America conquers Barcelona KM America

Many years later, in front of the Gabriel García Márquez Library, the people of Barcelona will remember that remote afternoon, on June 16, 2022, when the city’s Latin American literature festival was inaugurated.

In effect, Barcelona – the former capital of the boom, in those sixties and seventies – is betting, in the 21st century, on completing its publishing power with qualitative events and appointments (Kosmopolis, BCNegra, Foro Edita…) among which, from yesterday, Km América appears, a festival that celebrates its first edition until Sunday, with more than thirty participants (22 writers from eleven countries) in the various round tables and performances.

“Reading is feeling like a community again”, summarized the atmosphere Núria Bendicho

The director of the contest, the Mexican (and Barcelonan) Eduardo Ruiz Sosa called, at the opening, “to overcome any type of nationalism among us, both those of language and those of border”. And the first day of Km América was an example of dialogue between Catalan, Chilean, Colombian, Argentine, Dominican, Mexican authors… from different generations, who found several points in common in their works, such as the new treatment of violence against women, multiple identities, a vindication of the peripheries and dissidence and, as if we were in Sunrise, which is no small thing, a devotion shared by Faulkner, who, for the Costa Rican Carlos Fonseca “is the Latin American writer par excellence, here Vanessa Londoño has vindicated him, as in his day Gabo, Vargas Llosa, Piglia… at that moment in which the present is flooded from the past Faulkner always appears to us, with his torrential downpours”.

“I haven’t been in Latin America for a long time, but reading them is feeling like a community again,” Núria Bendicho summarized the prevailing climate. Organized by Casa Amèrica Catalunya and Biblioteques de Barcelona, ​​the first day fulfilled its objectives: in addition to the dialogues (which can be followed via streaming), the room was filled and the capacity of the auditorium had to be increased, something that the building designed by Elena allows Orte and Guillermo Sevillano.

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Lara Gomez Ruiz

For a first day, the question of “who are we?” was not a bad question. Fonseca, who emigrated to Puerto Rico at the age of 7, explained that “I was already at a point of identity ambiguity, which led me to Latin America, because being Latin American is a way of being everything. I studied in the US and there they confuse all our countries, I appropriate that fantasy of colonial places”.

Constanza Ternicier admitted that her novel The trajectory of aircraft in the air “He has an adolescent hatred of Chile, where the social explosion germinates. I place it between Barcelona and a hospital in London, the place where Pinochet could have been prosecuted and was not”.

One of the tables dealt with islands, Caribbean, Mediterranean, Atlantic… There the Majorcan Llucia Ramis said that “those of us who were born on tourist islands, the whole world tramples on us”, but that “one way to get out of there is the creation”. Laura Restrepo spoke of another type of island: “In Bogotá, class and economic status brutally isolate you. What happens when the rich and poor islands touch? The result is appalling”, as she reflected her in The Divines.

For the Argentinian Selva Almada, author of It’s not a river “Years ago, femicides were not even called that, they were described as isolated acts of violence. Today we show that they are part of the social fabric of a culture crossed by machismo”.

Dominican Sorayda Peguero Isaac, a resident of Sabadell, recalled her reading as a student, “when all the authors who made us read were men, like Juan Bosch or Joaquín Balaguer, none of them looked like anyone I knew.” In its A firefly passed by here He talks “about Celia Cruz, but also about a girl who was passing by my street and was raped. Everyone knew it, and no one said anything.”

The festival continues today, from 6 pm to 9 pm, with the aforementioned authors and others such as Martín Caparrós, Víctor Balcells or Marta Aponte Alsina.

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