At 10 a.m. on December 16, 1929, a discreet and hurried funeral procession left one of the houses located on the seventh avenue between 22nd and 23rd streets, towards the San Camilo cemetery, in the small town that was then Pereira. . The deceased was the poet Julio Cano Montoya, whom the Pereirans had consecrated in life, giving him the title of “poet of Pereira” and the authorship of the lyrics of the hymn that is still sung with pride at public events. He had been attacked by the Koch Bacillus, which at that time produced terror and against which the vaccine was just being tested. According to his death record, he was 52 years old.
“A very select group of gentlemen, friends and admirers of the delicate disappeared Aeda, made the honor guard of the corpse. On his tomb there was a brief silence, a beautiful homage to the simple soul of the disappeared and after covering his grave with all the floral offerings that friendly hands sent to the mortuary room, and the procession returned to the city, with the spirit sick and desolate, as if the sadness of the rainy and painful morning were copied ”, published in its evening edition of that day the newspaper The newspaper.
Julio Cano practiced the profession of dentist. He was the son of the doctor Delfín Cano Uribe, brother of the founder of El Espectador, Fidel Cano Gutiérrez. Everything indicates that Don Julio was not born in the ‘Villa de Cañarte’, but that he was brought to it just a few months old, since the news about the arrival of his father dates from 1878, although he was already in the surroundings doing part of the liberal armies that fought in the civil war of 1876.
After his death, the fame of Julio Cano declined until the death of the last of his admirers and due to the rise of the figure of Luis Carlos González, who replaced him in the memory of the Pereiranos. Cano, in addition to delivering his compositions to numerous newspapers and magazines that circulated during the first three decades of the twentieth century, published in 1914 his only book: Outbreaks of Rebellion and Submissive Voices, published in the Nariño Printing Office and of which there is only news of the existence of a copy owned by the National Library of Colombia. Only until 2015, thanks to the calls of the Municipal Institute of Culture and Tourism Promotion, was it possible for the new readers of Pereira to be able to read a selection of the poems of who was considered the first intellectual in the history of the city.
I mention the case of Julio Cano to show an example of how the mechanisms of forgetting operate. It’s not the only one. Suffice it to also cite the case of his brother, Rafael Cano Montoya, a talented chronicler and poet, murdered almost a month after the death of Don Julio, in what is perhaps the first case of press censorship to occur in Pereira. The prestige of the poet or novelist succumbs with the last of his readers, unless there are powerful systems of memory transfer, complementary to orality and occasional fleeting publications. There is an oblivion always lurking behind every ego. Obviously, literary tastes also change over time.
Hence the importance of continuing to join efforts to identify our literary memory, promoting research, reflection, circulation and discussion on written literature in the city and the region in all its eras. There are already significant advances with the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in literature at the Technological University, the festivals and book fairs, as well as the current literary collections. However, it is worth asking how these efforts are ‘penetrating’ the collective memory, at least of the ‘small reading mass’ of the city. The premise is that where there is a reader, a writer will always be alive and, after all, they are the ones who essentially make a literature.
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