Del Tiempo Y El Tropico-Honduras/of Time and the Tropics
(Of Time and the Tropics - Honduras is a voyage of discove...)
Of Time and the Tropics - Honduras is a voyage of discovery into the heart and soul of the Central American country of Honduras. Three artists - a photographer, a writer and a composer - explore the past and reveal the present of the land in their photographs, writings, and music. Dutch photographer Hannes Wallrafen's images depict Honduran society and the imprint history has left on it. The words of Julio Escoto, one of Honduras' most famous writers, give a depth of understanding to the photographs, and the music of Honduran singer and songwriter Guillermo Anderson adds an extra dimension to the exploration of this society. Together, they introduce Honduras and Hondurans to us in a way that is highly imaginative and truthful at the same time.
Julio Escoto is a Honduran short-story teller, novelist and essayist. He is the acclaimed author of several works of both fiction and Nonfiction that address his country's historical, political, and social legacies and currents.
Background
Julio Escoto was born on February 28, 1944 in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and was one of eight children in a middle-class family. His father, who published a local newspaper for a time, had been a revolutionary soldier against a despotic government in Honduras in the 1920s. Both this and his father's Lenca Indian heritage would provide rich inspiration for Escoto early in his career as a novelist.
Education
Escoto penned his first short story for a high school magazine after fearing that he had run over a child one evening when he first learned how to drive, and the piece won praise from his peers and teachers alike. Encouraged, Escoto wrote and published a second short story before he even arrived at college. He attended a teachers' training college in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, receiving his degree in 1964.
Career
Between the years 1965 and 1969 Escoto taught highschool Spanish. His first novel, Los guerreros de Hibueras, was published in 1967 after he submitted it to a national competition and it took second prize. "The Warriors of Hibueras" were men like his father who fought as guerrillas in the 1920s, and their brutal and bloody experiences are related in the spent narrative voices of the book, illustrating the ultimately dehumanizing aspects of war on individuals.
Escoto's second novel, El arbol de los panuelos ("The Tree of Handkerchiefs"), appeared in 1972 at a time when he was beginning a new dual career - as director of publications for Central Bank of Honduras and as a professor al the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras - and while continuing to write fiction. The work was inspired by a trip he took to a noted mystical Honduran village, llama, also the birthplace of his Lenca grandmother.
After the outbreak of war between EI Salvador and Honduras in 1969, Escoto moved to the United States and earned a degree from the University of Florida, then returned to Tegucigalpa's Universidad Nacional. In 1974 he edited the first anthology of love poetry from Honduran writers, Antologia de la poesia amorosa en Honduras. A collection of his essays, Casa del agua ("House of Water"), was published in 1975. Around this same time Escoto was invited to take part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, then returned once more to Tegucigalpa in 1975. With his second wife he would co-edit a number of nonfiction titles, such as the 1979 work Los Mayas.
Mid-career as both a writer and leading Latin American intellectual figure, Escoto became engaged in many projects and professional activities. He chaired the department of languages and literature at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras until 1976, then moved to Costa Rica for a decade as a result of Honduras's conflicts with EI Salvador and later Nicaragua. In the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, Escoto served as director of a consortium of Central America's university presses, the Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, an important institution in region's contemporary literary scene. After 1980 he worked for the Costa Rican-based Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Cooperation.
In 1980 his first novel in several years, Dias de ventisca, noches de huracan ("Days of Wind, Nights of Hurricane"), appeared in Costa Rica. Its publication was censored in Honduras because of the highly critical stance it takes toward the left-wing movement in both Honduras and the entire Latin American region. Escoto's time in Costa Rica, and his wide range of contacts with other Latin American writers and activists, had given him a considerably less nationalistic perspective on the politics of the region.
Another work of Escoto's that dealt with the destruction that war wreaks upon the human spirit was the 1983 short story "Abril antes del mediodia." which was awarded Spain's Gabriel Miro Prize. Translated into English in two versions - "High Noon in April" and "April in the Forenoon" - it was published in the United States, respectively, in two 1988 collections, Clamor of Innocence: Stories from Central America and And We Sold the Rain: Contemporary Fiction from Central America.
A parliamentary democracy returned to Escoto's homeland in 1982, and with the realization that his teenage sons were rapidly losing their sense of Honduran heritage, the writer and Silverthorne Turcios returned in 1986. They settled in Escoto's hometown of San Pedro
Sula, and he launched an editorial house the following year. Renewed, he also returned to writing fiction. The terrifying experiences of the summer of 1969, when he, his first wife, and three young sons were living in a residential area of Tegucigalpa that came under fire, would provide the basis for his 1988 novel Bajo el almendro... junto at volcan ("Under the Almond Tree... Next to the Volcano").
After publishing two works of nonfiction in 1990 - El ojo santo: La ideologia en las religiones у la television ( The Holy Eye: Ideology in Religion and Television") and Jose Cecilio del Valle: Una etica contemporanea ("Jose Cecilio del Valle: A Contemporary Ethic") - Escoto wrote what would become the most important book of his career to date. The 1992 novel El general Morazan marcha a batallar desde la muerte ("General Morazan Comes Back to Fight from His Death") is based upon an actual historical figure who led Honduras to independence from Spain in 1821 and created a solid, seventeen-year Central American Federation. Escoto's book quickly became a sensation in Honduras and sold ten thousand copies in just three months.
Escoto remains head of his own publishing house, Centro Editorial, in San pedro Sula, and is involved in the children's cultural foundation and community center that Silverthorne Turcios established before her death. Escoto's 1993 novel, Rey del albor: Madrugada ("King of the Dawn: Madrugada") addresses Honduran cultural identity as well as the wider Central American sense of alliance.
Almost none of Escoto's work has been translated into English, however, with the exception of the 1983 short story "Abril antes del mediodia," published in two 1988 anthologies.
Escoto began a family with his first wife, Nohemi Cordova Santos, in 1964. They had three sons: Julio Guillermo, Carlos Adolfo, Jorge Enrique. Shortly afterward he divorced his first wife he married Gypsy Silverthorne Turcios in 1976.