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Some of the (other) virtues of a book-crazed town
SOL invades the |
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Some of the (other) virtues of a book-crazed town
SOL invades the |
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who stayed with the
happy couple free of
charge. And the joint's genius of a desk guy, Mauricio Romero, brilliant scholarship
student at a local university, was never at a loss for thoughtful suggestions
about what to do, where to go, how to get there, whom to read, and all of that.
Rius—modestly leaving out his acknowledged influence on Subcomandante Marcos—at this year's FIL expressed some dismay that his near half-century of cartooning and hundred-and-some books haven't worked any apparent political changes in Mexico. He conceded, though, that he's triggered an explosion of natural food stores, whole wheat bakeries, and vegetarian restaurants throughout the nation. Certainly Flaco and his hungrily eating-for-two media naranja Hajime did their part to promote this sector of the economy by haunting the three vegetarian diners clustered between downtown and the University, where the both of them could eat their fill for a total of three dollars. In the same neighborhood, conveniently enough, are lots of used bookstores and thirty-cents-for-fifteen-minutes Internet access shops.
It was a pleasure to hook up in Guadalajara with some wonderful people who for
years had been names on envelopes and in the email inbox,
and
to
see them suddenly expand into three delightful dimensions. While I knew
they were real, physical beings, in truth they were no more tangible to me than
their good ideas and kind deeds that I
had read about. Cases in point,
two among many: Martín Vera and his wife Lorena Torres, activist librarians from Mexico City,
graduates of UNAM's library school, who caught a westbound bus out for the final
weekend of the FIL. She works in a philanthropy library helping NGOs find
and obtain funding. He's the librarian of the Reproductive Choice
Information Group (GIRE), working with groundbreaking
feminist and anthropologist Marta Lamas; the group's
low-priced publications make it a true, and indeed very daring, alternative health
information resource for women in Mexico and throughout the Spanish-speaking
world. Both Lorena and Martín are founding members of the
Mexican Circle of Studies on Political and Social Librarianship and they are
earnestly working together with such stalwarts as Felipe Meneses Tello to change the course of library history,
in a country that has a lot of library history..
Martín and Lorena with Cuba's national
Library Director Eliades Acosta
At the
Hospicio Cabañas, where José Clemente Orozco painted the wall and ceiling frescoes that make
it the Sistene Chapel of the Western Hemisphere (and a UNESCO 
World Heritage
Site,
kids) your lazy buddy Flaco demonstrates, at right, the only appropriate posture for
getting an eyeful of the master's work there. Orozco's presence in the
capital city of his native Jalisco is gigantic and thunderous, with truly
monumental paintings in important public buildings of the historic downtown.
Orozco's
thoughts on the mural are powerful, principled ideas we can all learn from,
and we can find inspiration in the
example of
this prolific worker who stayed true to his ideals and labored like mad despite
cruel physical limitations, leaving a body of work that by its nature was
intended to be
shared. Salma Hayek will never play him in a movie, but Orozco left us
plenty to look at and think about.
The traditional founding date of Guadalajara is—when else?—Valentine's Day, 1542. Is there another city like la perla tapatía? If so, I''d love for you to show it to me. Its downtown core crossed with spacious plazas and long pedestrian streets, the old city is a sea of strollers: lovers wrapped in each other's arms, bunches of schoolkids, families with mothers and fathers carrying babies, desolate Marías with a hand out hoping for some coins for to buy food, vendors toting impossible quantities of cotton candy, clothing, cold drinks, and five-inch-thick wedges of flan. It's a city that seems designed to bring people together. Even without a FIL going on, Guadalajara has plenty to teach us. But the book fair makes it even better. Your humilde and huesudo host—using some of the fruits of that historic, Disneyesque SOL copyright infringement settlement—offers a toast to your good health and the long life of the FIL, and he hopes to see you there someday soon.
