In the more than two decades of the fair we have been absorbing halls and days, until a moment came, five or six years ago, when we reduced one day to the date, because we did not stop growing”.
Fernando Macotela, director of the FIL Mining.
The Palacio de Minería International Book Fair (FILPM) is a victim of its own success. The emblematic building on Tacuba Street, in the Historic Center of Mexico City, has witnessed memorable moments of the annual meeting between writers and disseminators with a sui generis public. The corridors, halls and patios of Minería have seen rivers of people flow and innumerable queues form waiting for editorial presentations and conversations by writers with overflowing calls.
In those rows lawsuits were dissolved and solutions improvised. There are plenty of anecdotes. They are shared generously by Fernando Macotela, who took the helm of the fair in 1999 and who has seen the meeting grow to a huge offer of more than 1,500 activities over 12 days inside a building with small corridors that on weekends week were impassable.
That, along with all the variables of a pandemic that has not ended, were the reasons why the 43rd edition of the also called FIL Minería, to be held from March 24 to April 3, will repeat for the second consecutive year with a virtual version and reduced to approximately 100 activities.
Why do it again in virtual mode?
Although right now the pandemic in Mexico is in a clear decline, three months ago the panorama due to the scourge of the omicron variant did not give a truce and further back it was uncertain.
“The great problem of a fair in the pandemic is that the decision of whether it is going to be held face-to-face or virtual is not entirely in our hands. We are used to organizing it up to a year and a half in advance, with the selected poster and the given dates”, details the director, and acknowledges that the characteristics of the property, which in many of the spaces forces the public to be close, was another factor to bet again on virtuality.
“I haven’t said it for a long time, but, quite rightly, writers have become the stars of the fairs. Many times they slammed doors on us, even breaking down the Assembly Hall door and hurting people. It cost us blows, but the fair was finding a way.
“Mining has become less a fair of best sellers and more one of specialized books, but that does not mean that all kinds of copies are not sold. We must also understand that we are not organizing a physics congress, but a book fair that is used to spread and disseminate culture. That is one of the normative functions of UNAM. In short, here you can enter anything, as long as you have the level that the university requires”.
Have you considered moving venues?
“It was tried,” says Macotela. “At the time, Gerardo Fernando Bravo (rector of the Faculty of Engineering from 1999 to 2007) asked us for four or five scenarios where we could take the fair. It cost us a real job. One of them was to do it in three facilities of the Historical Center and another, to put it with pneumatic tents in the University Cultural Center (CCU). We gathered the four or five scenarios and presented them to the Caniem board of directors”, he recalls, but then the committee opted for Mining with all its advantages and limitations.
In the second half of the 1990s, recalls Macotela, the FILPM had an appendix in the lower part of the National Art Museum (Munal) and in 1998 an extension was set up in San Ildefonso. But none of the attempts were successful.
The Exhibition and Congress Center (CEC), in Ciudad Universitaria, was also considered to completely emigrate the fair at the suggestion of the rector Enrique Graue. “I had to tell him: ‘Mr. Rector, in Mining we have 5,000 square meters and here (the CEC) there are 4,000. In Mining we are perfectly located and there is no way to get to the space in CU’”. Finally, he shares: “here we stay and do what we can”.
Gender, the star theme
“The first thing I did for this fair was talk to the newly created Gender Equality Coordination, because it had to be the star of the fair. Gender equity is a priority issue. The Center for Gender Research and Studies and the University Program for the Study of Cultural Diversity and Interculturality will also participate,” she shares.
It highlights some of the books to be presented as part of this strengthened program. One of them is the issue Gender in Criminal Law: Feminist Criticism of Punitive Illusion, by Lucía Núñez and edited by the aforementioned center. Likewise, the Faculty of Arts and Design will present the exemplary Trajectory of women in the San Carlos Academy, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries: model, student, teacher and artist. 1794 – 1912, by Elizabeth Fuentes, with the assistance of the rector.