Biography | Frida Kahlo — San Ildefonso, the Preparatoria That Took Thirty-Five Girls

People treat Casa Azul as the only school that made her. The first public rooms were these courtyards. In 1922 Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón entered the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in the old Jesuit Colegio de San Ildefonso, Justo Sierra 16, in the historic centre. The school had run in this building since 1868. That year the roll was a little over two thousand. Thirty-five of them were women, among the first admitted. Her student ticket, number 569, still exists with her photograph and signature. She meant to read medicine. The accident three years later closed that door. The same year she arrived, Diego Rivera was painting La Creación on the walls of the Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar inside this complex. She watched him work. They did not marry for another seven years. José Clemente Orozco was covering other staircases at the same time. The building is now a museum. The patios and the amphitheatre are still the rooms a visitor walks. The pin is the school, not a later gallery that bought a self-portrait. Photo: Lsalgador82, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons