UNIVERSITY OF COLIMA
General Department of Information
Press Release
THE BOOK “COSAS DE COLIMA,” BY MANUEL VELASCO, WAS PRESENTED AT THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
*Emotional notes to understand today’s world, according to Rubén Carrillo, commentator.
Manuel Velasco Murguía presented his book entitled “Cosas de Colima” at the University’s Historical and Newspaper Archive, last Tuesday evening. In this book Velasco writes about his youth, his interest in hunting and jazz, the times he has climbed Colima’s volcano of fire, his trips to the mountains and the sea, and about the origins of radio broadcasting in Colima in the early 20th century.
In this presentation, Velasco was joined by Roberto Guzmán Benítez, Rubén Carrillo Ruiz and Abelardo Ahumada González, journalists.
Roberto Guzmán talked with excitement about the friendship he and Mr. Manuel Velasco Murguía have developed in recent years, and described this author as “one of the wisest men of the 20th century that has also taught me to love and value this land that welcomed me a little more than 21 years ago, and that I have already adopted as my second land.
Roberto, born in Mexico City, stated that “Cosas de Colima” is a book whose pages are full of the names and more names of his friends. “He says that friendship is more valuable than having a fortune.” In this book, “the author presents a picture of the Colima that will never come back, but that has become the basis of Colima’s present and promising future.”
Cosas de Colima, said Roberto Guzmán, “is a book that will be interesting to the generation that lived in the days in which Manuel Velasco used to run 3 miles with his many friends. But it will also be interesting to today’s generations, since they will know what their land used to be like, the land of their parents and their grandparents, and the land that will belong to their children one day.”
Rubén Carrillo, collaborator in some local newspapers, stated that the steps taken by Mr. Velasco, in more than 7 decades, “have always had a purpose: being an apostle of teaching in every public responsibility. In the serenity of his words I see the sign of relevance, a look that has not lost the radiance of everyday life and the intelligence that is aware of its time.”
With regard to Cosas de Colima, a book re-published by the University of Colima, he stated that it is a series of “emotional notes whose legacy explains today’s world. It is a sudden rain, an emotional storm of records, a chronicle dying to escape memories but held hostage in the story of these accounts left to the new generations. The book grants us freedom to think, perceive, imagine, dream, and remember our search and apprehension of facts.”
Abelardo Ahumada, writer and historian, noted that the book presented by Professor Manuel Velasco “intends to visualize, remember and register developments, the life of Colima in, at least, 8 decades. In this regard, Cosas de Colima is a compendium of unique facts, but these facts are simultaneous, and he had to experience them from his personal perspective.”
Cosas de Colima, said Abelardo, “is not a complicated book or a history book, but it is about Velasco’s history connected with the developments of the society of Colima in those days. It is a pleasant book to read that has no mysteries or hidden codes. It was written so that we could all read it and enjoy it.”
Manuel Velasco Murguía, a 92-year-old man with a firm look, read a text in which he names the jobs he has done during his life, and the governors and University presidents he has served, as well as the books he has published, and the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren he has.
The other books he has written are: Colima y las islas Revillagigedo, Relatos de Colima, Historia de la educación superior, and others he has not published yet like Reseña histórica de la U de C.
In the prologue written for the first edition of this book (1984), Juan Macedo López, a contemporary of Manuel Velasco, says that the text evokes, “with astonishing memory, the bygone days.” These are pages “which talk about our world, of that world which seems remote for today’s generation, but that is close to our sensitivity.”
Macedo López also remembers estanques such as La Armonía, San Miguel or Los Caballos, that used to be filled with water coming from a small river, which looked like the Jordan river to them, “where we would wash off our childish sins: playing truant and contemplating, with timid malice, the sculpture-like thigh of the girl sitting next to us in our class.”
