His early years
Federico García Lorca, one of the most important Spanish-language writers of the 20th century, was born at 4 Trinity Street at midnight on June 5, 1898, in a village called Fuente Vaqueros (Granada, southern Spain), into a well-to-do family.
His parents were Federico García Rodríguez, a farmer and landowner who was widowed by his first wife, and Vicenta Lorca Romero, a teacher at the girls’ school in Fuente Vaqueros.
After Federico, were born Luis (1900), who died two years later, Francisco (1902), Concha (1903) and Isabel (1909).
Federico started going to school at the age of four with his teacher, Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa. The teacher only knew Federico for three years (from 1898 to 1901), but the friendship with him and his family lasted a long time.
Federico said of his early years in Fuente Vaqueros: “My childhood is learning letters and music with my mother, being a rich boy in the village, a bossy”.
However, in Fuente Vaqueros, Lorca, a rich child, already experienced the feeling of social injustice. In Mi pueblo, a book of memories and reflections, Federico tells the story of a poor family in the village, especially the mother, whom he calls a martyr of life and work.
From Fuente Vaqueros to Valderrubio
Around 1906, the family moved to the neighboring town of Valderrubio because Federico’s father had business there.
In those early years, Federico was greatly influenced by the nature of his land. In 1934 he declared: “As a child I lived in full contact with nature. Like all children, I attributed to each thing, furniture, object, tree, stone, its personality. I talked to them and loved them”.
The village of Valderrubio would inspire one of his last plays, La casa de Bernarda Alba, based largely on authentic events and characters, and some scenes from Bodas de sangre.
Turbulent high school experience
Around 1907, when Federico finished elementary school, his parents sent him to Almería to continue his education. He applied for the entrance exam[1] for the baccalaureate at the General Technical Institute of Almería in August 1908. However, an illness caused by an infected phlegmon that deformed his face. Then, his parents were forced to take him back to the city of Granada, where the family moved in 1909, when Federico was 11 years old.
The choice of Almería was due to the transfer to this city in 1903 of his first letters teacher, Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, a colleague of Vicenta Lorca in Fuente Vaqueros and a faithful friend of the family.
To increase his income, the teacher took in a small group of students, including Lorca, who lived with the teacher’s wife and four daughters.
Federico remained in Almería until the spring of 1909, when he went to Granada.
[1] refers to the exam to start high school studies.
His first humorous poem
Federico himself describes this period of his life: “At the age of seven [that is, in 1905] I went to Almería, where I attended a piarist[2] school and began to study music. There I took the entrance exam and there I had an illness in my mouth and throat that prevented me from speaking and put me at death’s door. I asked for a mirror and saw my face swollen, and as I could not speak, I wrote my first humorous poem, in which I compared myself to the fat sultan of Morocco, Muley Hafid”.
[2] piarist: belonging to the Order of the Pious Schools, founded in Italy by Saint Joseph Calasanz in 1596.
A new life in Granada
But the family’s move to Granada in 1909 did not interrupt the relationship between Federico García Lorca and his siblings with Valderrubio. The reason was that every year, when the Corpus Christi[8] festivities ended in Granada, the family went there to spend the summer until they moved to the Huerta de San Vicente, a summer house in Granada, in 1926.
[3] Corpus Christi: a Catholic Church festival celebrated on a Thursday in early June.
In Granada, he finished high school and enrolled in university. In general, he was a poor student, according to his brother Francisco, because during those years, he was more interested in music than literature, and among his university friends, he was known more as a musician than a writer.
His affections and his teachers
The service people who accompanied the Lorca family profoundly influenced the siblings. First, in Fuente Vaqueros, Federico’s nursemaids Carmen Ramos and Dolores Cuesta, La Colorina[4], Francisco’s nursemaid. A daughter of Carmen Ramos was Federico’s nanny and playmate.
La Colorina accompanied the family to Granada and became a very loyal maid who, after the Civil War, waited for them until they returned from exile in 1951.
His favorite cousins, as Federico called them, also had an influence on the poet, such as Clotilde, who was about seven years older than Federico and thus could play and take care of him when he was little in Fuente Vaqueros, or Aurelia, about whom he wrote the unfinished comedy Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia, and also Mercedes.
[4] the nickname by which she was known.
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Some very eccentric teachers
In 1909, shortly after arriving in Granada, Federico and his brother Francisco attended reinforcement classes[5] taught at the Sacred Heart of Jesus school by a group of eccentric teachers.
The head of the center gathered a peculiar faculty consisting, among others, of a math teacher who was a city policeman and a hypnotist; a Latin teacher who ended his academic comments with bullfighting expressions; and a literature teacher who was a failed writer. Some of them appeared as fictional characters in his play Doña Rosita la Soltera.
[5] Classes usually held outside school hours to review academic content.
A family of musicians
Music was very important to Federico García Lorca from a young age, as his father’s family was full of good aficionados and performers who provided the soundtrack to Lorca’s childhood.
Among all of them, Baldomero, his father’s brother, was unwittingly one of his first teachers. Besides his musical talent, he was bohemian and disorderly, and thus had a bad reputation among his family. He was also lame and famous for his spectacular drunkenness, obsessive loves, and malicious folk songs he used to sing.
However, he was a great player of the guitar and bandurria[6]. The family used to say: “We have another Baldomero!” when Federico used words they considered inappropriate, to which he replied: “It would be an honor for me to be like him!”
[6] bandurria: a musical instrument with six double strings.
Isabel García, the younger sister of his father, was also an excellent amateur who used to perform habaneras[7]. Also her cousin Aurelia, from Los sueños de mi prima Aurelia, an unfinished work.
In 1931, Lorca arranged and recorded many of his homeland’s folk songs with a very popular artist of his time, La Argentinita, becoming a notable concert performer.
[7] habanera: a musical composition originating from Cuba sung in Spanish ports.
When the family moved to Granada, Federico completed his musical training mainly with Antonio Segura Mesa, a failed composer who, however, stimulated Lorca’s creative urges and had a great influence on him.
Upon his death, Lorca dedicated his first book, Impresiones y paisajes to him.
University travels (1916)
In 1916, Federico García Lorca enrolled in university. Although he initially started two degrees, when he had difficulties with some humanities subjects, he chose Law. He finishsed it in 1923, more due to the favoritism of some professors than to studying.
The most important event in the Faculty of Law was his relationship with professors Martín Domínguez and Fernando de los Ríos. With Martín, a teacher influenced by the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, he had an excellent relationship. Then, he participated in a series of study trips that allowed him, between 1916 and 1917, to learn about Spain’s heritage and establish connections with culturally relevant institutions and personalities in each city.
On one of these trips (1916), Federico met Antonio Machado[8]. This encounter was decisive for Lorca, who was torn between his first vocation, music, and his budding literary vocation.
[8] Spanish poet and playwright exiled to France due to the Spanish Civil War.
The El Rinconcillo gatherings (1917)
The teenage Federico García Lorca, still attracted to music, which he still considered his main vocation, soon joined a gathering at the Café Alameda in Granada, formed by young creators, which they called El Rinconcillo.
At the back of the café, behind a small stage, there was “a large corner where two or three tables with comfortable divans against the wall could fit,” where the young customers established their headquarters.
The founding of El Rinconcillo was a consequence of the decline of the Centro Artístico, whose most nonconformist members had separated due to its provincialism. Proof of this open and universal spirit of the rinconcillistas is that two of its most active members soon ended up in Paris, one of them becoming a disciple of Picasso. Soon, Federico and his brother Francisco would move to Madrid.
Source: Universo Lorca
