WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 13THE BORDER AS
A CHARACTER
The border between Mexico
and the U.S. can mean different
things to different people
BY LEYLHA AHUILE AND DAVID UNGER
David Unger is a Guatemalan author, translator, CCNY
professor, and the international representative of FIL.D
uring an unusually warm October 4–6 weekend,
LéaLA, the Spanish-language book fair, returned
to Los Angeles after a four-year absence, albeit in
a different format. Organized by the University of
Guadalajara USA Foundation and backed by the
Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), the
2019 LéaLA was a literary festival.
At its peak as a fair, LéaLA drew 80,000 people to the Los
Angeles Convention Center, but for the literary festival orga-
nizers opted to create a more intimate environment and moved
the event to the Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a Mexican-American
museum and cultural center that is the heart of the Hispanic,
predominantly Mexican community, in Los Angeles. The
change was made in large part to create greater dialogue among
the authors, special guests, and the public at large.
The theme of this year’s festival was the U.S.–Mexico border,
a topic that dominates discussions in the communities in the
southern California region. Los Angeles, home to the second-
largest Hispanic population in the U.S., is only 200 miles from
the border. The festival also celebrated the Spanish language, a
topic featured in many of LéaLA’s panels. Given the recent back-
lash against people who speak Spanish, the festival organizers
and speakers took a very strong stance on the importance of
keeping Spanish alive. As the ex-mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio
Villaraigosa, said, “We also need to learn English. We are two
wings of the same bird. We must learn Spanish and English well
because the border, one day, not today, but some day, will become
more fluid, and those that are truly bilingual will succeed.”
PW was present at LéaLA and on Friday attended the inau-
gural panel, featuring journalist Lydia Cacho. Described by
Amnesty International as “perhaps Mexico’s most famous inves-
tigative journalist and women’s rights advocate,” Cacho focuses
her reporting on violence against and sexual abuse of women and
children. Today, Cacho is living in exile in the U.S., as her life
has been threatened in Mexico and her home there invaded. That
experience resonated with audience members as Cacho reminded
them that not everyone immigrates for economic reasons.
The first presentation on Saturday, titled “The Border as a
Character,” included authors Carmen Boullosa, Margarita de
Orellana, and Rodrigo Blanco, and was moderated by David
Unger. The border was not only the title of this panel and theme
of the festival but it also became the main character.
In his opening remarks introducing the panelists, Unger
observed that the border is not simply geographical or a physical
barrier, a land one crosses, a navigable sea like the Mediterranean,
a supposedly impassable wall. It can also be a character. In a
sense, he said, it could be a real and armed person: an American
or Mexican soldier, an ICE agent, a member of the U.S. National
Guard. The border can also be a mental projection, without flesh
and blood, without physical existence. It could be the result of
paranoia. There is so much conflict on the border between
Mexico and the United States, Unger said, yet the border is a
no-man’s-land like the old Berlin Wall.
Marisol Schulz, director of LéaLA and FIL, closed the fair
with a conversation about culture and community between
Villaraigosa and Marcela Celorio, consul general of Mexico in
L.A. With so much going on in the Spanish-speaking com-
munity, Schulz said, “LéaLA will be absent no more: we will
return in 2020.” ■LéaLA’s opening panel featured
Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho.© léala/lola estudio© léala/josué nando
Attendees at LéaLA were encouraged to respond to the question,
“What does the border mean to you?”