With these words Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), writing in her diary in the early 1940s, described her memories of the Decena Tragica, the "tragic ten days" of February 1913. Indeed, her identification with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was so strong that she always gave the year of her birth as 1910. Following the colonial era and the thirty-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Dfaz, the Revolution aimed to effect fundamental changes in the country's social structure. Frida Kahlo apparently decided that she and the new Mexico were born at the same time. In truth, however, she was three years the elder: Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calder6n was born on 6 July 1907 in Coyoac~n, then a suburb of Mexico City, as the third of four daughters born to Matilde and Guillermo Kahlo.