One of the greatest Mexican historians, Josep Maria Murià i Rouret (Mexico City, 1942), son of exiles, has just received at the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) the Homage to the Bibliophile José Luis Martínez, an award parallel to the which are awarded to the best writer and the best editor, since the organizers consider that “in the book chain, whoever writes them is as important as whoever edits them or who collects and preserves them.” Murià talks – in impeccable Catalan, without a hint of a Mexican accent – with this newspaper on Tuesday night, shortly after receiving his award and taking selfies with half the fair. The award-winning, double academic -of Mexican language and history-, in addition to being the world’s leading expert on issues such as the history of tequila (he has also studied charrería or mariachis) and the great historian of the state of Jalisco, contributed decisively, 37 years ago, to found the FIL (the largest literary fair in Spanish in the world), together with his friend Raúl Padilla (1954-2023).
-You grew up in Mexico, but living the idealized Catalonia that your parents and your exiled friends told you about. What was your first real contact with the country like?
-In 1964 I made my first trip to Catalonia, saving for a year, with a ‘travel now and pay later’ offer. When I arrived in El Prat, I got on a bus and a man sat next to me. I didn’t know what language to speak to him in, a panic attack came over me. What if everything my parents had told me for 20 years wasn’t true? Was Catalan still spoken? I didn’t have any proof. After a while, while it took me to control my anxiety, I asked him something stupid in Catalan… and he answered me in the same language. I held back tears: Catalonia existed, it was not a story that my parents had invented, like many others.
-What others?
-On a small scale, they told me that the good oranges were the Valencian ones. However, once there, I saw that you have to add sugar to the juice, which means that Mexican oranges are actually sweeter.
-Anna Murià was his aunt…
-Don’t talk to me, he was a bad person, poor thing.
-But a great writer.
-As a writer she was very great, all the merits, and she was also very intelligent, but as a human being… She was envious and not much of a lady. She married a younger guy, who, while she worked, dedicated herself to composing verses. When her husband died, she wrote again and was successful.
-What was your first contact with Franco’s Spain like, in 1964?
-It was a favorable time for Mexicans, the regime was celebrating ’25 years of peace’ and there was a diplomatic campaign to respect Mexicans, to see if our government would reestablish relations with Spain, something it refused to do as long as there was a dictator. . So, they put up with my rudeness, like the day I went to the Post Office to send some postcards addressing the official in Catalan. He told me: ‘Speak in Spanish’, I took the Mexican passport, put it on the table and blurted out: ‘I speak whatever the hell I want, bastard.’ They couldn’t force a Mexican.
-What Barcelona do you remember?
-The city was shit, I mean it stunk, frankly. But, after three days, you couldn’t smell it anymore… I wrote, returning: ‘This city stinks, the people are difficult… but I fell in love.’ I made my next trip in 1972 and I haven’t stopped coming. The day the newspaper ‘Avui’ came out, in 1976, there was a demonstration in Plaza Catalunya, I went to stick my head out, without doing anything or shouting, like a tourist, and a gray man hit me in the back, chased me and , because of some works, he got me hooked, the injury in my knee still hurts from the very strong blow he gave me. Of course, I punched him in the face, I also have the mark on my hand, look, it’s this white line.
-Did you pass banned books?
-Yes, from the first visit, Lorca’s ‘Romancero gitano’, bound with a cover of something else harmless, and several books in Catalan that had been passed to me by Catalans in Paris, where I stopped before.
-How many passports do you have?
-Only the Mexican. If one day they make Catalan, I will carry it with great dignity.
-But you have the Creu de Sant Jordi and the Order of Isabella the Catholic.
-The order of Isabel la Católica was given to me for personal reasons, almost of friendship, which are not relevant. I don’t brag much about her.
-What is charrería?
-I discovered that the word ‘charro’ comes from Basque, it is a derogatory word that means ‘weak’, ‘little thing’, it goes into Spanish in Salamanca to mean the opposite. Here they got upset because the charros feel very macho, a kind of superman.
-He happens to be the main historian of tequila.
-I have studied the origins. The Spanish drunks who settled here needed something to drink and noticed that the natives of the country made sugar from the agave plant and they distilled it to obtain alcohol.
-Now indigenousism is being vindicated, one of his passions.
-I was always interested in the native cultures of Mexico as an object of study. The Mayan Train works are bringing out new wonders, which are respected, because there is great awareness, and the course of the tracks is changed.
-You do not shy away from controversies about it.
-My life is a lawsuit. Do you know why Josep Borrell has not come to inaugurate the FIL? I sent him the message that if he came, he would make him a new face.
-Sorry?
-His statements about indigenous cultures are unacceptable, a great offense that denotes repulsive racism. We would have to change the Spanish mentality, remove what still remains of Francoism.
-But you did participate in the commemorations of the Quincentennial.
-I worked for a few years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico. I had done my thesis on pre-Hispanic society and European thought, which pointed out that the words that the Spanish used to refer to the original societies of Mexico were words imported from Europe that did not work: they spoke of ‘king’ or ’emperor’ to refer to Montezuma and that is why they did not understand that, once he died, his son would not succeed him, as he was precisely the only one who could not do so. There are authors from the 17th century who talked about the marquises, dukes and counts of the Aztecs, the conquistadors were very ignorant people. I always had an indigenous vocation, my teacher Miguel León Portilla, the most prominent scholar of the original thought of this country, was named president of the Fifth Centennial commission, and he took me on as technical secretary. We managed to talk about ‘encounter between two worlds’ and not ‘discovery’, which was the initial Spanish proposal.
-You founded the FIL with Raúl Padilla. What did you feel when Catalunya was the guest in 2004?
-We had to overcome a lot of pressure to achieve it. They wanted to invite a community from Spain and they didn’t know which one. The same Mexican president, Vicente Fox, called on the governor of Jalisco not to go to Catalonia, he told me, but the decision was autonomous from the university, which organizes the fair. An Andalusian counselor said publicly that it would be them, and Raúl Padilla then advanced Catalonia’s announcement so that they would not put more pressure. He took me by the arm and, looking at me, he told me: ‘We owe the key to everything to your father’, because my father had been his teacher.
-Is it true that the Lopez-Obrador government is against the FIL?
-So true that even last year groups of officials demonstrated at the door to not let us enter. They wanted to sabotage the FIL.
-His extensive work has demystified the Spanish exile…
-At least the idea we have of the exile as a whole. Next to great intellectuals and creators, I could give examples of absolutely repulsive characters, from my point of view. And I do not understand the feeling of superiority of some who arrived, in ‘If it were not for Mexico’ I explain that this country saved 150,000 European refugees from death, giving them effective and written protection, removing them from concentration camps, chartering ships. What other country in the world has done that, for refugees? Neither before nor now. There were three waves, the one in 1939, the one in 1942 (where my father came) and the third is the one after 1945, they no longer came with the status of refugees but they were often the relatives of those who were already there. I can assure you, because we have made the lists, that around 50,000 Spaniards arrived, not the 10,000 or 15,000 that is said.
