Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years by Ilan Stavans

Author:Ilan Stavans [Stavans, Ilan]
Format: epub
Tags: Criticism, Autobiography, Garcia Marquez; Gabriel, Authors; Colombian - 20th century, Latin American Literature, Authors; Colombian, 20th Century, Garcâia Mâarquez; Gabriel;, Caribbean & Latin American, Literary, Literary Criticism, Biography: Literary, Garcia Marquez; Gabriel - Prose & Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, Literature - Classics, General, 1928-, Biography
ISBN: 9780312240332
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The Silver Screen

In early June 1961, Garcia Marquez, Mercedes, and their almost-two-year-old Rodrigo arrived in Mexico City. He was in his mid-thirties, with just $100 in his pocket, the remnants of a sum Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza had wired to him. To support the family, Garcia Marquez started working for a couple of advertising agencies, among them J. Walter Thompson. In the words of a journalist who met him at the time, he was "stocky, but light on his feet, with a bristling mustache, a cauliflower nose, and many fillings in his teeth. He wears an open sport shirt, faded blue jeans, and a bulky jacket fl ung over his shoulders."1

People were impressed by his unpretentiousness. In an interview, he was described thus: "he talks fast, snatching thoughts as they cross his mind, winding and unwinding them like paper streamers, following them in one end and out the other, only to lose them before he can pin them down. A casual tone with a deep undertow suggests he is making a strateg y of negligence. He has a way of eavesdropping on himself, as if he were trying to overhear bits of a conversation in the next room. What matters is what is left unsaid."2

El De Efe, as the city was known (after its acronym for Distrito Federal), was an exciting cultural capital. With a population of approximately four million people, it was brewing with all types of business deals. Barely two decades after the end of the campensino revolution--the first of its kind in the twentieth century, prior even to its Bolshevik counterpart in Russia--the populist president Lazaro Cardenas, who had promised to give Mexicans what "rightfully belonged to them," nationalized the oil industry and formed a state-run company called PEMEX.

That was in 1938, and the uproar that ensued pushed the nation's markets to an impasse. But Cardenas's decision resulted in the so-called el milagro mexicano, the Mexican Miracle, a period of economic bonanza that lasted four decades, from 1940 to 1980. A single party was in power, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, known as P.R.I. Although it ruled with an iron fist, a democratic atmosphere prevailed (freedom of expression, openness to foreign investment, a thriving print, radio, and television media, and a multi-party system). However, the presidential election, which came up every six years, was always won by the handpicked P.R.I. candidate.

The city was defined by its cosmopolitanism. In the thirties El De Efe was a safe haven for refugees and exiles from the Spanish Civil War, who flocked to Mexico in hordes. Their presence redefined education, media, and publishing. During the early years of World War II, Mexico, although it was neutral, deployed a small battalion to fight in the European front, the Escuadron 201 (201st Air Fighter Squadron). It was attached to the U.S. Army Air Forces, which was engaged in the liberation of the Philippine island of Luzon in 1945. Rivalries and disillusionment in Russia and elsewhere brought Leon Trotsky and photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tina Modotti, to Mexico.

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