VIAJE AL CARIBE: EL REALISMO MÁGICO DE GABO

This fall, De Agua y De Espiritu together with the world renowned writer & novelist, Eduardo Márceles Daconte, will embark on a passage back in time with culinary foods, music, meditative journeys and seminars transporting us to the place & time of Gabo’s creative process held in two adjacent homes in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania.

Commemorating our cultural diversity in honor of Latin American Heritage Month, from October 7th thru October 9th in VIAJE AL CARIBE: EL REALISMO MAGICO DE GABO.

This all inclusive immersive experience will focus on the Caribbean Region in Gabo’s Works (El Caribe de Gabo) and The Daconte Family in Gabo’s Literary Works (La Familia Daconte en la obra de Gabriel García Márquez).

Join us as we explore and examine the sources and the people that inspired Gabo’s greatest works.

About us:

De Agua y De Espíritu Wellness LLC was founded in July 2021 to provide experiences and events where BIPOC can reconnect with their roots via a variety of modalities including but not limited to meditation, yoga, hiking, creative workshops & retreats.

Eduardo Márceles Daconte was born in Aracataca (Colombia) but from an early age his parents settled in Barranquilla. At New York University he completed a bachelor’s degree in humanities (B.A. 1970) and at the University of California (Berkeley) he pursued a master’s degree in cultural history of Latin America, 1972.

Back in Colombia in 1975, he taught Latin American Literature and Theater in the graduate program of Javeriana University and of English and American literature at the Universidad La Gran Colombia, both in Bogotá. In 1986, the Shanghai International Studies University (China) hired him as Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies and editor of the Chinese-Spanish dictionary.

Between 1987 and 1988 he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Miami-Dade (Florida). He returned to New York where he worked as a multicultural curator at the Queens Museum of Art (1989-1999). From 2000 to 2004 he was editor of the cultural magazine VIDAHOY that circulated every weekend as an insert in HOY, the newspaper in

Spanish with the largest circulation in New York up to that date. He has published The Dogs of Benares and Other Pilgrim Altarpieces, a book of short stories (Editorial La

Oveja Negra, 1985); the book of essays Art Criticism and Painting Trends in Colombia (Ministry of Foreign Relations) for distribution at ARCO 84 (Madrid, Spain).

He is also the author of The Resources of Imagination: Visual Arts of the Andean Region of Colombia (Editorial Panamericana, Bogotá, 2010) and The Resources of the Imagination: Visual Arts of the Colombian Caribbean (Editorial Panamericana, Bogotá, 2010), books that summarize in essays and images, the visual arts in Colombia f rom a critical and conceptual point of view.

He is also the author of Azúcar!: The Biography of Celia Cruz (Reed Press, New York, 2004), in Spanish and English editions. His novel The Threshold of Fire (Collage Editores, 2015) deals with the adventures and difficulties of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Similarly, the anthologies of 20 Colombian Fiction Writers

in the USA (Collage Editores, Bogotá, 2017) and 23 Colombian Fiction Writers in Europe (Collage Editores, 2018) stand out in the collection of Colombian Literature of the Diaspora. His book Nereo López: Witness of his Time, a biography illustrated with images of the prominent Cartagena photographer, is being published.

He has half a dozen unpublished books of short stories, biography, press articles, reviews and essays on the visual arts. He has represented Colombia as a jury in numerous national salons, biennials and exhibitions of visual arts around the world and participated as a lecturer in

symposiums, writers’ meetings, visual arts salons, film and theater festivals in Colombia and various countries.

He also works as a free-lance cultural journalist for the daily newspaper El Espectador and as a cultural affairs advisor for national and international organizations. As a visual arts curator, he has organized a hundred exhibitions in Colombia, the United States, Spain, Venezuela and United Arab Emirates.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

The specific objective of this retreat is to invigorate our Latin cultural and artistic diversity through literary retreats, lectures, symposia and much more..

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

The Literary Retreats: The Caribbean Region in Gabo´s Works (El Caribe de Gabo) and The Daconte Family in Gabo´s Literary Works (La familia Daconte en la obra de Gabriel García Márquez) scheduled from October 7th thru October 9th. An experience immersed in Gabo´s Colombian Caribbean and in the Macondo of his narrative, Aracataca through a crystalline river that rushes thru a bed of large and polished stones like prehistoric eggs (Aracataca que lo recorre un rio cristalino que se precipita por un lecho de piedras grandes y pulidas como huevos prehistóricos) focuses on: Gabólogos (specialized in Gabo), Gabófilos (friends of Gabo and those who like to read it), professors specialized in Latin America, final grade students, writers.

The Caribbean Region in Gabo´s Works

Almost all of Gabo´s narrative takes place in this coastal region of Colombia. He used to say that the place in the world where he felt most comfortable was in the Caribbean region, from La Guajira to Sucre, a city in the western part of this area. In his novels and short stories, the Caribbean geography plays an important role. Let’s remember that he was born in Aracataca, a town on the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest mountain range of the country with abundant cold rivers and streams that satisfy the thirst of its inhabitants. His novel One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in an imaginary town called Macondo, the now famous name he gave to his birth town of Aracataca. Later on, he lived in the historic city of Cartagena where he started his career as a journalist, then he moved to Barranquilla, nicknamed the Golden Gate of Colombia for being at the mouth of the Magdalena River, the longest and most important river of the country, that empties its waters in the Caribbean Sea, making it the busiest sea and river port of Colombia.

These cities were evoked in two of his novels, first in Love in the Time of Cholera. It is a love story that was inspired by the lives of his parents and takes place in Cartagena. Also Cartagena is the city he chose to place his novel Of Love and Other Demons. Barranquilla was placed in the center of his novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores. One of Gabo´s first jobs was selling encyclopedias in La Guajira, a peninsula surrounded by the Caribbean Sea, a

region known for its desert and beaches, inhabited mainly by the Wayúu Indians, that is evoked in his famous short novel La cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada. Then his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch´s protagonist is a dictator of a port city somewhere in the Caribbean, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is located in the river port city of Mompox, to mention only a few of the Caribbean cities, towns or rural areas he selected for his works. So, in order to better understand his narrative, it's a good idea to identify the territory and idiosyncrasy of the people of these places that influenced Gabo´s literary works.

The Daconte Family in Gabo´s Literary Works

The members of the Daconte Family in the novels, short stories and newspaper articles written by Gabriel García Márquez are eloquent of the affection and appreciation that our Nobel prize winner felt for this Italian family who lived in Aracataca (also known as Macondo) when he was a child. He felt a deep gratitude for Antonio Daconte, the patriarch of the family, because he was an innovator that brought many inventions (just like the gypsy Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude) and entertainment to the town specially the cinema in which, as he once told me, was the place where he learned “in those rustic wood benches” to love moviemaking as indeed it happened, he studied film making in Rome and thereafter he wrote many scripts for films in México and Colombia.

One of the characters in this novel was an Italian immigrant by the name of Pietro Crespi although in the beginning his name was Antonio Daconte, we shall explain the nature of

such a change. Also in his short story The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow the name of the protagonist is a young woman named Nena Daconte, one of the daughters of Antonio Daconte with whom he was in love as a child since she was his classmate in the Montessori Elementary School of Aracataca. The name of Galileo Daconte, a son of Antonio´s and his best friend in childhood, was also introduced as a character in his novel Love in the Times of Cholera. In addition, the names of these characters also appear in many of his newspaper columns that he wrote in the daily Colombian newspaper El Espectador and the Spanish newspaper El País (Madrid). By recalling these characters, we will examine the sources and the people that inspired him. He felt such an appreciation for them that he wanted to leave a sign of gratitude by inscribing their names in the history of his literary works.