Maria Teresa Landa, Miss Mexico who took revenge with six shots for her husband’s lie

The Mexican media baptized her as the black widow. The name of Maria Teresa Landa circulated by word of mouth in a capital that in 1929 was in turmoil due to the crime that this woman had committed: the six-shot murder of her husband, a soldier. But the event was even more scandalous because the author was a beauty who a year before had become the first Miss Mexico and, therefore, the first Mexican to compete in Miss Universe. Her trial was public, followed in detail by the press and a citizenry that had also been hit by the assassination of President Alvaro Obregon. The popular jury declared her innocent for her crime, considering that the woman killed for dignity and she Landa disappeared from the public scene, locked in her world and stigmatized as “killing men.” Until now, when the Mexican writer Ana Romero has brought her back to life in a novel that tells the story of Miss Mexico: sad venus, winner of the third Sor Juana Prize for Historical Novel. “This is a representative story of the female struggle for daily survival,” Romero said on Tuesday, after learning that she had received the award.

Maria Teresa Landa was the daughter of a wealthy man from the Mexican capital, a macho but educated type, who had also guaranteed the young woman a quality education. “She was a highly educated woman, fascinated with the Greek gods,” says Romero. The girl charmed by her beauty, although she wanted her intellect to be recognized. She looked like a Minerva, the goddess of arts and wisdom, though to her father she was Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. In short, what was expected of a sensitive young woman from the Mexican upper class of the time. Landa entered the Miss Mexico beauty pageant and won it, so she participated, at only 18 years old, in the pageant that took place in Galveston, Texas. The young Mexican did not win the contest, whose prize remained in the hands of the United States representative, but the press of that country had been so dazzled by her beauty that she baptized her as a queen without a crown.

Life smiled on Landa, without imagining that the Fates, those obstinate divinities with truncating the destiny of anyone according to their whims, were preparing a nightmare for her. She had met a soldier, Moises Vidal, who she was in love with. The passion was so intense that her father agreed to their marriage, fearful that the couple would take steps that would tarnish the family name. The wedding took place, then, and for the father it was like the union of Venus and Mars. But it would not be the happy marriage of the beauty with the military that everyone expected. Vidal was jealous and possessive, he demanded that he confine himself and forbade him to read the newspapers, but it was in the press, precisely, where Landa faced reality: he found out from a chronicle that her husband was already married and had two children in the distant Veracruz, in southeastern Mexico. The desperate young woman tried to commit suicide, but she failed. In a discussion with her husband, according to press reports, the woman took one of her weapons and fired six bullets at the soldier’s body. The event was the delight of the newspapers of the time, which dedicated the front pages to it and also to the popular trial, the last one that took place in Mexico.

This is the third time the prize has been awarded, organized by the Sor Juana Cloister University and the Grijalbo publishing house, but it is the first time a woman has won it. The award is endowed with 150,000 pesos. This year, 72 works participated and the jury, made up of the writers Monica Lavin, Eduardo Antonio Parra and the editor Andres Ramirez, opted for Romero’s novel, considering that it “undresses the writing process in an ingenious way, exhibiting not only the reflections of the narrator, but by combining resources and sources until they become a fundamental part of the plot”. The prize was awarded this Tuesday in the Divino Narciso del Claustro auditorium, the place where Sor Juana lived and wrote. It is a beautiful building, with a floor mounted in what was a chapel of which a beautiful altar is still preserved. The writer Lavin has said that she was impressed by the story of Landa, a woman whom she has classified as “valid and passionate in the search for spaces for her desires.” Parra, who has applauded the humor with which the novel is written, has said that the work “makes us realize how women lived in Mexico in the twenties.”

The author of the novel has explained that the story of the young miss Turned into a murderer, she caught her immediately, “because I have a particular interest in bodies, mainly the female body and how it affects our lives.” The novel will be published at the end of the year, and Romero hopes it will captivate the reader as much as she was captivated by the life of Maria Teresa Landa, one of Mexico’s most famous “self-widows”. “I have loved Landa for a long time. Her story is like a spider web that traps you ”, Romero stated.