Mexico in a Nutshell | Online Literary Workshop 2025

With more than nine million inhabitants today, Mexico City is one of the most diverse cultural centres on the planet. Throughout its long history of more than 700 years, it has been the capital of the Mexica Empire on a lake, of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, of one of the first independent republics in America, of two empires, of the fantastic libertarian feat of its revolution and of the strange authoritarian experiment that emerged from it, which subdued the country for 70 years, under the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Today it is the capital of a country plunged in serious problems: violence, drug trafficking, migration, foreign capital interference, etc., but also of a country with many hopes and capacities, both social and economic.

Through this City of Palaces paraded characters such as Moctezuma, Hernán Cortés, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Alexander von Humboldt, Maximilian I of Mexico, Benito Juárez, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Porfirio Díaz, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, María Izquierdo, William Burroughs, Che Guevara or Leonora Carrington, among many other artists, politicians, spies, scientists, social fighters and a long list of unique characters. We could venture that the whole world, that is, the history of the world, has passed through Mexico City and has transformed it. In turn, these geological layers of history are visible today in its streets, novels, personal stories, and art.

Each week in this 10-session course, we will read and comment on some literary works that best describe this city. We will also learn about its history, from its founding to the present day, through references to documents, art, cinema, chronicles and biographies. We will narrate the life of the Mexican capital as if it were that of a literary character that evolves over the centuries to give us a plausible picture of its current reality.

We will read works by the best writers who have had a relationship with Mexico City, from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Juan Villoro, Roberto Bolaño, Cristina Rivera Garza, Carlos Fuentes, Fernando del Paso or José Emilio Pacheco, among others.

ABOUT ROBERTO FRÍAS:

Writer, editor, journalist, translator, cultural manager and audiovisual creator.

Roberto wrote weekly, from 2019 to 2022, about Mexico City for the cultural channel Canal 22 and also hosted and directed the brief television series México 1521 hoy – Mexico 1521 Today.

He has translated Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Hanif Kureishi, Francisco Goldman, among others. He has twice received the prestigious grant of the National System of Art Creators (SNCA), awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, in the field of literary translation.

Roberto lived in Barcelona between 2001 and 2010, where he began his collaboration as a consultant, translator, editor and writer with prestigious publishing houses in Spanish, such as Anagrama, Penguin Random House, Atalanta, Galaxia Gutenberg, Acantilado, Libros del asteroide, Alfaguara, among many others.

He has been a journalist since 1991, publishing essays, reviews, and literature, film and dance reviews. Also chronicles and reports on social, scientific, gastronomic and travel topics in media such as the literary supplements Cultura/s --La Vanguardia, Barcelona-- and Confabulario --El Universal, Mexico--, as well as the magazines Letras libres, SoHo, Chilango and National Geographic Traveller, among others. He currently coordinates the journalistic coverage of the activities of CulturaUNAM, the university’s cultural activities department, for Gaceta UNAM.

As a cultural manager, Roberto has been coordinator of the Chair Max Aub of Transdiscipline in Art and Technology, as well as coordinator and curator of several festivals at CulturaUNAM. He was also a member of the organizing committee for the Octavio Paz Centennial, a national tribute to the Mexican Nobel Prize winner, among other positions.

He has been a resident at the Writer’s Centre, Norwich, UK; Yaddo, New York; Banff Centre, and the Sun Yat-sen University’s International Writers Residency, Guangzhou, China. He is currently working on several novel and short story projects.