Background
Federico Gamboa was born on December 22, 1864 in Mexico City, Mexico, into the family of Manuel Gamboa, a military general and governor of Jalisco.
Federico Gamboa was born on December 22, 1864 in Mexico City, Mexico, into the family of Manuel Gamboa, a military general and governor of Jalisco.
Federico Gamboa was educated in the National School of Law. But his parents' death forced him to leave and start working in 1884.
Despite the adversities of his childhood and the difficulties with which he stumbled for his training, Federico Gamboa managed to enter the diplomatic career in 1888. He held positions in Argentina, Brazil, Central America and the United States, and represented his country in Spain as ambassador (1910-1911); Acting Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs in 1908, he was confirmed in his position as head of state in 1909 and temporarily served as Secretary of Relations in 1910. He was a delegate to the International Maritime Law Conference (Brussels, 1909), deputy and director of the Mexican Academy of the tongue.
He alternated his work as a public official with literary creation, in which he cultivated three genres: novel, autobiography, and dramaturgy. Its importance lies, above all, in the work carried out within the fictional sphere. By conviction and aesthetic affinity, he adhered to French naturalism and, in a particular way, to the one represented by Émile Zola and the Goncourt brothers, who were distinguished by the rawness of the expression and the sordidness of the topics addressed.
His most successful novel is "Santa" (1903), which has deserved countless reprints and has been taken to the movies several times. Santa recounts the drama of the village girl who, seduced and abandoned, seeks refuge in a house of bad note. The mixture of sentimentality and disgust explains the success of this novel, of which countless editions have been made, and which was brought to the screen with flattering success.
Previous to Santa were the short novels of the book titled "Del natural" (1888) and the long narrations "Appearances" (1892), "Supreme Law" (1896), and "Meditations" (1899); later he wrote the novels entitled "Reconquista" (1908) and "La llaga" (1910).
In the field of autobiography, Gamboa was the author of "Impresiones y recuerdos" (1893) and several volumes with the generic title of "Mi Diario", which would be reissued and prologued by José Emilio Pacheco. Much less relevant and known is his dramaturgy, which includes pieces such as "The Last Campaign" (1894), "The Revenge of the Glebe" (1905) and "Between Brothers" (1928). The prestige of Gamboa began to decline after his death and was overshadowed, at least in part, by the irruption of the so-called "Novel of the Mexican Revolution" by Mariano Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán.
(Volume 2)
Gamboa was, primarily, a man that searched for a good life to the end of his life. In his later works, Gamboa attempted to transcend the deterministic aspect of Naturalism with a more idealistic philosophy.
Federico Gamboa was married to María Sagaseta and had one son.