Marvel Moreno

Biography

Marvel Luz Moreno Abello was born September 23, 1939 in the aristocratic El Prado neighborhood of Barranquilla, the principal river and maritime port on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. She belonged to an upper middle class family that managed to maintain appearances while slipping into financial decline. Her mother, Berta Abello Falquez, came from an old family of the established upper class that counted among its forebears a Spanish admiral, a governor and a renowned mayor of Barranquilla. Her father, Benjamín Moreno, came from a middle class family in Cartagena de Indias that was a mixture of Dutch Jews and Caribbean Indians; he was a respected Cartagena lawyer. In October 1938 she was baptized as a Roman Catholic. Two years later her only brother, Ronald Eduardo, was born. She grew up in an atmosphere that was predominantly feminine, the first education she received being from her maternal grandmother, an important person in Marvel’s life who impressed upon her from childhood the importance of winning her own personal independence.

In 1944 her mother enrolled her in a religious school, Nuestra Señora de Lourdes, where she embarked on her primary education and where three years later she received first communion. Her father introduced her to music and reading, with a healthy orientation toward the classics. In 1950 she began secondary studies at La Enseñanza, a school run by the Company of María religious order. Eventually she was expelled for defending Darwin against the Doctrine of the Church and its dogma condemning evolutionary theory. She subsequently lost her Catholic faith. She read tearfully the novel Maria by the romantic novelist Jorge Isaacs; she died with laughter reading Don Quijote fifteen times and one of them crying, as she later recalled. Transferred to a public school that took in working class boys, she was forced to abandon her studies at age 16…