Draft:Sara Guardia de Mendoza

Sara Guardia de Mendoza (Barquisimeto, February 3, 1923 – Caracas, September 5, 1994) was a prominent Venezuelan educator and social activist who lived in the town of San Antonio de Los Altos, Los Salias Municipality of Miranda State, Venezuela. Sarita, as she was widey known, was among the first women who obtained in Venezuela a diploma of higher education in physics and graduated in 1944 as a Secondary Education Teacher (Physics and Mathematics) at the Instituto Pedagógico de Caracas. During the 1950s, she was part with Miguel Arroyo, Alejandro Otero and Mercedes Pardo of a group of artists and free thinkers dissident of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. She worked as a photographer leaving an important archive that documented the modern artistic activity of Caracas at the time. However, her life's dedication was in education and activism, where the foundation (1959) and direction (1959-1994) of the Escuela Comunitaria San Antonio de Los Altos and the foundation of the Los Salias Municipality in 1982 stood out.

Education and Career
Sara Guardia de Mendoza or "Sarita" as she used to demand to be called, was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, on February 3, 1923, daughter of Don Tomás Guardia and Doña Sara Blanco de Guardia. Her capacity for leadership and autonomous thinking was initially shown in the family environment. She studied at the Instituto Pedagógico de Caracas (IPC) and at the same time worked to support her family due to the disability of her father. She was one of the first women in the capital with a different image: independent, academic, with her own car, and wearing blue jeans; a photographer with sharp and critical thinking. Together with her inseparable husband Benjamín Mendoza Sánchez (1921-1984), also a Professor of Literature at the IPC, she had a family of three children: Claudio (1951), Emilio (1953), and Anela (1958). She graduated from the IPC in 1944 as a Secondary Education Teacher specializing in Physics and Mathematics and taught at the Liceo de Aplicación of Caracas (1944-1952) as a Physics teacher. At the IPC she worked as a Guiding Professor of Teaching Practices in Physics (1949-1952), and was the Head of the Instituto de Observación de Menores del Consejo Venezolano del Niño in Caracas (1952-1953). She also practiced in private schools as a Physics Teacher at the Colegio Católico Venezolano (1941-1944) and Colegio América, both in Caracas.

Photography and art during the dictatorship
As a result of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Sarita and Benjamín were unemployed as teachers from 1953 to 1958. Benjamín became a truck driver and Sarita a photographer, isolating themselves in the sector of El Toronjil in the small town of San Antonio de los Altos, Miranda State, with friendly people of Canarian origin. Together with their next-door neighbors, the artists Mercedes Pardo, Alejandro Otero, and Miguel Arroyo, as well as other thinkers and dissidents of the dictatorship, they developed cultural activities in the town and the capital, especially at the Cruz del Sur Bookstore, an intellectual and cultural melting pot on the margin of the iron dictatorship. The group founded the Ecological Society in 1956, a precursor and without precedent for that time, and collaborated in the organization of the patron saint festivities of San Antonio de Padua that year with performances by joropo tuyero musicians, local talent contests, theater at the Plaza Bolívar, and special guests such as cuatro (instrument) virtuoso Fredy Reyna. Within these celebrations, Sarita exhibited a collection of photographs of the town's people, landscapes, and activities, making an ethnographic survey in large format black and white photographs with a marked visual sensitivity to gray textures.

Sarita's camera also recorded different trips through the Araya Peninsula, the dancing devils of Corpus Christi in the town of Yare, Miranda State, and the Guajira Peninsula, among others. She silently captured figures of the time in their creative and social activities such as the American sculptor Alexander Calder, the dancer Grishka Holguín, the local artists Miguel Arroyo and Alejandro Otero, the ceramists Tecla Tofano and Cristina Merchán, as well as the spirit of renewal and positivism existing among a large group of acquaintances and thinkers amid military oppression. Collections of her photographs were presented in a variety of exhibitions that were documented to date only in newspaper clippings collected by her husband.

With the fine artists Mercedes Pardo and Alejandro Otero - neighbors and close friends - Sarita also developed a unique and unprecedented artistic expression in Venezuela: the intervention of photo negatives with diverse materials such as vegetable textures, fabrics, and paint. An exhibition of this photographic experiment was shown at the Cruz del Sur Bookstore under the name “Transparencies” by Sarita, “Huellas” by Alejandro Otero, and “Fotogramas” by Mercedes Pardo. The latter two artists immersed themselves with Sarita in a new visual expression through the technology of photo-chemical developing.

La Perla and the town of Tintorero
La Perla, Sarita and Benjamín's house in the sector of El Toronjil in San Antonio de los Altos, next door to that of the Otero Pardo family, became an icon of the innovative artistic thought of the 1950s, a witness to the change towards abstract modernity by the artists Alejandro Otero and Miguel Arroyo. Its possible influence originated from the hypothetical visual stimulus of the fabrics of the blankets of the township of Tintorero in Lara State. At the beginning of that decade when it was built, the beds in the house were dressed in woolen blankets with parallel vertical and horizontal stripes of striking colors. At the same time, Alejandro Otero developed his "ortogonales" (paintings on wood) with black and colored vertical and horizontal stripes, which eventually led to his famous "coloritmos" and “tablones.”

In artistic and creative collaboration with Arroyo, Otero installed an eight-meter-long aluminum sliding window in La Perla's living room, with non-symmetrical rectangles of glass and colored metal sheets, and Arroyo designed his famous "Mendoza Table" with a similar structure using parallel wooden slats. Otero painted two murals on the facades of La Perla, continuing with another similar production on the "Facade and Stained Glass" in front of the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas.

The link between the designs of Tintorero's blankets and the development of Otero's abstraction in his production of orthogonals, colorrhythms, murals, and stained-glass windows, as well as in Arroyo's furniture design, seems to hold a striking relationship with immediate visual logic in addition to its structural and historical coincidence. Still, it would require a more in-depth study to verify it. However, it is exciting to recognize the cultural and aesthetic transfer of a design of indigenous origin in traditional blanket fabrics to completely different artistic expressions in the hands of unique creators, who were inspired by them to take a leap toward modernity and abstraction in the fine arts and furniture design.

A distinguished educator
In 1959, together with several families from the town of San Antonio de los Altos, Sarita founded the Escuela Cooperativa, now known as the Escuela Comunitaria, an innovative educational unit that would grow with her throughout her life. From 1961 to 1973, she worked in parallel at the Ministry of Education as Director of the Zoning Office of the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, as Coordinator of Textbook Evaluation in the Technical Directorate, and as advisor to the Foreign Scholarship Program.

In 1965 she moved to London, England, with her family and produced a report for the Venezuelan Ministry of Education on teaching methods, books, and school buildings in England. She also studied photography and film at the London Institute of Photography until 1967 when she returned to Venezuela. She retired in 1973 but continued as Head of the Escuela Comunitaria, as well as Coordinator of the Evaluation Commission of the Scholarship Department of the Ministry of Education (1974) and Member of the Evaluation Commission of the Gran Mariscal Ayacucho Scholarship Program on behalf of the Ministry of Education (1975).

As an educator, she was awarded the Order June 27 from the Venezuelan state in 3rd Class (1961) and 1st Class (1973), and from the Council of Directors of Sector No. 3 in the Teaching Worker Week (1980), the “Honor of Merit.” Also recognitions from the municipality of Guaicaipuro, Los Teques, for disseminating the thoughts of the Salias Brothers (1982) and from the School District No. 1 of the Miranda Educational Zone in 1984 for her community work. She was subsequently awarded the Order Hermanos Salias 1st Class (1985), the Order Vicente Emilio Sojo 1st Class (1989), and in 1989, the highest recognition for a Venezuelan educator, the Humboldt Foundation Award.

Social activist
Apart from her achievements as an educator (the Escuela Communitaria was founded in 1959), Sarita is remembered and admired for her tireless communal activism, whereby she exercised leadership in bringing about improvements in the standard of living of the inhabitants of San Antonio de Los Altos. In this respect, she was the Coordinator of the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of the Pan-American Sector (FAVESEPA) (1976-1978) and its President (1978-1984). In 1980–1983, she undertook the Coordination of the Commission to present the Autonomy Feasibility Project of the Los Salias Municipality. From 1987 to 1988 she was a Member of the Advisory Group that studied the Urban Planning and Zoning Ordinance Project of the Los Salias Municipality, and from 1989 until she died in 1994, she worked as an Advisor to the Education, Culture, and Sports Commission of the Los Salias Municipality.

To all who knew her or worked with her, this recount of distinctions, dates, and achievements does not compare to the indelible memory of her integral personality, work discipline, and commitment. Many anecdotal scenes are remembered; for instance, when she lay down on the ground in front of a bulldozer with the children of the Escuela Comunitaria trying to stop the ecological abuses that frequently occurred in San Antonio in its bizarre and excessive urban growth. Likewise, her energy when she faced the town councilors demanding citizen respect, and the images of the town she captured with her unique photographic gaze in 1956, a San Antonio we would not recognize now but that we should not forget, an example of sensitivity for the small and intangible details, and an unstoppable fight for the convictions that unite us.