On Monday night, the editor Cristina Urrutia, founder of Ediciones Tecolote, one of the most important children’s and youth publishing labels in our country, repeatedly awarded internationally for its quality, relevance, illustration and plot proposal, received the Tribute to Editorial Merit 2021 of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL Guadalajara)
The ceremony was held at the Juan Rulfo Auditorium at Expo Guadalajara with the presence of the Oscar-winning art director, Eugenio Caballero; the director and president of the fair, Marisol Schulz Manaut and Raúl Padilla López, and the rector of the University of Guadalajara, Ricardo Villanueva Lomelí, who was in charge of delivering the diploma that materializes the tribute to which Urrutia was the object, as well as the commemorative medal of the act.
Trust the intelligence of the reader
After being decorated, Urrutia declared that the publishing label was born under the thought that “children and young people should not be underestimated. We must bet the reader, trust his intelligence, offer him something different from what the trends strongly marked by the policies of the large cultural industries propose, take a risk against the cultural capitalism that permeates the increasingly globalized collective imagination and propose to the young person that he look into a different culture, with millenary roots that belong to you ”.
He added that Tecolote’s firearm has been the recovery, through the Ya Verás collection, of the historiographic value of the codices, colonial paintings, engravings, photographs, the creation of testimonial texts and, “in this way, bring the reader closer to the characters that made history, present them with a creative and sometimes even playful design ”.
One of the greatest satisfactions of his professional life, he assured, has been to see the impact that a book can have.
“Today, the panorama of children’s literature has changed and we can say that in Mexico we have a vast offer of books aimed at children. One of the great triggers of this transformation was the demand created by the SEP’s School Libraries and Classroom program. As a result of the creation of this program, the interest of the large national and international publishers to cover this market gradually emerged, since such a high circulation was obviously very profitable for them ”.
However, he said, this offer does not always respond to the true needs of young people, but to commercial criteria that seek quick and safe sale. “This is where small publishers like Tecolote play an important role, filling all those gaps that large companies do not address. Without an infrastructure that requires the recovery of large investments and with different purely commercial criteria, we are the ones who ventured into the development of new topics and the production of quality books that inform, instruct, educate and amuse at the same time ”.
Finally, he exhorted civil society to generate and participate in self-financing cultural projects “and thus avoid the ups and downs and vagaries of the six-year period.”
Loas for the children’s editor
Both Eugenio Caballero and Marisol Schulz dedicated words to the editor.
“I met Cristina through her posts before I met her personally. I remember nights when I would read owl books to my young children so that reading would become a habit, and I could not deny it, also to help them fall asleep, which was not the case because the reading sessions lasted for the many questions that these texts aroused in them, ”Caballero shared.
He highlighted the facet of the honoree that is attractive to him in particular, the curatorship. “In a huge publishing world, understanding why you buy the rights to a book should not be easy. In the case of Tecolote and its international alliances, I see a great coherence in its selection, being a natural extension of the concerns and themes touched on since the first books. The exchange is a bridge where readers from Mexico and from other countries learn about each other ”.
For her part, the fair’s director highlighted that: “at the beginning of the 90s, the panorama of the publishing industry in Mexico and the world was uncertain, as there was a complicated environment where economic tensions were present. I think it sounds familiar to us today. Difficulties were a daily issue for all those involved in the tasks of editing, printing, disseminating and promoting reading within and outside of our country. At that time, founding a publishing label oriented to literature for children and young people was something that the vast majority considered an unnecessary and perhaps daring action, but with total naturalness, Cristina Urrutia made the decision to create Ediciones Tecolote in 1993, a label that since its foundation it has been synonymous with quality, originality, proposals and talent, always with an always outstanding level of editorial care ”.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx