Enrique Márquez Jaramillo (San Luis Potosí, March 4, 1950), known in Mexico and abroad as Enrique Márquez, is a poet, historian and Mexican politician. In early 1994 Márquez participated in the Commission for Peace and Reconciliation in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, with a focus on the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) uprising. From 2007 to 2010, he organized the bicentennial independence anniversary and Mexican Revolution centennial celebrations in Mexico City. At the end of 2012, Márquez convened the World Summit of Outraged Dissidents and Insurgents in the city.
Biography
Márquez was born on March 4, 1950, in the north-central state of San Luis Potosí on the Mexican Plateau, and was educated at the #10 Damián Carmona boarding school. He studied law from 1969 to 1974 at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí. To finance his studies, Márquez was a factory worker in Chicago.
Literary career
In San Luis Potosí, Márquez was a member of the Literary Society Manuel José Othón (1967) and published his first poems in its periodicals. In the Literary Workshop of the House of Culture, he collaborated with Ecuadorian writer Miguel Donoso Pareja in 1973 with poets and storytellers such as Juan Villoro, David Ojeda, José Ignacio Betancourt, José de Jesús Sampedro, Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro.
During the first half of the 1970s, Márquez promoted Mexican poetry and world literature in México. In 1973 he taught a course at the University of Panamá on contemporary Mexican poets, participating in several readings with Mexican writers from that country. This resulted in The Gorillas Nap, an anthology by young Panamanian poets published by Potosin Words magazine.
In 1971, interested in a new generation of Spanish poets including Vicente Molina Foix, Leopoldo María Panero, Ana María Moix and Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Márquez prepared an anthology of poems by Vázquez Montalbán for Potosin Words. More than two decades later, reviewing his book Marcos: the Lord of Mirrors (an interview with the leader of EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in Barcelona, Márquez and Vázquez Montalbán conversed about the Chiapas conflict and the Catalan writer was surprised that his poetry attracted interest in a Mexican province so long ago.
During the 1970s Márquez collaborated with the magazine Change, directed by Julio Cortázar, Miguel Donoso Pareja, Pedro Orgambide, Juan Rulfo and José Revueltas, and Carlos Monsiváis' supplement The Culture in Mexico. In 1975, shortly after moving to Mexico City, he received a National Award for Young Poetry from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. In 1976–77 Márquez received a scholarship from the Instituto which enabled him to write his second book of poetry (published in 1979), Liturgy of the Rooster in Three Feet. When Monsiváis republished his anthology, Mexican Poetry of the Twentieth Century (Mexico, Editorial Enterprises, 1966), in 1979 he included Márquez in the new edition with Alberto Blanco, Ricardo Castillo, Kyra Galván, David Huerta and Jaime Reyes.
Academic career
Márquez attended El Colegio de México from 1975 to 1977 receiving a master's degree in political science from its Center for International Studies. He received a doctorate in history from the University of Perpignan in France. Márquez conducted a wide-ranging study of the political and social history of 19th- and 20th-century San Luis Potosí, analyzing the power wielded by Gonzalo N. Santos and his family in the Huasteca region from 1806 to 1978. The first result of his research was his master’s thesis, "House of the Holy Lords: Caciques in the Potosin Huasteca 1876-1910", whose hypothesis of the origins of the Mexican Revolution influenced Mexican historians Romana Falcón, Jean Meyer, Alan Knight, Wil Pansers, Claudio Lomnitz, Guy P.C. Thomson, Antonio Escobar and Carlos Monsiváis. During the 1980s Márquez studied Mexican social liberal Ponciano Arriaga, publishing a five-volume Complete Works of Ponciano Arriaga with María Isabel Abella.
Márquez has contributed to the Institute of Humanistic Research of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (1984) and the College of San Luis (1997). He has been a professor and researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Metropolitan Autonomous University-Azcapotzalco, the Institute of Social Research of the Mexican Autonomous University, the Center of International Studies of the College of Mexico and the Department of Social Sciences of the Universidad Iberoamericana.