Ann Roy papers

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ann Roy attended Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she worked as a poet and a published cartoonist in the style of William Steig. Her book, Absolutely Normal (Houghton Mifflin, 1947) was critically acclaimed. With her first husband Robert Emmitt, she went unacknowledged as the fieldworker who interviewed all the Ute Indian women whose stories contributed to Emmitt's classic book The Last War Trail. With her second husband, the artist John Nevin, she traveled to Italy and Spain and commemorated their experience with a book of photographs and poems, Travels in Italy: A Magic Lantern Show. She later turned this into a slide show with recorded bi-lingual narration with her son Willie. After a brief time drawing and painting in the artist community of Jerome, Arizona, she and Nevin started a family and moved with their two sons in Marfil, Guanajuato. There she worked with local women, designing women's and children's clothing. Her designs utilized fabric from the textile mills in nearby San Miguel de Allende and incorporated traditional folklore designs and embroidery. Inspired by the artistic and international ethos of Eleanor Lambert, she created a women's cooperative that produced a line of clothing which was sold through an outlet in Scottsdale, Arizona.

After the breakup of her second marriage, she moved to Tepoztlán, Morelos, a center for international spritual seekers offering mystic adventurism and hallucinatory experiences. There she worked with the astrologer John Starr Cooke and the feminist Margaret Fiedler. In Tepoztlán, she filmed fantasy Super-8s of her young friends who were exploring identity and magic, often under the influence of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. With local artist Rita de Tepoztlán she created a series of photographs of Christa, the female Christ.

Roy became known as a leading thinker of feminist cosmology in the area. She taught at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), founded by the former Catholic monsignor Ivan Illich, in Cuernavaca. She taught symbol systems (I Ching, Astrology, Tarot) and one of the first ever courses on women in Mexico. She later broke from her relationship with CIDOC and Illich, over what she termed his "patriarchosis."

Roy moved from Tepoztlán to Pátzcuar in the state of Michoacán. There she deepened her political work centered on the Latin American anti-imperialist movement and the liberation theology that formed its ethical base. She had met the Mexican journalist Cesar Arias de la Canal and, moved by his book chronicling the grassroots efforts of the Sandinista uprising the against the ruling Somoza family, she travelled to Nicaragua to do research and interviews for The Drums of Monimbo, her English translation of his book.

Her final move was to San Miguel de Allende to participate in the community of ex-pats, snowbirds, artists and writers and to join an Alcoholics Anonymous group of her peers. In San Miguel she became involved with the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. Under the nom de plume Fair Witness, she translated Zapatista documents, particularly the writings of Subcommandante Marcos, and attended conferences in the jungle and in several Mexican cities. It was in San Miguel de Allende that she took up poetry again, publishing in anthologies and reading publically in groups like the Live Poets of San Miguel de Allende. She worked closely with Mexican poet Fernando Maqueo, each translating the other's work.

Her oldest son Ian had an international career in computers. Her younger son Willie, an artist, married and had a daughter, Natalia. Both sons died young, within weeks of each other. Ann Roy suffered from myasthenia gravis for several years and passed away on May 24, 2006 at age 80. She left behind a large cache of journals that extensively documented her life since the 1950s.