# Angelina Muñiz-Huberman

Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (Spanish pronunciation:; born December 29, 1936) is a Mexican writer, academic, poet and professor. She is known for her work and research on Ladino, crypto-Judaism, Jewish mysticism and Sephardic Jews. Muñiz-Huberman is a recipient of the Xavier Villaurrutia Award and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. In 2022, she received an honorary doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) for a lifetime's work, an honor she shares with such figures as John Dewey, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo.

## Biography

She was born in Hyères in France to parents who had fled the Spanish Civil War. Her father was a Spanish journalist who wrote for the Heraldo de Madrid newspaper. As the Nazis started advancing into France in 1939, the Muñiz family fled to Cuba, where they briefly lived in the countryside until the family moved to Mexico City in 1942. Her father ran an outpost of a laboratory testing company owned by a family member residing in New York. Her mother changed her surname to sound more Christian, despite the fact that Sacristán was not a typically Jewish name. She converted to Judaism after discovering her Sephardic ancestry. Muñiz-Huberman grew up among other middle-class Jewish immigrants in the Condesa neighborhood. She studied Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and has a PhD in literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She is a professor of medieval and comparative literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
In November 2021, Muñiz-Huberman was inducted into Mexico's most prestigious literary body, the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (Mexican Academy of Language} following the death of the philosopher and historian Miguel León-Portilla. Her candidacy was proposed by academicians Ascensión Hernández Triviño, Javier Garciadiego, Roger Bartra and Silvia Molina.
She has been married to Alberto Huberman since 1959. Huberman was born in Cuba and migrated to Mexico after the Cuban revolution to complete his medical studies. He was a member of the socialist Zionist youth organization Hashomer Hatzair, and co-founded Kibbutz Gaash during his stay in Israel.

## Awards

She has been awarded the Xavier Villaurrutia Award (1985), for her short story collection Huerto cerrado, huerto sellado, the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (1993), for her novel Dulcinea encantada, and the National Prize for Arts and Literature (2018), in the field of Linguistics and Literature. She also holds the José Fuentes Mares, Magda Donato, Woman of Valor Word, Manuel Levinsky, Protagonista de la Literatura Mexicana, the Orden Isabel la Católica, the Escuela Nacional de Altos Estudios de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras recognition and the Arqueles Vela Medal, awarded by the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics). On January 14, 2021, she was awarded the 7th chair of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (The Mexican Academy of Language), a vacancy left by the death of the Mexican anthropologist, philosopher and historian Miguel León-Portilla. Muñiz-Huberman is also a corresponding member of the Academia Espírito-santense de Letras, Vitória, Espírito Santo, Brazil.