This Monday, the Rector’s Office of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) announced that the novelist, storyteller, essayist, translator, professor and academic Rosa Beltrán Álvarez was chosen as the new coordinator of Cultural Dissemination in this highest house of studies, a position that she assumed at noon, replacing fellow writer Jorge Volpi Escalante, who has held the position since December 2016.
According to a statement issued this afternoon by UNAM, Volpi Escalante will assume a new commission from the rector, Enrique Graue Wiechers, which will be announced shortly.
The change of post office took place at the headquarters of the Rectory in Ciudad Universitaria. There, the rector of the university conferred on Beltrán the responsibility to coordinate efforts in the face-to-face return of the university community and its vast visiting public to the facilities of this house of studies.
“Cultural dissemination will be preponderant in order to ensure that university students have a healthy return,” said Graue Wiechers and urged the holders of the 14 chairs dependent on the Coordination to work closely with Beltrán.
For her part, the academic and celebrated novelist guaranteed the continuity of the work carried out by the Volpi Escalante administration, but added that the command she assumed this Monday will be governed by two words as axes: the post-pandemic and the post-patriarchy.
He stressed that culture should be that place where differences in argument are expressed, but that confront confrontation and violence in the country and the rest of the world. “I wish and will do everything I can to attract and make visible the diversity of voices and make them sound like one voice,” he said.
Recognizes the work of Jorge Volpi
Enrique Graue thanked the work that Volpi carried out for just over five years in this Coordination, which he estimated at 15,000 annual activities to which 14.5 million people had access, a scope that, he said, placed this house of studies as the second cultural force of the country.
The rector of the UNAM highlighted the work of Volpi Escalante to support cultural projects such as the establishment of the Youth Advisory Council, the Academy of Early Music, the Laboratory of Cultural Initiatives, the UNAM Culture Points program, in addition to the redesign of the UNAM Magazine. National University, the creation of the El Aleph Festival and programming with a gender perspective, to highlight a few.
“Culture at the university could not be just something cosmetic, nor could it be just the search for entertainment or something just to pass the time, but we all had to imagine how to make culture become that instrument of criticism and transformation. permanent social; how to respond to the challenges of the world, for example, the pandemic, how to respond to the challenges of Mexico, for example, inequality, violence; how it responds to the challenges of the university itself, particularly with issues of gender violence”, declared Volpi about his management.
Rosa Beltrán’s credentials
The new coordinator of UNAM Cultural Dissemination has a degree in Hispanic Literature from the highest house of studies and a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition, he is a member of the Mexican Academy of Language (AML).
She is the author of well-known novels such as “La corte de los ilusos” (Planet Award 1995), “El Paraíso que fue” (2002), “Alta infidelidad” (2006), “Efectos secondary” (2012), “El Cuerpo Exposed” (2013) and “Free radicals” (2020), as well as collections of stories such as “Amores que matan” (1996) and “Cuentos darwinianos” (Universidad de Guadalajara 2020) and essays such as “Virtual truths” (Debolsillo 2019) .
ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx
