The First Time the Fire Chose Me (FIL Guadalajara, 2019)

I didn’t enter the Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara so much as get absorbed by it. Crossing the threshold felt like stepping into a pressure system where language thickens the air. Sound rose in warm currents—Spanish braided with Portuguese, English leaning into French, a flicker of Arabic, a bright chord of Nahuatl. Conversations collided and scattered like swallows. The hall trembled with the friction of ideas: books opening and closing like tiny doors, voices entering and exiting, a thousand beginnings happening at once.

Every stand felt like a small nation, stubborn and beautiful in its sovereignty. Some strutted with glossy hardcovers and metallic spines, others were low tables draped in cloth, stacked with handmade chapbooks stitched like quiet miracles. A university press wore the patience of librarians who have learned the long way that beauty sticks when hype fades. A micro-press hid in a corner with a zine that looked like it had been cut from somebody’s heart. Each booth declared, with a grin or a dare: this is who we are—take us home and see if we fit inside you.

People talk about literature as if it’s a quiet thing. At FIL I learned it’s a festival. Teenagers with ink-stamped wrists elbowed their way into poetry readings; grandmothers argued about translations with the politeness of saints and the stamina of boxers; translators traded secrets like musicians trading riffs. I watched a boy clutch a manga like a talisman and a girl fan through a stack of feminist essays as if shuffling a deck of spells. No one was waiting to be told what mattered. They were hungry, and hunger is a form of intelligence.

There was a moment—somewhere between a panel on border narratives and a spontaneous reading that unfurled near a staircase—when I understood that the hemisphere I grew up in is often misdrawn. We’re told the map centers elsewhere. But at FIL, the map rotated until Guadalajara sat where all the lines crossed. Mexico wasn’t background; it was the axis. Voices from the south and the north met here and recognized each other without asking permission.

That recognition did something to me. It knocked the shyness out of my handwriting. It made my drafts feel like unlit matches. The feeling came in two words that hit like twin knocks on a door: urgency and responsibility.

Urgency, because when you’re surrounded by thousands of living books, you realize there is no mystical someday. You either add your page to the living body now, or you keep apologizing for the wound where your page should be.

Responsibility, because this blaze is collective. Someone hauled boxes at dawn. Someone said sí to a debut when it would’ve been easier to say no. Someone translated in the space between two languages and came back carrying both. If they could shoulder that weight, what right did I have to hoard silence?

By dusk, my tote straps had carved red parentheses into my shoulders. Out on the sidewalk, Guadalajara breathed—the vendors with their cups of elote, the last light pooling gold in the gutters. I realized the books I carried weren’t just paper. They were receipts for a promise. If a city could host this thunder of pages and keep the doors open to anyone with a hunger and a handful of pesos, then the least I could do was write like a person who knows the feast is real.

I walked home with a new theology: books are not objects; they are gatherings. Each one is a room where the living meet the living, the living meet the dead, and the dead—God bless them—still argue back. I had thought writing was monastic. FIL taught me it’s civic. It isn’t about guarding a candle in a lonely hallway—it’s about throwing open the windows so the whole block can see the light.

Days later, the afterglow remained. I could still hear the page-rustle tide, feel the floor hum where a standing-room-only panel made the building throb like a drum. I kept thinking about the teenager with the manga and the girl shuffling her deck of essays, and I wanted to build a bridge for them—a simple, sturdy bridge from wonder to action.

So here it is.

If You Felt the Heat Too (A Short, Useful Manifesto)

1) Show up where the books are.
Go to your city’s book fair. If there isn’t one, help start one: a plaza, a school gym, a café patio. Fold tables. String lights. Invite your elders and your punks.

2) Buy like it matters—because it does.
Alternate: one book from a big house, one from a micro-press, one from a local author who’s betting dinner money on a carton of dreams.

3) Learn a name and say it out loud.
Editors, cover designers, translators—speak their names on your feeds, in your groups, at your dinner table. Praise is oxygen.

4) Build small circles that meet often.
Reading clubs, kitchen-table workshops, late-night translation swaps. Literature grows like sourdough: passed hand to hand, kept warm.

5) Review generously, critique precisely.
Five sentences and four stars can change a month for a writer. When you critique, aim for true over clever.

6) Translate a page.
Even if you’re not a pro. Bring a poem across, imperfect and honest; let a friend bring it back. You’ll widen both your lives.

7) Feed the commons.
Donate a copy to the public library. Volunteer at the school library. Teach a kid how to hold a book without fear.

8) Keep the door open behind you.
If you’ve got a platform, lend it. If you’ve got a table, add a chair. If you’ve got a microphone, pass it into the crowd.

And If You Write

Write bravely but revise like a surgeon. Practice being specific enough to make a place real and generous enough to let a stranger in. Name your streets and your ghosts. Let Mexico be a center, not a backdrop. Refuse the poverty of permission. You’re not applying to be allowed; you’re contributing to what already exists. If your drafts feel small, bring them to where the voices are louder—read them to a friend in a café, on a stoop, at a market bench. Let the world’s breath get into the sentences.

Because that’s what FIL did to me in 2019: it refit my lungs. It taught me to breathe at the rhythm of a crowd that loves paragraphs the way other crowds love choruses. It proved that literature is not dying; it’s dancing, and the floor is strong enough for all our weight.

When I think back to that first afternoon, I remember a woman at a tiny stall selling stapled chapbooks with covers the color of marigolds. She pressed one into my hands and said, “Llévatelo. Si te encuentra, es tuyo.” Take it. If it finds you, it’s yours. I keep hearing that. Books find us, yes—but we have to make ourselves findable. We have to walk into the room, shoes dusty, hearts open, ready to carry something burning home.

So if you’re reading this, consider it an invitation. Come to the feast. Bring cash and curiosity. Leave with a promise. And when the straps bite into your shoulders and the bags swing heavy against your legs, smile. That’s just the fire getting comfortable. That’s just the weight of your place in the circle.

I’ll see you in the aisles.