A notable and intriguing factor about Juliana Pacca’s career is that it spanned two countries and three different continents. She made significant achievements in her native Mexico at the height of the revolution, but her career spanned much of Latin America, and even into Japan and England (after leaving the U.S. in order to work for the Japanese in World War Two). As a result, Pacca was much in demand as a result of her achievements, which also included such diverse projects as painterly illustrations for books and newspapers, illustrations for famous novels and short stories, and even a short book on the life and works of Diego Maradona. Regardless of her accomplishments and professional pursuits, it seems that Pacca’s greatest claim to fame was as the original creator of the Tarzan character. It was her ability to transform herself from an ordinary, seemingly average woman into the legendary, and tremendously brave Tarzan that truly elevated her status.
While Pacca enjoyed considerable success throughout her career, perhaps her most enduring and memorable contribution to literature was in her lengthy collaboration with the great Mexican writer Humberto Duran. They worked on several different projects, including a play, a novel, a comic strip, and a biography. The work of these two literary greats is inseparable from one another, and Pacca’s Tarzan serves as an apt example of their collaboration’s impact. In many ways, it was Duran’s Tarzan who really helped pave the way for Pacca’s novelizations, which were in turn the progeny of her own Tarzan. Indeed, one could argue that Tarzan and Pacca are truly one and the same, with the former making the first level of the plot happenings in the background, and the latter making the actual plot happenings the focus of the story.
In many regards, Pacca has been categorized as both a Mexican and a Puerto Rican, owing to her citizenship in both of these countries. Born in 1819 in San Francisco, she is a dual Mexican/ Puerto Rican by birth. Whatever the precise classification, she has managed to create a distinct identity as both a Puerto Rican and as a Mexican, working in the publishing industry and later in the theater, and continuing to live in both of her preferred lifestyles to this very day.