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Juan Villoro: "Journalism is literature under urgency"

2022-10-02T10:39:44.322Z


The Mexican writer receives the award for excellence from the Gabo Foundation and talks to EL PAÍS about journalism and football


Mexican journalist Juan Villoro at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Roberto Ricciuti (Getty Images)

Editing an interview like this leaves a strange rude feeling, where cutting off is like interrupting when you speak.

The seductive capacity of the words of Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) have made him the best possible conversationalist, a mixture of anecdotes, passages and memory that make you adore Mexico City.

The governing council of the Gabo Prize, made up of prominent journalists, writers and academics, decided to award him the award for excellence "for the brilliant and inspiring set of his work and career" and the "own, deep and critical look that he projects in his exercise journalistic with rigor, ethics and exemplary talent”.

Villoro has written chronicles, reports —one of them winner of the King of Spain— but the jury recognizes the writer as the heir to the giraffes, the columns of Gabriel García Márquez, where he spoke the same about letters, men of science, statesmen;

on GB Shaw, Einstein and Churchill;

about comedians, about radio soap operas and movies;

about Princess Margarita, Lamparilla, the bandit of violence, and the singer Rafael Escalona, ​​the hydrogen bomb, the flying saucers.

In the same way, Villoro can dedicate his column to the hotels, for which he admires in front of his house, where each burned-out spotlight accuses of abandonment.

The last column dedicated to the earthquakes of September 19 is the perfect connection with the world

of Garcia Marquez

.

“There is no scientific explanation for the earthquakes of September 19.

The first two were a tragic coincidence.

One was missing to close the account and to quote López Velarde: “we only know one thing: that the world is magical”.

Question

.

Award for excellence, that forces you to be a good person.

Answer

.

I believe that all prizes are an act of goodwill from people who conspire to benefit you, but they are prizes that commit you.

I do not consider in any way that he deserves this award, but what you say is totally true, it is in a sentence of responsibility that I cannot avoid.

P.

The jury says that you are "a public service", something like a hospital or a punctual subway for your readers.

R.

_

I believe that journalism is a job of public attention.

It is a way of bringing data, information and interpretations to readers.

And in that sense it has a useful purpose.

When you write a novel you can put off your readers for a long time and that novel can secretly fail for many years, waiting for someone to discover it.

But journalism has an immediate mission and has to make sense to the community to which it belongs.

So, I think that we are public servants, to the extent that we try to give the orientation signs that people require.

If you want to move around a city you have to follow arrows to know where you are going.

To try to circulate in the world you also need arrows and it is the social work that journalism does.

P.

_

The ruling says that he is capable of going out into the street and turning any topic into a wonderful chronicle.

“Going outside” almost seems like a genre in itself.

R.

_

One of the wonderful things about this award is that it is associated with the figure of García Márquez and he taught us that it is possible to write about the most varied topics of reality.

If you know how to see it up close and if you know how to distinguish in them a sense of mystery.

There is a chronicle of hers called

She was not just any cow

, which is about a cow that arrives in the city of Cartagena, stands on a corner and does not move from there and changes the entire life of the city.

That minimal event that has to do with going out into the street, with observing an unusual event in the order of everyday life is a masterpiece of journalism and I think that García Márquez alerted us to see the streets in that way.

If you can discover something that surprises you in the usual neighborhood, you somehow reinvent reality.

The great lessons he received as a writer come precisely from journalism.

P.

_

I once heard him say that newspapers are getting thinner and journalists fatter.

R

.

I said that journalists are getting fatter and newspapers thinner, because journalists go out on the streets less, they have sedentary jobs and newspapers basically follow what happens on the Internet.

I think that in many newsrooms there is more interest in not losing what the rival newsroom is doing than in discovering the news itself.

And then the journalist who used to win the exclusive in a seedy bar or by being at a strange time in the place of certain events is increasingly rare because the journalist is anchored in front of the television screen, trying to write in their own newsroom, the same as other newsrooms are already writing so as not to lose the common tone of the important news.

So I think it's very refreshing to go back to the very origins of the craft,

that have to do with entering reality.

Let's see what surprises it holds for you.

P.

_

What is the state of health of journalism in Spanish?

R

.

There is a long tradition of journalism of the highest quality that has subsequently become literature in the great moments.

Journalism is literature under pressure and this has been demonstrated by José Martí and Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Ramón María del Valle Inclán and Martín Luis Guzmán and Gabriel García Márquez.

So many other authors and today also Alma Guillermo Prieto, Leila Guerriero.

In short, a host of very good authors of the language.

We have an extraordinary health of journalists.

Unfortunately, the media where they express themselves do not enjoy the same health, because it is a very complex moment in which newspapers can no longer function as an independent business model.

They have to rely on resources that do not necessarily have to do with the newspaper itself.

We are in a situation where technology allows information to compete with serious journalism.

It's the age of

fake news

and there is also a polarization in most societies that makes the media divide into opposite poles and postpone the search for the truth to dedicate themselves instead to propaganda of one sign or another.

So, in this very complex environment, there are not many quality media, nor is it easy to do the job, much less make a living from it.

But I think that the fact that there are notable journalists in the specific case of Mexico, we cannot fail to mention that only this year 15 journalists have been murdered in our country.

It is a high risk trade.

That is why I am going to donate this money that is associated with the prize to the Fifth Element laboratory, which is dedicated to supporting investigations by journalists in silenced areas, at risk, and tries to see the displacement of migrants and make reports that they have to do with victims and human rights.

It is the least I can do to repay the work of these extraordinary colleagues.

P.

_

Theater, chronicle, novel, columns, even television series.

Where do you look most comfortable?

R

.

Fortunately I don't feel comfortable in any genre.

If not, I wouldn't blame them.

I think one of the most interesting things is the nervousness that each of the genres causes you.

We know that the bullfighter without fear is not a bullfighter, an actor who does not get nervous is not an actor.

And well, there's this feeling of uneasiness.

It is a fundamental stimulus for the trade.

The interesting thing is that different genres arouse different nerves.

So, in the case of journalism you have to meet a delivery date, with a space limit, with a notion of clarity sufficient for it to be understandable to the readers of the particular medium in which you are collaborating.

On the other hand, a novel requires a long patience,

an anxiety always contained to be able to endure the relationships between the different characters for a long time and to cope with this long road that is one of tenacity, is of patience and where everything has to be connected.

I am like a tailor who has a series of fabrics and with them they ask me for a vest, pants, a shirt, an overcoat and he makes different garments, but always from the same garments, the same cloths.

I don't think about that personal brand thing.

P.

_

The chronicle is the platypus and an exotic bird that everyone talks about, but rarely seen.

Does this have anything to do with that newspaper crisis you were talking about?

R

.

Yes, at times the chronicle can be like the dodo bird that everyone thinks is a wonderful species, that must be protected, but few people have seen it and, above all, very few have seen it in its natural habitat.

The chronicle has a very great social prestige, because denying the value of the chronicle is practically equivalent to denying reality.

I don't know any editor in chief, any newspaper owner who dares to say 'I'm not interested in the chronicle' because it would be the same as saying 'I'm not interested in deep news'.

The practice of the genre is not easy if we think that in other countries a journalist can receive a salary for three months to write only one chronicle and that this text can have an extension of 20 pages.

That is a totally unattainable utopia for us.

P.

_

His book

De him Horizontal Vertigo

, a tribute to Mexico City is that platypus he talks about.

R.

_

You're right.

When I said that the chronicle was the platypus of prose.

I meant that all of us attribute traits of other animals to the platypus.

Indeed, it would seem to be the combination of five different animals, but its nature is not to be any of them and that is its essence.

The same goes for the chronicle.

It has elements of the report, the story, the memory, the essay, the interview, in short, everything.

It brings together traits from all the other genres, but it is none of them and that is its peculiar nature.

So, if we define the chronicle that way, then the texts of

Vertigo horizontal

indeed they have to do with that way of interpreting the genre.

There is a report about street children that sticks much more to the pure and simple report.

And there are other somewhat autobiographical passages that are closer to the memoir.

But basically most of the texts have to do with this combination of genres that, without being any of them, gives rise to another, which is the mysterious genre of the chronicle.

P.

_

Once he was reproached in the script of a series that he made dialogues that were too cultured.

How do you get along with the series genre?

R.

_

Yes, there was a golden age of the series and Jorge Carrión wrote a book about this moment called

Teleshakespeare

, which from the title indicated that the great narrative creativity was in the new television series, because it was a totally unprecedented phenomenon.

So projects like

The Sopranos

,

Wilder

,

Breaking Bad

,

Six Feet Under

and others profoundly renewed the art of telling long-winded stories.

But with mass culture it always happens that what starts out as an avant-garde very soon becomes routine.

It happened with television, it happened with cinema and it happened with rock and it has happened with television series.

Nowadays, when you arrive with a project, you find a surprisingly young executive, which is not a flaw, but a virtue, but who has not written an episode in his life.

And yet he has ideas of what the public wants.

And precisely they put young people, because most of the people who belong to the public are of that age so that they value what is valid and what is not,

and then there you enter a catastrophic situation for which all writers and that situation leads you to submit what you are trying to say to industrialized criteria.

So it is a long road of negotiation and litigation.

The most admirable thing about those who manage to impose good stories in the series is precisely that work of lawsuits and previous negotiations.

Personally, I do not have many ambitions in this regard and I think that the passage through the series was simply, let's say, a beautiful opportunity to fail.

P.

_

He has two militancies, Zapatismo and soccer.

R.

One of the worst things that can happen to a journalist is that the reader knows in advance what he is going to say.

Especially in opinion articles.

This is often the case and it seems to me that it is very poor for a columnist to become a routine propagandist for a cause.

It seems to me that one of the richest things that García Márquez did in his columns, which he called Las giraffes when he started in the newspapers of Barranquilla and Cartagena de Indias, was precisely to show that reality is much more varied than what we suppose and nobody could anticipate what topic she was going to write about.

So, this plurality of options, which should be a natural condition for newspapers, has become quite rare.

Having said that, I have had some topics in which I have tried to be neither nagging nor repetitive,

but consistent.

And one of them is the rights of the native peoples of Mexico, who live in a terrible situation.

There is a very large intra-historical colonialism.

When the conquest ended, 75% of Mexicans spoke at least one indigenous language.

After the colonial period, independent Mexico begins and today, 200 years later, only 6.6% of Mexicans speak an indigenous language.

The strange thing, as the linguist Yásnaya Aguilar has said, is that these languages ​​still exist.

It has been an admirable work of cultural resistance.

I am very interested in that cause and it has been represented in an emblematic way by the Zapatistas.

They have taken refuge in the municipalities that they have and have dedicated themselves to the heroic task of reinventing daily life.

It is remarkable how life has improved without having great economic support, but with a much more equitable distribution.

Wealth is a zone of equality, of totally different administration of justice, of direct and non-representative democracy.

Without gender discrimination.

In short, I think it is remarkable what has been achieved in the Zapatista caracoles, which is how they call their forms of local government, but it is still a pending commitment, not only for what is happening in Chiapas,

but for all indigenous communities that their voice may be heard.

I was very close to the campaign of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez

Marichuy

, who tried to be an independent candidate for the presidency as spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Council.

It was an important movement to point out that there is a Mexico that is not heard, a Mexico that is ignored, and that this Mexico exists and is part of our greatest cultural wealth.

P.

_

And about football, how do you see a World Cup being held in Qatar?

R

.

With what FIFA has become a very questionable association.

He has made pacts with leaders as unpresentable as Putin, who was the great host of the previous World Cup.

Or like Qatar, which is a country that violates human rights.

It will be played in air-conditioned stadiums because the ambient temperatures make the game of soccer unfeasible.

So, organized sport has reached a great moment of delirium.

FIFA was investigated a few years ago by the FBI, which ended Blatter's term.

And selectively, Latin American leaders were punished.

If Michel Platini, who was the second in command, had been Paraguayan, he would be in jail or at least disqualified from holding any position.

Beyond this misfortune, the magic continues to happen on the courts.

Football is that corruption,

but they are also the marvelous assists of Kevin de Bruyne, the unpredictable plays of Lionel Messi, Foden's off the hook and we will be able to see all of that in the World Cup.

The World Cup in Qatar will be one of the most contrasted in history, because it is a country that would not deserve it due to the type of government it has and the little relationship it has had with football.

But that's how crazy the world of football is, of course.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-10-02

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