The annual Guadalajara Book Fair held in Mexico's second-largest city, is the most important trade book fair in the Americas. Fair organizers reported in their wrap-up news conference that 9,000 booksellers, distributors, and librarians attended this year from across the continent. Some 82,000 titles were on display in the large Guadalajara Expo, with about 35 countries represented. Though the huge majority of the titles were in Spanish, books in English, French, Italian, and Portuguese were also available. Participating in the fair for the first time this year were publishers from the United Kingdom, Belize, and the Caribbean nations of Trinidad and Tobago and St. Martin, a French-Dutch colony.

According to organizers, some 345,000 people attended the fair, which was open to the public a substantial portion of the nine days. On November 30 alone, 20,000 high school and pre-university students were bused to the fair.

Each year one country is featured. This year the nod went to Spain, which resulted in many bookstores, distributors, and writers from that country having a presence here.  
 
A literary crossroads for Americas
Many writers from throughout the Americas attend the annual Guadalajara event. Each day, several programs featured prominent authors discussing their works or symposiums on a range of topics. The annual literary prize given to a Latin American writer was awarded this year to poet Juan Gelman from Argentina. Gelman spent time in exile in Mexico during the late 1970s when a U.S.-backed military dictatorship was in power in Argentina. Gelman's son and other relatives were among the thousands who disappeared under this regime. This aspect of Gelman's life received prominent press coverage.

Vicente Fox from the National Action Party (PAN) was inaugurated as the new president of Mexico on December 1 in Mexico City while the book fair was taking place. The event marked the end of the seven-decade-long control of the presidency by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The inauguration day was a national holiday in the country. A few book fair panels were organized to discuss the new Mexican government.

One panel, featuring Felipe González, a social democratic politician and former president of Spain, was titled, "Globalization and Democracy in the Third Millennium." This was part of a series of panels in which speakers argued for a "third way" between capitalism and socialism and for "creative market socialism."

The book fair received prominent coverage here. Each morning the daily newspapers--Informador, Público, and Mural--carried several-page special sections reporting on the previous day's activities and the schedule for that day.

Free concerts attracting many youth were held in the pavilion outside the expo in the evenings following the fair. Scores of street vendors had an crafts and T-shirts on sale there as the large crowds exited the building.  
 
Pathfinder booth a center of discussion
From November 27 to 29 until 5:00 p.m. each day, the fair was open only to those in the book trade. The team staffing the Pathfinder booth made use of this time to meet with various book distributors, librarians, and chain stores in Mexico. They had follow-up meetings with a few companies that are vying to sell Spanish-language books over the Internet that Pathfinder had initiated contact with at the previous book fair. New meetings were held this year with potential distributors in Brazil and Spain.

Many U.S. librarians visited the Pathfinder stand during the hours open only to the book trade. Several commented that they had received the promotional mailing sent out by the Pathfinder office in New York prior to the fair.

The booth featuring Pathfinder titles was a constant center for political discussion during the public sessions. Many youth crowded into the booth looking at the books and asking questions about them. Several people indicated they had visited the booth last year. On a couple of occasions the discussions would continue over coffee.

The booth was staffed by a team of nine volunteers--from New York; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Houston; Des Moines, Iowa; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Tucson, Arizona. Most of the team members participated for about half of the nine-day event.

Four members of the team were workers in meatpacking plants in various U.S. cities. This fact proved interesting to many who wanted more political discussion. Four team participants were also members of the Young Socialists.

A number of workers from the area passed through the booth in addition to wave after wave of students. A young worker hanging the lights as the team was setting up commented that he had worked until recently at the Excel meatpacking plant in Dodge City, Kansas. Another worker, in her 40s, told us she had worked for a few years in the early 1990s at the Swift packing plant in Worthington, Minnesota. After receiving a Pathfinder flyer featuring the publishing house's new titles, a hotel worker came back to the booth to purchase the Spanish-language edition of Capitalism's World Disorder by Jack Barnes.

The books at the Pathfinder stand were sold at half their U.S. cover prices. A copy of Capitalism's World Disorder was offered for $12.50, or 120 Mexican pesos, at the fair. A relatively well-paid worker in Mexico is paid in the range of $100 a week, or 950 pesos. Most workers are paid considerably less. The minimum wage in this country varies by region, but averages between $3 and $4 a day. It was common for young people to pool their money to obtain the book they wanted.

On numerous occasions we were asked: how can a publishing house like this one--containing revolutionary and communist books--exist in the United States?

This was an opening to show them the new Pathfinder title in Spanish, Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution. More than 40 copies of this title were sold.

"We would explain that the struggles of workers and farmers in the United States is on the increase," said Roberta Black, a meat packer from Minnesota who was part of the team. "We often showed those who asked this question a display of 'Pathfinder in the world,' with photos of socialist workers and Young Socialists selling Pathfinder literature as they participated in demonstrations and strikes by coal miners, meat packers, janitors, and other unionists."

A wide range of Pathfinder titles were sold from the Pathfinder stand, including a few dozen in English and a few in French. Many people would pick up the couple of titles we had on display in Farsi to show their friends.  
 
Discussions on U.S. politics
Booth staffers were often asked their opinion about the disputed U.S. presidential election. They responded that the sharp factionalism in the U.S. big-business parties has its roots in disagreements among the wealthy ruling-class families about how to address the sharpening competition they face from their imperialist rivals and the fact that the workers and farmers--from Russia and Eastern Europe to semicolonial countries such as Mexico, to the United States--are not defeated and are increasingly resisting the assaults on their living standards and rights emanating from Wall Street.

They urged visitors to pick up a copy of the Pathfinder pamphlet, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning. The introduction to the pamphlet by Jack Barnes outlines the stepped-up bipartisan assaults in recent years, from moves to undermine social security to the accelerated use of the death penalty, to attacks on the rights of immigrants. Eighty-two copies of this pamphlet were sold.

Books on or about the Cuban revolution were the most popular Pathfinder titles at the fair. The biggest seller by far was Che Guevara Talks to Young People, with 63 copies in Spanish and four in English sold--all those that were brought to the event.

Some guests to the booth argued that Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro had turned his back on Ernesto Che Guevara during the guerrilla campaign that Guevara headed in Bolivia. In October 1967 Guevara was captured in combat and murdered by Bolivian army forces, in an operation organized together with the CIA.

The real record of the Cuban government in supporting the campaign led by Guevara was addressed by Cuban president Fidel Castro in a speech he gave in 1987 on the 20th anniversary of Guevara's death, which can be found in the Pathfinder title Socialism and Man in Cuba. We also urged them to read Making History, interviews with four commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba that give concrete examples, through their lives, of the kind of men and women that a revolution helps create. Thirty-two copies of the Spanish-language edition of Making History were sold.

Others wanted to know why it appeared that U.S. president William Clinton had received a warm welcome in Vietnam during his recent visit to that country, given the ferocious attacks directed against that Asian nation by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. This led to discussions in which Pathfinder supporters compared the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party, which has consistently refused to buckle to imperialism and continues to set an example in the world today, and that of the Stalinist leadership in Vietnam, which has a long history of accommodation to Washington despite the heroic effort of the Vietnamese people in successfully resisting Washington's aggression.

We also pointed to the role that the Cuban leadership had played during the November 17-19 Ibero-American Summit in Panama, when it refused to sign a pro-imperialist resolution condemning the Basque independence organization ETA as terrorist without mentioning either the U.S.-sponsored terrorists attacks against Cuba or the repression of Palestinian people by the Israeli government.

Cuba has also refused to allow the establishment of the kind of "free-trade" zones existing elsewhere that give employers from imperialist countries free rein to hire and fire workers and establish the conditions of work in plants set up in these zones.

A big topic of discussion was fascism and anti-Semitism. Several dozen people visited the Pathfinder booth asking for books by Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, a noticeable increase over the previous year, and a sign of deepening class polarization in Mexico. In stores and markets in Guadalajara it is not uncommon for pins with a picture of Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara to be on display next to a bin of pins with swastikas on them.

On November 28, three young uniformed skinheads wearing swastikas wandered from booth to booth, provoking a big discussion among other youth there.

On the evening of December 2, when large crowds were inside the Expo, the booth of a Mexican City store containing books on sexuality was vandalized, resulting in several books being destroyed. In their final press conference, fair organizers complained about the presence of right-wing groups distributing literature inside the book fair.

Many youth also asked us about our views on anarchism. Pathfinder booth staffers pointed out sections of V.I. Lenin's State and Revolution and other titles that explained why communists reject the middle-class political outlook of anarchism and why "youth radicalism" without a working-class foundation and orientation can play into the hands of the fascists.

Titles by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and V. I. Lenin were very popular, as were those presenting a communist explanation of the roots of the oppression of women, and those on the Palestinian struggle.

Other top sellers were the Spanish-language edition of Capitalism's World Disorder, with 46 copies sold, and Habla Malcolm X (Malcolm X Speaks), with 20 copies sold.

Team members were able to pay brief visits to the University of Guadalajara, ITESO, a Jesuit University, and a high school connected to the University of Guadalajara where Young Socialists were invited to speak to classes by a professor who had earlier visited the booth and purchased books.  
 
Cuban publishers participate
Publishing houses from Cuba displayed books, videos, CD-ROMs, posters, and T-shirts from four contiguous stands. With a Cuban flag flying from the rafters overhead, this was one of the most popular stands in the fair, packed from beginning to end of the public sessions. Several of the 55 or so Cuban participants in the fair had received delays in their visas issued by the Mexican government, which resulted in some materials arriving late. By the end of the fair, however, most of the material on display there had been sold.

Cuban minister of culture Abel Prieto spoke one evening on his novel El vuelo del gato (The flight of the cat), a novel about Cuba both in the 1970s and during the special period of the early to mid- 1990s, following the collapse of that country's favorable aid and trade with the Soviet Union. Prieto was interviewed by the press on culture in Cuba today. Another program featured six Cuban novelists and poets discussing their work. A third program featured presentations on a range of other books and CD-ROMs on display at the Cuban stand.

Brazil has been selected as the featured country for the 2001 Guadalajara Book Fair. Cuba has been given the honor for the following year. In noting that Cuba would be the featured country in two years, Prieto told the press that this would provide an opportunity to display not only Cuban books but other aspects of Cuban culture, including music, dance, painting, and sculpture.
 
 
Related articles:
Volunteers mobilize to carry out two Pathfinder projects
'Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution' will be available in English
 
 
 
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