Mexico City entered Dorothy Day’s life after her breakup with Batterham, when she moved there with her daughter, Tamar. The city’s significance in this account is practical and literary: it became a home from which Day wrote about poverty for an audience in the United States.

Day’s Move to the City

After holding several jobs, Day had been hired as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, where she was paid every Friday but given nothing to do. She then moved to Mexico City with Tamar. The account places the move within the unsettled years after her relationship with Batterham ended, without describing the circumstances of their life in the city further.

Writing about Poverty

In Mexico City, Day wrote articles about poor people for Commonweal. This work preceded her later assignment for the magazine: near the end of 1932, during the depths of the Depression, Commonweal sent her to Washington, D.C., to cover the hunger march of the unemployed. Mexico City thus marks an earlier stage in a developing engagement with poverty that would lead her to report directly on the unemployed and reflect on the need for a response to their hardship.