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Last December 17, President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo led the start of the delivery of millions of books to the young people of Mexico and the sister countries of Latin America, accompanied by Clara Brugada, Claudia Curiel de Icaza and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who, as director of the Economic Culture Fund, led the team that selected the titles (27, in the end) that began to be distributed that same day also in Havana, Buenos Aires and 200 other cities in Mexico and Latin America. In a brief and emotional speech, the President recalled her career, her commitment and what reading means: (https://www.gob.mx/presidencia/es/articulos/version-estenografica-25-para-el-25-libros-gratuitos-para-jovenes-zocalo-de-la-ciudad-de-mexico-415367?idiom=es)
Almost nothing about the illiterate Mexican right now surprises me and I assumed that they would cry out loud about the money and the selection of books, but I didn’t think that the fact of making literature available to young people would cause them so much anger. Some of those who try to argue say that giving books as gifts does not stimulate reading: since they have never left their ivory towers, they ignore that putting books within the reach of young people and guiding them on how or what books to start with does make them read. Those of us who are close to book clubs, reading circles and workshops with young people know that putting books in people’s hands makes them read. But that’s what we do, not the illiterate right that, from its armchair, ignores that almost all the medium-sized cities in the country lack bookstores worthy of the name (with work, small book supermarkets whose clerks are not trained to guide new readers). Books not for everyone, but for many, and books that circulate and are exchanged. Books.
I imagine Taibo, Paco Ceja, Luis Arturo, Sandra, Sofía, Marco, Marilina, Andrés, Enna, Fritz, the rest of the team, debating about 25 books to impact teenagers, with a central characteristic: Latin American ones (that’s why, say, Rudyard Kipling, Alejandro Dumas or Emilio Salgari are not there, although, would they be read by today’s young people like we read them?), and although I wonder why personal hobbies to Rosario Castellanos, Nellie Campobello, Alfonsina Storni, Jorge Amado, Jorge Luis Borges, B. Traven, Manuel Scorza, César Vallejo, Jorge Ibargüengoitia or Paco Taibo ( easy thing either shadow shadow They would be splendid in this collection), I understand that there could only be 27.
Because the list is really very good, and it is Latin American. There are five Mexican authors, three from Guatemala, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Colombia, two from Peru and one from Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. What is offered? Although the borders between literary genres are difficult to draw, I would say that there are nine books of stories or stories, because it is about hooking, and the hook is usually a good short story; six novels, six books of love and combat poetry, and six of essays, testimony or chronicles.
What is the Mexican government giving to reading circles, to book clubs, to adolescents? I have my favorites: Carlos Montemayor’s non-fiction novel about Lucio Cabañas and his mortal fate, which is one of the greatest novels of the Mexican 20th century; the amazing stories of Miguel Ángel Asturias that tell how the empire overthrew the democratic president Jacobo Árbenz and subdued Guatemala by force; to Osvaldo Bayer, the amazing narrator of so many resistances whom the Taibo team chose The expropriating anarchists; the poetry that reaches the soul of Alaíde Foppa or Juan Gelman… or that of Roque Dalton, only that from the universal Salvadoran the team did not choose his poetry, but the chronicle of his small country, the little thumb of America, governed today by one of the worst scoundrels on the continent (removing the arrogant clown Trump and the pathetic clown Milei). And I won’t tell you anything about Nona Fernández and Piedad Bonnett, because I cried with their books.
And so that the haters of the great Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential authors in our America, can be purged, they bring us a wonderful biography of the Che Guevara, because if we talk about America, we have to talk about Che. Let’s get serious: Sergio Ramírez is one of the greatest Latin American storytellers, and his splendid living testimony of the Sandinista commander Francisco Rivera Quintero in the fight for the liberation of Nicaragua from a dictatorship of half a century in the service of the Yankees leaves no pause to breathe… but choosing Sergio Ramírez and a commander from the heroic times of Sandinismo shows that perhaps Paco and his team (I am, without a doubt) are tired of the buffoonish mini-tyranny of Daniel Ortega who became Anastasio Somoza IV.
And what to choose from Gabo? I am sure that almost no one of my readers has read his harsh and direct chronicle of Cubans in Angola, very, very far from Macondo, because it is a marginalized work by the most brilliant of Colombian writers who will now, thanks to Paco’s team, cease to be so.
I was wrong at the beginning: the Mexican right is right to rage against reading and against this project, because reading is revolutionary and generates awareness, because reading collectively consolidates solidarity work teams and the right hates that this reaches young people, neighborhoods and communities. I conclude: reading is not the only way to learn to be generous, supportive and combative. Many people who cannot or do not want to read are also.
