Paco Ignacio Taibo II: An advocate for reading books in the era of TikTok

Mexico City — 

He is among Mexico’s most celebrated novelists, historians and left-wing activists. But Paco Ignacio Taibo II is best known for his fictional alter ego: Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, a one-of-a-kind private eye confronting injustice, corruption and crime in the noir depths of 1970s Mexico City. The gumshoe’s exploits, punctuated with suspense, dark comedy and a motley cast unique to the demimonde of the Mexican capital, have been made into films and a Netflix series and translated into English and other languages.

Taibo, 75, has penned more than 40 books, among them nine Belascoarán mysteries, biographies (subjects include Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Gen. Francisco “Pancho” Villa) and ruminations on signature historic events, such as the 1968 Mexico City student protests, in which he was a participant.

The prolific author also serves as a kind of cultural commissar, heading the government’s publishing house, El Fondo de Cultura Económica, which has published 10,000-plus titles across genres in its august, 90-year history. El Fondo has bookstores in Mexico — the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking nation — and others throughout Latin America and Spain.

Taibo’s longtime friend and leftist compadre, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s former president, tapped him for the publishing post. López Obrador’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, who took office in October, reappointed him to the post.

Taibo spoke to The Times at a cafe outside El Fondo’s main bookstore in Mexico City. The author, in jeans and a red polo shirt, chain-smoked Marlboros and sipped Coca-Cola — mainstays of a U.S. culture that he often disdains — as he held forth on literature, politics, reading in the digital age and mortality. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is El Fondo de Cultura Económica?

El Fondo is a publisher with a degree of independence from the government, co-financed by the apparatus of the state and its own book sales. At the same time it’s a center for the promotion and stimulation of reading.

We publish 40 books a month and reach out to readers with libro-buses [libraries on wheels].

El Fondo has changed since you took charge.

We inherited [in 2019] a structure with a lot of corruption, incapacity, ineptitude. We had more than 100,000 books — many by young authors — not distributed, sitting in a warehouse. What we said was: “We are going to edit, promote and distribute these books at a low price so that they find their readership.” We changed all the rules of the game.

Some have criticized you for shifting El Fondo’s focus from academic texts to more populist — and less expensive (some El Fondo booklets sell for $1 or less, and relatively few books cost more than $25) — works of fiction, children’s literature and illustrated works.

That’s not true. A very important portion of the books we publish each month has to do with science. … But our priority is making books available to people who often don’t have access to them — because of the price, the distribution network, whatever.

Is helping young writers a priority?

They are a natural source, but it’s not a question of quotas. My brother used to joke: “Until when can someone be considered a young poet? Until age 50.” But we do have a specific collection of young authors from outside the capital [Mexico City]. We want to extend our reach to writers who don’t have access to publishing.

In the digital era, how much of a challenge is it to promote books, especially among the young?

Obviously this is a time with very strong pressures toward distraction, the mobile phone. We [publishers] are no longer the bosses of the game. We have to battle. We now have six programs on TV each week speaking about books, and seven on radio. We make TikToks and whatever else we have to do to convince adolescents that reading is fun.

Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

(Cecilia Sanchez Vidal / For The Times)

El Fondo has a distribution hub for its collection in San Diego, and also a mobile “book truck” visiting schools, libraries, etc., in that area. Might El Fondo expand its reach among Spanish speakers in the United States?

I have to go to Los Angeles to see what the possibilities are to make a good bookstore and a cultural center. We can’t do it alone. We would have to associate ourselves with independent Hispanic booksellers.

There’s a perception that the current age of Latin American literature pales in comparison with the “boom” years of the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, etc. What’s your take?

You really can’t compare. Give it time. Maybe now is not as brilliant as the boom, but you need distance to judge. I was very, very fortunate: I read Latin American literature like crazy in my youth. … And of course there have been some advances, some expanses of genres, since then. … In the 1980s Latin American authors took on the dimension of la novela negra [the “noir,” or dark, novel], police mysteries that mixed the criminal with the social milieu. I am part of that movement.

Belascoarán Shayne stands somewhere on the gumshoe spectrum between Sam Spade and Columbo — but is very much a chilango, or Mexico City native. He clings to a sense of decency amid an atmosphere of moral decay, sometimes verging on the surreal. His loyal Dr. Watson is a plumber. The detective’s singular pedigree: He’s the son of an Irish folk singer mom and a Basque sea captain dad.

But he’s absolutely Mexican.

As a child, you emigrated to Mexico with your family from Spain. That was after the Spanish Civil War. Did that epochal conflict resonate in your home?

My grandparents participated in the war. One died and one was put in jail.

They were Republicans against Francisco Franco?

Republicans of course! I would die of shame if not.

You are an outspoken supporter of ex-president López Obrador and President Sheinbaum, and their proclaimed “transformation” of Mexican society. What about critics who say Mexico is on a path to a one-party, authoritarian state?

Authoritarian, really? Did they forget something? The time in Mexico when there was a congress with 315 [ruling-party] deputies and one independent? That wasn’t that long ago. And a time when the president was elected via fraud? A country that resolved its conflicts through violent repression? That was authoritarian.

Is political polarization on the rise?

Is this a polarized country? Yes? Is it more polarized than it used to be? No. When they fired against los campesinos in Aguas Blancas [a 1995 police massacre of 17 peasants in western Guerrero state], was this country less polarized than now? No. It was polarized in a different way.

Are you bothered by the international pushback against leftist political rule in Mexico?

Conservative thought in the United States and Spain doesn’t like what we are doing in Mexico. I get it. We represent the left and we don’t hide in a cave. We favor social programs over capital. Andrés Manuel [López Obrador] said it very clearly: “We have no problem with big capital in Mexico — but with fair salaries, full liberty and no plundering.”

How do you see Mexico’s future?

Complicated. And hopeful.

Fans await new tales of Belascoarán navigating the capital’s brooding depths. Have the world-weary shamus and the former Aztec capital lost their noir juju?

I’ve lost it, because I’ve become old. I no longer write novels with the same angle. At nights now I’m writing a mystery novel — but not with Belascoarán but with Olguita, my favorite character. She is a journalist, 22.

You ever get tired? Time to sit back and savor the smokes and Coca-Cola?

El Fondo demands tremendous energy — but it’s an interesting energy. We are providing something to people that they didn’t have: access to the world of books.

Do you ever contemplate the Reaper?

No. That’s a waste of time. You get enough time on this earth, and when it’s over, it’s over. When you’re an author who writes noir novels and you direct a publishing house, you face two possibilities: Be optimistic, or kill yourself.

Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.