Jesús Anaya, editor and disseminator of literature, died

Jesús Anaya Rosique (Mexico City, 1946), editor, translator, teacher and great disseminator of literature, died on Tuesday at the age of 78, reported the Economic Culture Fund (FCE), the institution where he worked.

That publishing house published a statement on its social networks with a message in which it extended its condolences to the family of Anaya Rosique.

He was a militant of the revolutionary left and worked in various publishing houses in Mexico, Italy and Spain; pioneer in the professional training of editors and booksellers in Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Guatemala; consultant specialized in editorial issues, and member of the academic council of the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry (Caniem).

Anaya Rosique dedicated her life to cultural promotion and the training of new generations of readers and writers. In October 1964, when he was 18 years old, he joined the international section of the newspaper The Day under the orders of the Ecuadorian writer Miguel Donoso Pareja (1931-2015), who taught him to confront the opinions of different agencies.

Later he was a proofreader at the newly born Era and Siglo XXI publishing houses. In the spring of 1966, as a philosophy student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, he participated in the student strike that led to the resignation of Ignacio Chávez, in what Anaya himself considered a rehearsal of what would be 1968.

In 1968 he joined the Mexican News Agency. He witnessed the massacre of students on October 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco and later joined a clandestine group.

Anaya Rosique asked Francisco F. Álvarez, director of the media, to assign him the correspondent in Ecuador. In January 1969 he decided to board a Peruvian plane coming from Montevideo with a group of students heading to Miami, which he diverted, along with other young people, to Havana. Upon his arrival in the Cuban capital, the island’s government kept him under surveillance in a house for three weeks. He sent it to Prague and then to Paris in February 1969.

Seclusion

In 1970, Anaya Rosique became friends with leftist groups in Italy and with the help of journalist friends sought military training to undertake armed struggle. He traveled to a camp in Jordan and spent several months in the mountains of Venezuela before returning clandestinely to Mexico in 1971. Mexican police arrested him in January 1972. He disappeared for three weeks in Military Camp Number One and was then held in the Lecumberri prison.

At the end of 1975 he joined the Feltrinelli publishing house, founded in 1954 by the communist editor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. He knew little Italian, but his work as an editor and later as a translator gained recognition until he was in charge of a collection and obtained legal residency. In 1982, Anaya Rosique was downsized and decided to return to Mexico to be with her family.

He independently founded a magazine at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, directed the Tabasco Graphic Workshops under the orders of Governor Enrique González Pedrero, gave editorial training seminars, participated in the Juan Grijalbo Scholarship and produced the newsletter Editors of the Caniem.

In 1991, Anaya Rosique presented the project of the International Study Center for Publishers and Booksellers of the University of Guadalajara, with the support of the rector Raúl Padilla, the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the Caniem, the FCE, the Book House Training Center of London and the Inter-American Group of Editors.

Although the project was short-lived due to internal political movements at the university, its most notable fruit was the two generations of graduates that produced its master’s degree in publishing, the first in Latin America: in Guadalajara (1993-1995) and Mexico City. (1994-1996).

To complement the master’s curriculum, Anaya Rosique visited several schools for editors in London, Milan, Frankfurt and Vancouver, which expanded her extensive network of contacts and gave the program great relevance, making it a reference and hotbed of projects like the collection Books about booksco-published by Libraria and the FCE.

From 1997 to 2006, he served as editorial director of Grupo Planeta in Mexico and taught professional training courses for editors in Latin America.

Since 2006 he was a professor-researcher at the Academy of Literary Creation of the Autonomous University of Mexico City and since 2009 he taught in the master’s degree in editorial design and production at the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Xochimilco.

Various institutions and representatives of the publishing world published their condolences on social networks for the loss of Anaya Rosique. His brother Carlos published: He died because his great heart gave out; He died accompanied by his loved ones. One dies alone, but there are companies that are in the transition. He died. Definitely.