Frida Kahlo's Secret Life as a Schoolteacher

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón, the woman who would one day become a global icon for resilience, pain, and passionate artistry, was born on July 6, 1907, in the charming and complex borough of Coyoacán, Mexico City. The world knows her as Frida Kahlo, an artist whose turbulent personal life and intense self-reflection were immortalized on canvas in ways that challenge even the most rigid boundaries of art. But behind the famous unibrow and the vivid images of suffering, there was another layer to her identity—one that often goes unnoticed: Frida Kahlo, the teacher.

Frida’s life has always been the stuff of legend. From her early years growing up in the Del Carmen neighborhood, where her Hungarian-German father, Guillermo Kahlo, and her mother, Matilde Calderón, raised Frida and her three sisters, to the physical trauma and psychological depth that would later inform her work, her existence was undeniably marked by extraordinary circumstances. Yet, nestled among these larger-than-life narratives is a lesser-known chapter—her stint as an educator. Through a series of dusty documents housed in Mexico’s National General Archive (AGN), we glimpse Frida not just as a teacher, but as an employee of the state, subject to the bureaucracy, suspensions, and pay cuts typical of any public servant.

A Young Teacher with a Strong Protest

In 1929, when Frida Kahlo was just 22 years old, she was appointed as a professor in Mexico’s Department of Fine Arts, a division of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP). It’s a striking image—this young woman, freshly emerging from adolescence, already marked by personal hardships and an unspeakable tragedy, now taking on the task of guiding others in the Drawing and Manual Works section. She was paid a modest salary of $3.00 per day.

Frida officially assumed her post on June 10, 1929, and was registered as employee number 69. A few days later, she found herself juggling multiple assignments across the city. Her classrooms were spread out, from School #21 in the historic Vallejo neighborhood to School #101 on Avenida Chapultepec. The ever-vibrant Coyoacán had not yet become the artistic hub it would later be, and in these schools, Frida likely encountered children and adolescents from modest, working-class backgrounds—far removed from the bohemian elite circles she would later move through.

At the time, Frida’s presence in the classroom seems almost surreal. We know her as a painter who poured her inner world into portraits filled with pain, bleeding hearts, and flora sprouting from skulls, yet here she was in front of young students, teaching them how to hold a pencil or brush, how to channel their creativity into manual works. But it wasn’t to last.

Frida’s tenure as a teacher was as tumultuous as the rest of her life. Three months into her teaching career, she requested a 91-day unpaid leave of absence. This wasn’t an impulsive move; the request was dated September 24, 1929, and approved almost immediately. By the end of December, she asked for yet another extension. We can only imagine the reasons behind these absences—was she consumed by the fires of creativity, recovering from one of the many surgeries that peppered her life, or perhaps even following Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist whom she had just married?

By January 27, 1930, Frida’s refusal to return to work had its final consequence: she was dismissed from her position by the SEP. It seems oddly fitting that Kahlo, whose life was so often marked by fleeting passions and tragic interruptions, would find her first teaching career to be just as transient. The SEP’s records, preserved with bureaucratic thoroughness, noted her dismissal coldly: Kahlo had failed to return to her duties.

But this was only the first chapter in her relationship with Mexico’s public education system.

The Return of Frida the Teacher

Frida Kahlo’s relationship with education wasn’t completely over after her 1930 dismissal. In 1943, she was reappointed by the General Directorate of Aesthetic Education as a type “C” vocational education teacher, this time with 12 hours of class per week. This phase of her teaching career was more stable, though hardly without its challenges. By 1945, Frida was delegating her payment collection duties to her sister, Cristina—a practical solution, perhaps, given the mounting health issues that plagued her during the later years of her life. The records reveal this curious administrative wrinkle, and through it, we catch a glimpse of a personal life inextricably linked to family even in the minutiae of payroll management.

Frida’s classes at the School of Painting and Sculpture on Esmeralda #14 marked an era of deeper engagement with the country’s burgeoning art scene. At this point, her own career as an artist had begun to take shape, and she was no longer simply the wife of Diego Rivera, tagging along on his larger-than-life mural projects. Now, Frida was an artist in her own right, her work characterized by striking self-portraits that laid bare her innermost pain and passion. Her teaching, too, became another avenue of artistic influence, one that allowed her to directly engage with the next generation of Mexican artists.

Despite these renewed efforts, Kahlo’s bouts of illness continued to haunt her. The final document in her employment file with the SEP is dated July 27, 1954. It records her dismissal for the last time—this time, due to her death. She was 47 years old, and the pay stub of her final salary was a bittersweet $720.

The documents stored in the National General Archive are an unexpected window into the life of one of Mexico’s most beloved artists. They strip away the layers of mythology, offering a pragmatic, almost mundane look at Frida Kahlo’s working life. Here, she is not the tragic heroine or the tortured genius but a young woman trying to make a living as a teacher, balancing the demands of an oppressive bureaucracy with her own inner turmoil.

It’s a side of Frida Kahlo that the world rarely sees. These papers reveal an artist subject to the same mundane forces as the rest of us: schedules, approvals, dismissals, and paychecks. There’s something deeply human about imagining her receiving notices of her “unjustified absence” or seeing her hand over the collection of her wages to her sister. For a woman whose public persona is often larger than life, the idea of her navigating the mundane world of civil service adds a certain depth to her story.

Frida Kahlo’s art is, of course, what we remember her for. But her time as a teacher, though fleeting, offers a unique glimpse into how she sought to interact with the world beyond her canvas. She wasn’t just an isolated genius locked away in La Casa Azul; she was a woman who tried to give back, to educate, to share a passion for creativity in ways that perhaps only she could.

In the end, Frida Kahlo’s legacy transcends both her art and her time in the classroom. She represents the resilience of the human spirit, the ability to transform pain into beauty, and the undying need to create, even when everything else falls apart. And perhaps, through her students, some of that brilliance lingers on—an echo of Frida, not in the gallery walls, but in the countless lives she touched during her short but vibrant time on Earth.

Source: Archivo General de la Nación. “EL EXPEDIENTE DE FRIDA KAHLO EN EL AGN.” gob.mx, http://www.gob.mx/agn/es/articulos/el-expediente-de-frida-kahlo-en-el-agn?idiom=es. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.