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M exico as an exile of the Spanish Civil War in 1940. Previously he had visited M exico in 1937, as a member o f Barcelona’s only baseball team - ‘M éxico’ - which included several militant members o f the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista: Costa-Amic apparently came bearing a letter from Andreu Nin to Lazaro Cardenas requesting asylum for Leon Trotsky. Besides his diplomatic and sporting activities in M exico, he had time to note ‘una inexplicable carencia de editoriales privadas y librerias en un pais tan dotado en escritores y revistas literarias.’65

His publishing endeavours in M exico went under the name o f Ediciones Quetzal and B. Costa-Amic Editor. Ediciones Quetzal was originally the publishing house o f exiled writer Ramon J. Sender who sold it on to Costa-Amic and two other exiled friends. Together they created a catalogue of rescued and/or translated works of universal culture - especially French and Spanish -, and essayistic works o f an overtly political nature. Many o f the exiled members o f the Surrealist group were also associated with Quetzal, providing cover illustrations and advertisements. In his single-handed enterprise as B. Costa-Amic Editor, Costa-Amic was astute enough to publish the first edition o f M iguel A ngel Asturias’s El sen o rprésidente in 1946, plus translations o f Gérard de Nerval and Jean Giraudoux, Antonio M ediz B o lio ’s La tierra d el fa isa n y d e l venado, and several o f Luis Spota’s novels; yet, as far as his catalogue o f travel-chronicles is concerned, the quality has been even less assured than that o f Botas’s publications.

The travel-chronicles were published from 1961 with the safe bet o f Francisco L. Urquizo’s M adrid de los anos veinte to 1988 with the most bigoted and laughable text: Maria del Carmen Marquez de Romero A ceves and Ricardo Romero A cev es’s M éxico y el mundo - not so much a travel-chronicle as an extremely paternalistic travel-guide for Mexicans going abroad.66 Indeed, most o f the chronicles cover travel abroad, and, perhaps not surprisingly, Costa-Amic has published anything and everything about Communist states such as the USSR and China. The motivation for these texts ranges between reports o f international conferences (the banal and uncritical text of Margarita Paz Paredes’s Viaje a la China Popular (1965) and the better documented and written text o f René A vilés’s Las estrellas rojas (1967)) to works focused on encouraging tourism - generally cultural tourism - in Europe. On M exico Costa-Amic has tended to publish specialist guides and

64 See Jesus Antonio Machuca R. and Marco Aurelio Ramirez, ‘El turismo como cultura trasnacional',

Ciudades: turismo y tiempo libre, 23 (July-September 1994), 3-9; and Rosario Asela Molinero Molinero,

‘Mitos y realidades del turismo en México, 1976-1981’ (unpublished bachelor’s thesis, Colegio de México, 1982).

65 See Fabienne Bradu’s ‘Bartomeu Costa-Amic’, Vuelta, 253 (December 1997), pp. 41-45 (43). 66 The dates are approximate with respect to the time period during which travel-chronicles have been published. There are approximately twenty-six of these Mexican travel-chronicles (see bibliography for some of these titles.)

sociological or ecological studies o f some importance (Pablo Montanez’s L acandoniay Parque N acional Montes Azules (1961; fourth edition, 1985), Fernando Jordan’s Cronica de un p ais barbaro (1967; fifth edition, 1978); Arturo Castellanos Lira’s Nueva cronica de un p a is barbaro: diagnôstico critico de Chihuahua (1969; second edition, 1974), and Manuel Leal Sierra’s guide to mountaineering. M edio siglo de excursion: 1920-1970

(1971; second edition, 1976)).

A ll three publishing houses have tended to produce first editions o f these travel-chronicles with print runs in the region of one to three thousand copies which is standard for M exico. W hile a handful o f the more successful works have been reprinted, the first editions of almost all o f these travel-chronicles are still on sale in M exico City in the warehouses of Botas and Costa-Amic, some o f them over fifty years old and with their pages still uncut. What this proves is that despite Botas and Costa-Am ic’s attempts at commercialising the travel-chronicle, it clearly has not achieved the popular appeal which they thought it would. The problem seems to be that w hile some o f the faster selling texts have negotiated a deal between the criteria o f ‘high literary’ creations and popular texts to produce a successful chronicle which betrays the characteristics of good journalistic writing (the style contributes to the expedient communication o f information, rather than hinders it or poses as a red- herring to disguise the lack of content), those travel-chronicles that have not sold, have not lived up to their literary pretensions and thus constitute ‘bad literature’ rather than popular reading matter. These latter texts have seriously damaged the reputation o f the travel- chronicle as a literary genre and are no doubt part o f the reason why, in present-day M exico, most authors interviewed for the purposes o f writing Section 2 o f this thesis, claimed that the travel-chronicle had ceased to exist (as a literary genre) in the 1930s.