Queer Places:
La Librería de Cristal, or Crystal Bookshop, Angela Peralta, Centro Histórico de la Cdad. de México, Centro, Cuauhtémoc, 06000 Ciudad de México, CDMX
Rafael Giménez Siles (March 7, 1900 – 1991) was a Spanish publisher,
bookseller and printer, exiled and nationalized in Mexico. A significant point
of access for Mexican readers to homophile ideas was the kiosks, bookstores
and publishing houses that Spanish Republican exiles and others operated.
Publisher Rafael Gimenez Siles’s progressive press, the Companıa General de
Ediciones, translated important American and European homophile texts. Gimenez
Siles released 6,000 copies of
Edward Sagarin’s The Homosexual in America, translated as El homosexual en
Norteamerica in 1952, barely one year after its appearance in the United
States. The next year, Gimenez Siles published
Carlo Coccioli’s controversial
homophile novel Fabrizio Lupo. It narrated the tragic love of two young
artists, Fabrizio and Lorenzo, who, unable to be together, each commit
suicide: one overdoses while the other drives his motorcycle into a bus.
Adding a preface to the text not published in the original French or
subsequent English editions, Coccioli denounced the Church’s tolerance of
homosexual promiscuity (it offered forgiveness in the confessional) but
refusal to recognise homosexual love and monogamy. Coccioli’s preface called
for the acceptance of homosexuality as natural and offered a beautiful defence
of love between ‘two men, not inverts, or monsters, but men who are true to
their nature’. 'Homosexual’, he noted, ‘is a word that in our Latin countries,
is pronounced fearfully – if uttered at all, despite everything that we see
around us everyday’. In one of the most passionate defences of homosexuality
to date, the novel’s character Fabrizio proclaimed his love for Lorenzo before
God: ‘I believe in a God who is good, powerful, generous, who does not
threaten . . . not a God of love, but Love itself’.
Salvador Novo, to whom Coccioli had sent a
copy of the novel in late January 1954, raved about it in his column.
Homosexuality (to which Novo referred using Lord
Alfred Douglas’s euphemism
‘l’amour qui n’ose pas dire son nom’) was no longer ‘a taboo’ thanks to this
book, and Novo reminded readers about the novelists Huysmans, Zola, Porche,
Deberly, Mann, Hall and Jackson who also wrote on homosexuality, offering
solace to those repressed by society.
At least four foreign-language bookstores imported and distributed homophile
books and journals. Rafael Giménez Siles sold homophile texts like Sagarin’s
and Coccioli’s from his cruisy, two-storeyed Cristal bookshop, spread along
four pavilions on Alameda Park, next to the Bellas Artes Theatre. The
bookstore’s second-floor gallery hosted exhibits and lectures, and its cafe
was an important gathering place for gay intellectuals made safe by the
presence of bohemians and foreigners.
Alberto Misrachi sold homophile books
and magazines from his foreign-language bookstore, ‘Librerıa Misrachi’
(1939–92) on Avenida Juarez, across the street from ‘Librerıa Cristal’.
Misrachi had an art gallery attached to his business and sold – mostly to
tourists – the works of leading Mexican painters, including many gays like
Roberto Montenegro, Jesus ‘Chucho’ Reyes
and Juan Soriano. French texts could be obtained at the ‘Librerıa
Francesa’ in the Zona Rosa, and the American Bookstore on Madero Street
specialised in English-language textbooks.
Giménez Siles completed his primary studies in his hometown and then moved to study Pharmacy at the Central University of Madrid. It was during this period of formation when he began his publishing activity with different university publications such as El Estudiante. That time also coincided with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, where Giménez Siles was sentenced by the Supreme War Council to six months in prison when the court considered him a participant, as director of Post-Guerra, in the dissemination of a student manifesto against Alfonso XIII. The stay in prison allowed him to meet many reprisals of the dictatorship, among them the lawyer and republican Antonio Graco Marsá. With him and Juan Andrade, he created the publishing house Cénit, upon his release from prison, that in 1928 illuminated his first work, a work by Ramón J. Sender with a prologue by Valle-Inclán, The religious problem in Mexico, Catholics and Christians. In addition, associated with Joaquín Arderíus and others, Giménez Siles acquired several printing presses over the years, either through acquisitions or agreements, which allowed him to go beyond publishing in the world of books.
Proclaimed the Second Republic, he was one of the main promoters of the Book Fairs in Madrid, the first of them in 1933, and that they were installed in the Paseo de Recoletos; he was also the promoter of the Association of Publishers and the project of dissemination of the book and reading throughout Spain with the "trucks-bookstore". During those years he created two other publishing houses linked to Cénit: Nuestro Pueblo (in Barcelona) and Estrella (in Valencia), the latter dedicated to children's and young people's literature; both would continue to be published in Mexico. Cénit ended up becoming a benchmark for Spanish publishers in the following years, and published works translated into Spanish by authors such as
John Dos Passos, Hermann Hesse or Maxim Gorky, as well as Marxist thinkers such as Engels or Trotsky. By 1935, more than two hundred titles had been published through Cénit in twenty-five series.
In 1936 Giménez Siles was appointed president of the Official Book Chamber, an entity in which years before he had entered as a professor of commercial technique, and which was the germ of the first Spanish public publishing entity, the Distribuidora de Publicaciones. He was also a member of the Board of Pedagogical Missions.
At the end of the Civil War, Giménez Siles went to France on his way to exile and, from there, to the United States, to reach Mexico via New York. He acquired Mexican nationality a few months after arriving, and the same summer of 1939 he joined other figures of the Spanish and Mexican exile such as Martín Luis Guzmán or Enrique Díez-Canedo, as well as Mexican authors —Antonio Castro Leal, among others — to create Edición y Distribución Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, S. A., better known as Ediapsa, as well as different publications, including Amiga, Romance or Rompetacones. He opened the first of the so-called Crystal Bookstores, in memory of the Crystal Palace of the Retiro Park in Madrid, located in the Alameda Central of Mexico City, next to the Palace of Fine Arts. That was the beginning of a broad business project in which, under the umbrella of Ediapsa and with Mexican capital from individuals, such as Pascual Gutiérrez Roldán or entities such as Banco Capitalizador, among many others, several important publishing houses were created — Colón, Diógenes, México, Nueva España — one of the largest bookseller groups in Latin America. In 1944, Giménez Siles founded the Asociación de Libreros y Editores Mexicanos, later becoming the Instituto Mexicano del Libro, and participated in the creation of editorial Siglo XXI.
In 1940
Giménez Siles married Francisca Navarro, youngest daughter of the also exiled Tomás Navarro Tomás, who was an academic and director of the National Library of Spain, and with whom he had two children. In 1976 he retired and sold the bookstore business.
He was the author of an autobiography, Pieces of Life of a Stubborn Apprentice
Editor, Bookseller and Printer (1984) and a memoir, Professional Testament.
Comments, illustrations and suggestions at the end of the editorial task,
bookcase and printer (1980).
My published books:
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