Cuéllar would run these operations on a trial basis for less than a year before parting ways with the education bureau, and later returned to collaborate on the project with fellow TC alumni Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez on the project starting in 1926. She shortly thereafter served as its director for six months. Despite Mexican officials carrying on Torres Cuéllar’s work, she has “not received sufficient credit in the official history,” notes Calderón, who sees her contributions as essential to the effort, which still continues to influence rural education. 

3. Supported by a scholarship from the World Peace Foundation, Torres Cuéllar studied rural education during her time at Teachers College under the guidance of Mabel Carney. The two remained in touch for decades, with Carney and a group of TC students even traveling to Mexico to visit her former pupil in 1935, according to Carney’s own papers.

4. She was a politically active feminist, and participated in international suffragist activities after the United States ratified the 19th Amendment, like many of the other Latin American women who were studying at TC during those times. In Mexico, Torres Cuéllar helped establish the Mexican Feminist Council, created the Mexican Section of the Pan-American League for the Enhancement of Women and organized the First Women’s Congress in Mexico in 1923. 

5. Torres Cuéllar believed that education was essential to Mexico’s political and economic stability. A self-identified socialist, Torres Cuéllar fled her position in the Mexican government in 1926 out of fear of being assassinated for her pro-union beliefs.

6. During this period, Torres Cuéllar was employed as a social worker in St. Louis, Mo., for two years before returning home to Mexico in 1929, when she  went to work on assessing challenges with their rural schools and advanced the implementation of home economics curriculum, which she saw as essential to rural life for all students. She also conducted research on these topics at the time through 1940. 

7. In 1945, Torres Cuéllar participated in a commission for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated to helping foster educational equity across the post-World War II landscape. Their work would partly culminate in an organization that remains core to rural education today, now known as the Center for Regional Cooperation for Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (or CREFAL, the Centro Regional de Educación Fundamental para la América Latina).

8. She died at 77, in Mexico City, on October 13, 1970, just six years after the publication of her autobiography, Fragments. Despite gaining more recognition in recent years, scholars like Calderón have called for additional research to further illuminate the complexities and contributions of her scholarship to Mexico’s educational landscape. 

Additional research support and fact-checking provided by Marco Calderón and Amanda Earl.