The Militant (logo) 
   Vol.65/No.48            December 17, 2001 
 
 
Pathfinder titles spark discussion
at Guadalajara, Mexico, book fair
 
BY FRANCISCO PICADO  
GUADALAJARA, Mexico--"This is wonderful," said Francisco Pérez Romo, a 25-year-old Spanish literature teacher at a local high school, as he looked around this year's Pathfinder booth at the Guadalajara Book Fair. Pérez was one of the more than 300,000 visitors to the fair in this city, the most populous in the state of Jalisco.

Pérez's reaction to the display was not uncommon among many participants in the internationally renowned book fair who got a chance to see Pathfinder titles for the first time. "You tell me these books are from the United States, but you all speak Spanish," he said with a look of disbelief. Staffers at the booth explained the history of the publishing house and how widely the Spanish language is used among working people in the United States.

Pérez was handed four titles in the course of the explanation: The Changing Face of U.S. Politics; Cuba and the Coming American Revolution; Capitalism's World Disorder; and Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution. Pérez chose the latter two. "If I knew I was going to run into you, I would have saved my money," he said. Pérez came back later with a number of his students, who bought the Communist Manifesto and the pamphlet, The Working Class and The Transformation of Learning.

"I got this one last year," said Ernesto González Urritia, a first-year student from the University of Monterey, as he showed a copy of the Spanish edition of Lenin's Final Fight to a couple of friends. Like González, a number of young people and workers who visited the booth this year had visited the Pathfinder booth in previous years.

Visitors asked countless times, "Is there a place to get these books in Mexico?" Many were pleased to learn about the coming inauguration of pathfinderpress.com, the publishing house's web site, planned to be up and running after the first of the year.

This year Pathfinder sold a total of 447 titles in Spanish, English, and French. Among the best sellers were The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, the final copy of which was sold on the second-to-last day. Fifty-three copies of the Spanish edition of Che Guevara Talks to Young People were sold, along with 30 copies of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, and 18 copies of Capitalism's World Disorder in Spanish. Also sold out two days before the conference ended was Thomas Sankara's Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle. A total of 67 English-language titles were sold, including several copies of Marxism and Terrorism and Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, along with My Life and the History of the Russian Revolution, all by Leon Trotsky; Malcolm X Speaks; and Nelson Mandela's The Struggle is My Life.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home