By Luis Felipe Rodriguez Palacios
In August of 1974, the Mexican writer Jose Manuel Pintado arrived in San Miguel de Allende. He was excited and motivated by the Latin American boom of writers, who had come on the scene and created a world movement—Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Julio Cortázar from Argentina, Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru, and Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz from Mexico. Pintado arrived in San Miguel with the intention of stimulating young writers through a literary workshop at the El Nigromante Cultural Center.
The Latin American literary boom came with the worldwide success of García Márquez’s novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” published in 1967. Then came the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala. Subsequently, two more Latin American authors received the award: García Márquez in 1982 and Vargas Llosa in 2010.
Several young people attended Pintado’s literary workshop. They experienced self-criticism of their work and began to work on their potential as writers. In December of 1974, Pintado, Ramón Téllez Trejo, and Gilberto Flores Varela began publishing a bimonthly magazine titled El Cuervo—The Raven—an allusion to Edgar Alan Poe’s famous poem. Pintado published a book of poetry, but the magazine was not successful. Pintado sought me out to restart the project, but without the support of Varela, who had gone to Canada, or that of Tellez Trejo or Enrique Patlan, who had gone to the United States, I did not dare attempt the revival of the magazine. But I carry a memory of those people who dreamt of being writers in their youth: Pintado, Elena Reséndiz, Cintya, Flores, Luis Leriche, Patlán, and José Martín C.
Pintado returned to Mexico City as a scholar and later developed a great career at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL)—the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature in Mexico City. Pintado also worked for the Department of Education and at Instituto Latinoamericano de Comunicaction Educativa (The Latin American Institute for Education Communication). He is a writer, reporter, television producer, and screenwriter, aside from other endeavors. Flores had already published three novels at the time and lives in Canada to this day.
INBAL’s objective is to preserve and disseminate artistic heritage, stimulate and promote the creation of the arts, and to develop education and research into the arts. The Institute functions at the federal level.
Here I share the covers of some of those magazines.
