Quick Facts
Biography
Francisco Azuela Espinoza (born March 8, 1948 in Leon, State of Guanajuato, Mexico), is a writer and poet. He served as a diplomat in the Mexican Embassy in Costa Rica and later in Honduras (1973–1983). During those years The Honduran government awarded him the Order of the Liberator of Central-America Francisco Morazán, and in 1981 the Honduran Academy of Language nominated him for the Cervantes International Literature award. He later served as Director of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies of the State of Guanajuato (1991–1997), and became the CEO and founder of the El Condor de los Andes-Aguila Azteca AC, an international cultural center currently based in the city of Cochabamba, Bolivia (1999).
Biography
Translation from Spanish by the poet Reynaldo Marcos Padua & the Professor of American Literature Ronald Haladyna
Birth and childhood
Francisco Azuela was born on March 8, 1948 at 404 General Emiliano Zapata Street in León, Guanajuato the fourth of 13 children. His father was the stationmaster of the National Railways of Mexico in Trinidad, Mexico. From his early childhood he learned of an episode of the Mexican Revolution in which a bullet fired from a train tore a chip from the gate of the Santa Ana Hacienda, causing future president Alvaro Obregón to lose an arm. Azuela grew up in Trinidad and was immersed in the rich Revolutionary history and spirit of the state of Guanajuato during his 17 years of residence there.
Azuela comes from an artistic family of some renown: his great uncle was Mariano Azuela, author of one of the most celebrated novels of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo (The Underdogs); his mother, Maria Esperanza de los Dolores Espinosa Hernandez, is a writer and actress, author of several traditionalist novels, including Historia de un Gran Amor (The Story of Great Love); his father, Ricardo Azuela Martin del Campo, was a poet and nephew of Mariano Azuela.
Some of the most enduring memories of his early life when his father taught him to read are these: when he discovered an unknown universe of old locomotives emitting steamy clouds as they passed through town; and an early acquaintance with Maya mythology and legends that later on shaped his poetic imagination. Especially memorable were the Mayan Aluxes, small fantastic creatures living in abandoned ruins and cemeteries and stories of the Chilam Balam, the sacred book of the ancient Maya.
Youth
Azuela began to express his first thoughts in poetry at a young age. His father, a poet himself, introduced him to great Russian literature, such as Pushkin’s beautiful poem Ruslan and Ludmila. Another book that made an indelible mark was the poetry and the odes of the legendary wise king and poet Tezcocan, a.k.a. Netzahualcoyotl. The literature of the Aztec world recorded in the Nahuatl language impressed him early on with its beautiful metaphors and strength of poetic expression, but it also gave him a wealth of information about Mexico’s vast and varied geography: Tenochtitlan, the Valley of Mexico a.k.a. Anahuac Valley; the fabled Atlanteans of Tula with neo-volcanic mountains and highlands; Mexico’s highest volcanoes and cordilleras; and Mexico’s pre-Columbian civilizations, the Olmec, the Maya, Zapotec, the Chichimec, and the Mixtec.
During these formative years Azuela read classic literature, as well as contemporary poets and narrators of diverse origins and nationalities, including writers and poets of social and political perspectives. He came to understand that poets and narrative writers are an invaluable source of social consciousness as they give witness to their life and times.
His father’s death, when Azuela was 20 years old, did not diminish his influence on the nascent literary career of the young man. In Azuela’s poetry loneliness, love, nature, life, death, the spirit of nationalism, war, indifference, despair, hopelessness, abandonment, neglect, fear, anguish appear constantly as themes he shares with other Latin American writers. He also writes about the solitude, the sadness and the suffering that characterizes today’s people, harking back to the pre-Columbian empires of the Incas, the Aztecs and the Mayans. His poetry often reflects the plight of peoples who have been oppressed, neglected, involuntarily involved in wars and endangered by the invasion of Western values.