Rosarío Castellanos (1925-1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Raised on a family ranch in the southerly state of Chiapas, she was an introverted young girl, who took notice of the plight of the indigenous Maya that worked for her family. According to her own account, she felt estranged from her family after a soothsayer predicted that one of her mother's two children would die shortly, and her mother screamed out, "Not the boy!"

The family's fortunes changed suddenly when president Lázaro Cárdenas enacted a land reform and peasant emancipation policy that stripped the family of much of its land holdings. At sixteen, Rosarío Castellanos and her parents moved to Mexico City. One year later, her parents were dead and she was left to fend for herself.

Although she remained introverted, she joined a group of Mexican and Central American intellectuals, read extensively, and began to write. She studied Philosophy and Literature at the National University , where she would later teach, and joined the National Indigenous Institute, writing scripts for puppet shows that were staged in impoverished regions to promote literacy. Ironically, the Institute had been founded by President Cárdenas, who had taken away her family's land. She also wrote a weekly column for the newspaper Excelsior.

Throughout her career, Castellanos wrote poetry, essays, and two novels the semi-autobiographical Balún Canán, and The Book of Lamentations , depicting an imaginary peasant uprising in Chiapas. In recognition for her contribution to Mexican literature, Castellanos was appointed that country's ambassador to Israel. She died in Tel Aviv from a freak electrical accident, when she tried to plug a lamp into a wall socket. Though she died young, she had opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today, and is helpful in understanding the current unrest in Chiapas.