U.S. publishing may state that Hispanics do not read, but the universe begs to differ. Hailed as one of the largest book fairs in the world, the Guadalajara International Book Fair draws publishers, book sellers, librarians, writers, translators, etc, from the U.S., Canada, and Europe. David Unger, originally born in Guatemala, is the fair’s U.S. Representative. Unger’s duty is to facilitate the travels of anyone within the U.S. who may be interested in attending the fair. He is “a one-man band to provide as much lead information to get professionals to come to Guadalajara.”
Unger’s background, as a novelist and translator with an MFA in Poetry and Translations, gave him the necessary credentials to build up an “aspect of the book fair that at that point was non-existent.” Unger states that “up until 1992, it was a very, very good fair for Spanish language publishing but it did not have United States publishers going down there, and now United States publishers, Canadian publishers, French publishers, German publishers, Japanese and Korean publishers all go to Guadalajara.”
Unger also comments on the intimate, inclusive circle of Hispanics within the publishing industry. He asserts, “There are a lot of Latinos and Latin Americans who are very much involved in publishing and they are from very different nationalities, and what that does is it breeds a kind of richness that one would not expect if everyone were Dominican or Puerto Rican or Guatemalan or Argentinian.”