A journey to the city that was founded, with courage and pride, by a woman

Guadalajara (Mexico)A love ballad is playing in the taxi. Luis Miguel, one of the most popular icons of Mexican pop music of recent decades. The traffic is heavy, as it is every weekday mid-morning in Guadalajara, a city of more than one and a half million inhabitants preparing for one of its busiest annual cultural events, the International Book Fair.

In this 39th edition, The guest city of honor is BarcelonaAnd the arrival of writers, musicians, artists, politicians, and journalists—who in Guadalajara have a museum in a building with a curious and revealing name, El Palacio de los Perros (The Palace of the Dogs)—has already begun. A total of a thousand people have traveled to the capital of Jalisco to represent "Barcelona from a fiercely current and very diverse point of view," as Barcelona's mayor, Jaume Collboni, commented at the spectacular Musu Cabañas, during the presentation of two of the four exhibitions that can be seen in the coming months at two of the city's art centers.

The first is The women will sell"It focuses on the open and contested plural body that is Barcelona from the 19th century to the present day, passing through the civil war and the transition, through the eyes of almost a hundred women protagonists, including writers such as Mercè Rodoreda, Montserrat Roig and Maria Aurèlia Capmany, but also photographers like Colita and artists Mari Chordà"Ingrid Guardiola recalled in Guadalajara, one of the three curators of the exhibition, along with Anna Maria Iglesia and Mita Casacuberta.

The second exhibition at the Cabañas Museum features three artistic-musical installations by Cabosanroque, Three ways to enterInspired by three classics of Catalan literature—Jacint Verdaguer, Mercè Rodoreda, and Joan Brossa—the trilogy of installations "took a lot of work and left us exhausted," says Roger Aixut, one half of the duo with Laia Torrents. Even so, Cabosanroque has already begun planning a new installation for next year that will pay tribute to Blai Bonet on the centenary of the poet's birth.

"Raise the Spanish flag immediately, please!"

"The State of Jalisco has a great number of tourist attractions, but it goes beyond that," proclaimed Pablo Lemus Navarro, its governor. "We must remember that it was founded by a woman, Beatriz Hernández," he added. "With great courage and pride, she did it." It was in 1542 that Hernández led the settlement of some seventy itinerant Spanish families in the Atemajac Valley, with the following words:Folks, we're staying here, my rooster is king and we're staying here for better or for worse.!".

After this brief history lesson, a gust of wind knocked down one of the four flags in the courtyard of the Cabañas Museum, where the opening of the two exhibitions was taking place. "Raise the Spanish flag immediately, please!" and a plea for it to be raised. Alongside these two fallen symbols, the flags of the cities of Barcelona and Guadalajara stood firm.

On the way to the Museum of Arts of the University of Guadalajara (MUSAG), where two other exhibitions were opening—one on Barcelona's editorial design, the other on Catalan digital creativity—dozens of restaurants and food stalls offered tacos and drinks while cars drove by calmly. The faces of dozens of missing citizens were printed on the walls, the darkest and most disturbing side of a country where drug trafficking continues to define daily life.

Inside the MUSAG, the curator of the exhibition The books of BarcelonaEnric Jardí summarized its content as follows: "Design has accompanied the publishing industry since the birth of bookstores in the mid-19th century. The exhibition begins by recalling that, for a long time, printers acted as publishers of the book, the first industrial product in history." The books of Barcelona It proudly displays Jordi Fornas's pop-inspired designs for La Cola de Paja, published by Edicions 62, the iconic collections Julio Vivas created for Anagrama, and the work of Tono Cristòfol, Jordi Duró, and the Setanta studio for publishers such as Periscopi, L'Altra, and Blackie. "A good cover should invite you to read and not give away any false clues about what you'll find inside the book," Jardí added. Anna Guitart, curator of Barcelona's literary and cultural program, admitted at the fair, while workers were putting the finishing touches on the Catalan pavilion, that she was facing "the opening with nerves, excitement, and great enthusiasm." "When we started working with the fair, we realized that there are authors who are very important to us, like Mercè Rodoreda, who were very little known here," she continued. "Being here aims to correct this situation, and we believe it will be a good start, because there is great curiosity about Barcelona and Catalonia, and because the program we are presenting is very talented."