“Save the Date”
Steinbeck Festival
August 7 – 10, 2008
Steinbeck and Mexico

Full schedule to follow.
For information call (831) 775-4724 or email colleen@steinbeck.org.

Steinbeck Festival 2008 will explore Steinbeck’s regard for Mexico in broad cultural contexts.  The Mexico that so inspired Steinbeck’s work will come to life at Festival 2008 through presentations on Mexican and Mexican American culture and heritage.

Some of the distinguished scholars and artists who will speak at the festival include William F. Gilly from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station,  who will share his experience in retracing the Steinbeck-Ricketts journey to the Sea of Cortez, Julianne Burton-Carvajal, a scholar in the history of Mexican and Latin American Cinema, who will discuss Mexico and the movies in both Spanish and English, and Francisco Jimenez who will share his personal experience as an immigrant from Tlaquepaque, Mexico, who worked in the fields of California, and today is the Fay Boyle Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, director of the Ethnic Studies Program at Santa Clara University and an award winning author.

On exhibit will be a show of the artwork of the gifted painter, muralist and teacher, Eduardo Carrillo who lived and painted in his family’s ancestral home in La Paz, Baja California where he founded and directed El Centro de Arte Regional, a center for the revival and study of regional crafts.  Carrillo’s art work transforms color into light and captures the vibrant intensity of the landscape and people of the Baja region.

Over a third of John Steinbeck's work is either set in Mexico or features characters of Mexican descent.  From 1932 until the mid 1950s, he wrote often about the environment, history, culture and politics of Mexico. This is some of his best work: Sea of Cortez, an environmental classic written with Edward F. Ricketts; The Pearl, a novella about aspirations of poor fishermen; Viva Zapata!, a film about Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata, directed by Elia Kazan. Mexican American characters appear in Tortilla Flat, Sweet Thursday, The Wayward Bus.

Growing up in Salinas, Steinbeck was close to the Wagners, who spoke Spanish--and certainly John himself picked up the rudiments of Spanish from that family, later learning to speak and read the language. In 1932, he planned to ride horseback into Mexico, and finally drove there with his first wife Carol in 1935. That was the first of repeated trips to Mexico to write, to research, and to appreciate the culture.