Aren't we all migrants?
Mexican author Juan Villoro will be teaching at the University of Bern in the fall semester of 2025. As the Friedrich Dürrenmatt Visiting Professor for World Literature, he will be dedicating a weekly seminar to the experiences of migration.
From Mexico City to East Berlin
Juan Villoro, born in Mexico City, studied sociology in East Berlin and then worked as a cultural attaché for his country. In addition to his literary work, he has taught at Princeton, Yale, and Stanford Universities, as well as at the New Journalist Foundation. Villoro writes a column for the Mexican newspaper Reforma. As a writer and public intellectual, he repeatedly addresses the question of how literature can respond to social upheaval and what role linguistic form plays in this. In his novel El testigo (2004), for example, he describes the return of a Mexican literature professor to his homeland, which is dominated by corruption and disappointment with democracy. Villoro combines personal and collective memories with historical and fictional events, thus finding a literary language that addresses contradictory reality on various levels.
From soccer to the drug war
Juan Villoro has published novels, short stories, reportages, essays, and plays. Among others, his young adult novel Das wilde Buch (2014) and the narco-crime novel Das dritte Leben (2016) have been published in German. In El vértigo horizontal (2019, English: Horizontal Vertigo: A City called Mexico), he paints a portrait of his hometown from Aztec antiquity to today's megacity. Thematically, his spectrum ranges from soccer, to which he dedicated the essay collection Dios es redondo (God is Round, 2006), to the drug war in the short story collection Los culpables (2007, English: The Guilty).
Writing, reading, being foreign
Juan Villoro dedicates his seminar at the University of Bern, which he teaches in German, to the experiences of migration. Together with his students, he wants to explore the following questions: What experiences do we have when we emigrate and immigrate? How do we behave as strangers? How do we treat strangers? How do we preserve our culture in a foreign country? And aren't we all migrants? Texts by Mexican, Argentine, French, Polish, South African, US, and German authors are read, dealing with what it means to enter a different culture and belong to the "other" there. Together with his students, Villoro wants to open up comparative perspectives: between genres and languages, between one's own and foreign experiences, between written, read, and experienced otherness.
Public launch at the Burgerbibliothek Bern
The public launch event with Juan Villoro will take place on October 1 at 6:30 p.m. in the Hallersaal of the Burgerbibliothek Bern.
