Camila Henríquez Ureña was the younger daughter of the Henríquez Ureña family. She was dominican scholar and writer.
Background
She was born in 1892 in Santo Domingo, just three years before the death of her mother, Salomé, and was raised by her father and her stepmother. When she was a child, the family moved to Cuba to avoid the political instability of the Dominican Republic.
Education
Henríquez Ureña received most of her education in Cuba, where she graduated from college. Following in the steps of her brother Pedro, she went on to the University of Minnesota, where in 1920 she received a master's degree in romance languages. She returned to the University of Havana, where she finished a Ph.D. in literature in 1926; in 1927 she completed a doctorate in education. She later took graduate courses at Columbia University in New York and at the University of Paris.
Career
After graduation, Henríquez Ureña became a professor of Spanish language and Hispanic American literature at Oriente University in Cuba, Oriente's Normal School, Matanzas Normal School, La Vivora Institute, and the University of Havana. During the 1940s she started to teach in the United States at Vassar College and Middlebury College, and was a guest lecturer in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Argentina.
In 1942 Henríquez Ureña accepted a full-time teaching position at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she eventually became full professor and chair of the Spanish Department. At Vassar, she was instrumental in bringing Chilean poet and Nobel Prize-winner Gabriela Mistral to teach for a semester. In 1947 she took a one-year leave to act as advisory editor to the publishing firm Fondo de Cultura Económica (Economic Culture Fund) in Mexico City. Two years later, in 1949, she was appointed as a member of the prestigious Cuban National Commission of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization).
After her retirement in 1959, Henríquez Ureña, a Cuban citizen, returned, to Cuba where she devoted the rest of her life to lending her educational expertise to the Castro revolution. She taught at the University of Havana and participated in a number of educational initiatives.