There are moments when literature, history, and geography collide in unexpectedly moving ways. My late November visit to Guadalajara offered one such moment—an experience shaped by three overlapping currents: the epic scale of the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), the intimate scholarly space of the UC-Mexicanists’ convening and the chance to share my work on a long-forgotten Romantic encounter between Spain and Yucatán.
FIL Guadalajara, founded in 1987 by that city’s public university, is the largest book fair in the Spanish-speaking world. This year, Spain was the Guest of Honor, filling the halls of Expo Guadalajara with the writers, artists, and publishers, and a palpable energy around transatlantic literary exchange. The FIL is a cultural carnival—part marketplace, part think tank—where academic panels brush shoulders with poetry slams, and where one can overhear conversations about translation rights in one aisle and Mayan storytelling traditions in another. It is, in every sense, a living archive of Spanish-language cultures.
Nested within this sprawling celebration was the annual gathering of the UC-Mexicanists, a conference-within-a-conference curated annually through the dynamic scholarly vision of Sara Poot Herrera. This year’s panels offered deeply rooted explorations of Mexican literature and history, animated by personal reflection, archival work, and cultural critique. It was in this space—among friends and mentors, and in the expo atmosphere thrumming with books—that I gave my talk on a peculiar but telling episode of 19th-century cultural misrecognition.
Roughly translated to “An Andalusian in Yucatán: Romanticism, Misrecognition, and the Curious Case of Valladolid,” my presentation in Spanish revisited a trio of relatively little-known works by Antonio García Gutiérrez, the famed author of El trovador, written during his brief sojourn in Mexico. These plays—El duende de Valladolid, Los alcaldes de Valladolid, and El secreto del ahorcado—offered a bizarre yet revealing vision of Yucatán, crafted not from personal experience but from secondhand tales and the writer’s own Romantic imagination. In his hands, flatlands became mountains, Maya ruins transformed into medieval castles, and a real city—Valladolid—was remade in his imagination.
What fascinated me, and what I shared with the audience, was not only García Gutiérrez’s creative distortions but the local response: his fantastical dramas sparked a theatrical boom in Mérida’s Teatro de San Carlos, energized editors at El Registro Yucateco, and inspired young Yucatecan playwrights eager to see their region on stage—even if imperfectly rendered. It was a case study in cultural longing, in how Romantic idealism could simultaneously misread and inspire, distort and ignite.
Being able to share this story at UC-Mexicanists—before a room of scholars who know both the archives and the stakes—felt like a homecoming. It reminded me that scholarly dialogue, like serial narrative, is a long conversation across time. What begins in misreading can become a map. What starts in fiction can leave real traces in cultural history. What better place to reflect on these themes than FIL Guadalajara, a space that celebrates both the local and the transnational, the archival and the experimental. In the end, this trip was more than a conference or a book festival —it was a return to questions that first moved me as a student, now approached with the perspective of years, standing in the ever-evolving terrain where Spain and Mexico continue to meet in literature, memory, and imagination.My gratitude goes out to the organizers —especially to Sara Poot Herrera for her ongoing vision— and to the many Mexicanist colleagues who made the week so memorable.
Read more about this event here.
