Quote by Rosario Castellanos: “Humor is a way of not becoming the prisoner of your own ideas.”

When we take ourselves too seriously, we become rigid — locked inside a single way of seeing. Humor creates distance from our own certainties, which is actually a form of intellectual freedom. It keeps us flexible and open to being wrong.

Castellanos was a prominent public intellectual in Mexico in the early 1970s, writing newspaper columns that blended feminist argument with sharp wit. She used humor as a deliberate rhetorical strategy, believing it could disarm defensive readers and open conversations that earnest polemic would close.

Mexican poet, novelist, and diplomat who used literature to confront the racial and gender hierarchies of mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Her novels Balún Canán and Oficio de Tinieblas drew on indigenous Mayan experience and the violence of colonial social structures.