Meeting Monsiváis among the shelves

“We call this the ‘alley of intimacy’,” says Ruben León, the librarian at the Carlos Monsiváis library in the Cuidadela, “because on one side is Monsiváis’ hidden secret and the other his public passion.”

And there we stand in front of the largest collection of books on homosexuality in Latin America, facing an equally large collection of books on politics.

This is the fifth time that León has mentioned to us that Monsiváis was gay. Is he trying to tell us something or trying to ask us something? I’m pretty sure there is more to the famous Mexican author than his sexual preference or fancy friends ( León has also shown us every book in the collection signed by a famous author or artist.)

If you don’t know who he was, Monsiváis was a social activist and left-leaning media critic who wrote scathingly about the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was a vocal supporter of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and campaigned for legal abortions and gay rights in Mexico.  He also loved him some cats.

Francisco Toledo, the artist whose pieces decorate the Monsiváis library are a little cat-heavy. Cats on the tiled floor, cats felted into the sides of the bookshelves and cats stitched into giant frames. Toledo and Monsiváis were buddies, so I guess he knew what the right homage would be for a man who at 71 started a feline homeless shelter in Mexico City called “Forgotten Kitties.”

When Monsiváis died three years ago there was a quite a stir over who would get his completely uncatalogued library of thousands of books on every subject he fancied. Some U.S. foundations wanted to purchase the collection from Monsiváis’ niece, but in the end Conaculta was able to convince her to keep this important piece of “Mexican patrimony” in country.

León says that they still have hundreds of books to catalog, but with what looked like all the library employees on facebook in the middle of the afternoon, I don’t see how it’s going to get done.

Monsiváis never had his collection cataloged himself because he feared that whomever did the work would move around his hundreds of meticulously placed book piles reaching from floor to ceiling at his house. Now you can go to the Ciudadela and see the exact order he had them in, topic by topic – Mexican art, international art, philosophy and of course, the alley of intimacy.

He’s not the only famous figure who’s personal library is housed at the Ciudadela, an ancient tobacco factory converted into a cultural center, there’s also Ali Chumcero, Jaime Garcia Terrés, Antonio Castro Leal and José Luis Martinez, plus a giant general library – an unusual phenomena in Mexico City worth seeing. It’s great for the rainy afternoons that we are still having in the city. Just beware of the cats.

@MexCityStreets

Catch me on Instagram

Click here to subscribe via RSS