Six years ago, we began sending writers from the Hay Festival in Querétaro (Mexico) to Dallas, taking advantage of the fact that there was a direct flight on the Sunday morning of the festival. This expanded the scope of the festival to the neighboring country, creating an exchange of ideas with the United States, a country with a complex relationship with Mexico.
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We especially liked that the event in Dallas was an extension of the Querétaro Festival and not the other way around. We collaborate with the bilingual bookstore The Wild Detectives, created by the lyricist Javier García del Moral, and with three universities. Over the years, authors such as the Mexicans Alma Guillermoprieto, Joselo Rangel, Emiliano Monge, Cristina Rivera Garza, the Argentine Hernán Díaz or the Colombians Juan Cárdenas or Pilar Quintana, among others, filled auditoriums in Dallas.
The Hay Festival Forum in Dallas was growing in participation and expectation and this year, we decided to separate the event from the Hay Festival Querétaro and do it a month later, in mid-October, to be able to offer activities from Friday, October 11 to Sunday the 13th, including the emblematic headquarters of Texas Theater, also located in the creative neighborhood of Oak Cliff, known for being the place where Lee Harvey Oswald, JF Kennedy’s assassin, was arrested.
On Friday night, the patio of The Wild Detectives bookstore was filled to listen to Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, who launched a harsh criticism of his country The United States and its narratives. According to Viet, if you are of Vietnamese or Asian origin you soon realize that Hollywood stories are there to destroy you since the stories and the way they are told are deeply racist and he advocated for new narratives that better represent their countries of origin.
The next morning I headed over to a meet and walk about the history of Oak Cliff. A group of descendants shared the story of a community that, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, sought to create a society free of repression. In 1852, Fourier follower Victor Considerant chose Dallas to establish a colony in what is now West Oak Cliff. However, terrain conditions made agricultural success difficult, leading to the failure of the socialist experiment, and many settlers returned to France or moved to other cities. However, some stayed and prospered, paradoxically, through capitalism, the system they sought to avoid. The descendants, whom we met, now seek to preserve this history.
Chronicle of the Hay Festival Forum Dallas 2024
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Exciting first talk of the afternoon withn the poet Natalia Toledo who tells us that she is made of the words of the women of her house in Zapotec, before her education in Spanish began. In Zapotec, poetry has several names: chosen word, flower word, sweet word with aroma, and word that embodies truth and power.
Next, Canadian John Vaillant, author of The Time of Fire, explained that fire is present in our daily and urban lives, in houses, cars, and warned about the increasing intensity of fires due to climate change. It made us see that we are facing a 21st century wolf with a 20th century straw house in an uncertain climate where we are living experiences exacerbated by natural changes never before experienced.
At the Afroperreo party, on Saturday night, October 12, I met Robert Samuel, a Washington Post journalist, who, together with Toluse Olorunnipa, wrote a biography of George Floyd, denouncing systemic racism in the United States. His research included more than 400 interviews to understand how society repeatedly failed Floyd and the black community at large, earning them the Pulitzer Prize.
On the morning of Sunday the 13th, the Mexican writers and activists Dahlia de la Cerda and the Argentine Dolores Reyes advocated for completely free abortion in a state where it is illegal in most cases. The current law, known as the “Activation Law,” prohibits abortion from conception and makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. Individuals who perform or facilitate an abortion may face severe criminal penalties, including large fines and imprisonment.
The festival closed with a rockstar writer, Mariana Enriquez, who commented that the rise in interest in crime and true crime series is a sign of the times in which we live. He was concerned that we live in uncertain and complex times where we are creating technology we cannot control, destroying the atmosphere and electing openly questionable leaders. When she started writing the horror genre that characterizes her so much, she was afraid that reality would crack and now it is happening. Your fear has become reality.
Hay Festival Forum Dallas 2024 talks.
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In a not entirely conscious way we gave voice to the different Americas: the Asian, the Latin and the black in a moment of social polarization increased by the ravages of climate change and on the threshold of elections where perhaps we will risk the future of democracy. All the taboos and all the cultural wars were freely discussed and the eminent elections were present transversally in many of the talks. There is fear and a certain pessimism.
We will see under Which President will the next Hay Festival Forum 202 take place?5. In any of the possible results there will be a need to talk, to meet, to reflect.
But I’m going with the words of John Valliant, which were repeated in a nuanced way in the different talks, and also echoed Rebeca Solnit’s messages at the last Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias. In times of crisis, he recalled, people collaborate more than ever and solidarity flourishes and collective action is our greatest resource, it is our super power. Let’s not forget it. And let’s continue creating spaces that inspire this collective action.
Cristina Fuentes La Roche
Hay Festival International Director
