The pandemic is far away and the Guadalajara Book Fair has only broken its own records since it managed to catch its breath. This year’s event, with Barcelona as guest of honor, approaches one million visitors and provisionally ends with 953,000 participants, 46,000 more than the previous event, which had Spain as the protagonist of the meeting. Then, all expectations were exceeded and 50,000 additional spectators were added compared to the previous year: an increase that confirms the power of the largest Spanish literature forum in the world, and which is close to its capacity limit. If it wants to continue to grow, it will have to do so with activities outside of funfairs, of which there are more and more.
The organizers celebrated another year of “massive influx” and detailed this Sunday morning, during the closing press conference, a set of figures which show the good muscles of the show. It is not just about the attendance of the public: there were more than 3,000 activities, among which the 648 book presentations stand out (this figure is also a record), and 973 authors deployed between the events on the ship and those prepared outside, in schools, the University or the cultural spaces in the center of Guadalajara. In total, 2,790 publishing labels from 64 countries were present and 450,000 titles were offered to the public. Some major publishers are celebrating the increase in sales of around 6% compared to the previous year, as they explain to the newspaper, in line with the growth of the publishing sector in Mexico last year.
“We said we would come with flowers. We did not know that they were waiting for them as they were”, said the commissioner of the invited delegation, Anna Guitart, in reference to the motto under which the activities were carried out, Vindran the flowers. The evocative phrase, taken from a tale by the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, ultimately attracted strong attention from visitors, who browsed the writer’s literature in the delegation’s bookstore a few days before the end of the fair. Books in Catalan that have not been sold by the end of the day will be donated to the Jalisco Juan José Arreola Public Library.
The protagonists of the meeting, however, were the Catalan singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat and the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both received as undeniable idols in the city. Hollywood actor Richard Gere also sneaked into a program in which, on the literary side, the Spaniard Eduardo Mendoza, the Cuban Leonardo Padura and the Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza stood out. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú and Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan completed this powerful catalog.
Some agreements and pending reconciliation also emerged from the fair. Among the first, the creation of the Ibero-American Forum of Universities stands out, a space which will currently include Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mexico City and Guadalajara, and which seeks to become “a group of influence in the broadest sense”, in the words of the rector of the University of Jalisco, Karla Planter Pérez. Also noteworthy is the creation of a three-month international residency for Latin American writers announced by Barcelona City Hall. The grant, endowed with 80,000 euros and created to allow writers from the other side of the Atlantic to tell the story of the city, raised dust in the Catalan literary sector, which saw it as a way to strengthen Spanish instead of allocating resources to promote the minority language of the autonomous community.
On the political level, the alliance was established within the Latin American country itself. The restoration of relations with the federal government, virtually broken since 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power and dismissed the event as “elitist”, ends an unprecedented disagreement that left Mexico’s top representative outside the country’s main cultural event. The arrival of her successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, last year anticipated a turnaround, but it was not until this call that the Fourth Transformation definitively returned to be present at the show. The Secretary of the Economy, Marcelo Ebrard, staged it by presenting the distinction of Made in Mexico to the forum itself, the first certificate of this nature awarded to an activity and not to a product.
The FIL puts the finishing touches to a year in which both countries committed to unblocking in the cultural domain what was resisting in the political domain, with tensions over the Conquest dating back to the mandate of López Obrador. In any case, attention is already focused on the next call, which will have Italy as a guest country, with the 150th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the background. The fair will also be celebrating. “The gift that Mexico gives to global intelligence”, again in the words of Karla Planter Pérez, will turn 40 with all eyes on it.
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