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Born in Bryan, Texas, and raised in Houston, Dorothy Hood won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1930s, then worked as a model in New York to earn money for classes at the Art Students League. On a whim, she drove a roadster to Mexico City with friends in 1941 and ended up staying for more than twenty years. Hood was front and center at the cultural, political, and social crossroads of Mexico and Latin America during a period of intense creative ferment. She developed close friendships with the exiled European intelligentsia and Latin American surrealists: artists, composers, poets, playwrights, and revolutionary writers. She married the Bolivian composer Jos Mara Velasco Maidana, and together they traveled all over the world.