Novelist's Hometown Refuses A Name Change

Posted on July 3, 2006

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez grew up in the town of Aracataca. In order to spur tourism, supporters put a referendum on the town ballot to change the name of the town to Macondo, the name of the fictitious town in Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Alas, the referendum did not pass.

Although 93 percent voted for the change on Sunday, high absenteeism invalidated the results. In total, 3,600 of the town's 22,000 eligible voters -- fewer than half the minimum needed -- cast ballots, town Mayor Pedro Sanchez said. Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, was born in the banana-growing town near the Caribbean coast in 1927, and was raised there by his maternal grandparents until he was 9.
In his 2002 autobiography Living to Tell the Tale, he described how, as a struggling journalist in the 1950s, a return trip to Aracataca with his mother inspired him to become a novelist. One Hundred Years of Solitude, his first and best-known work, takes place in Macondo, a hamlet of zinc-roofed homes and a snowcapped-mountain backdrop that closely resembles Aracataca. The novel, in which residents suffer years of endless rain and an epidemic of insomnia, introduced the world to the style of "magical realism," in which fantastic events are made to appear ordinary.
To capitalize on the author's fame and attract tourists to the depressed town, the mayor last year proposed a referendum to change the town's name to Aracataca-Macondo. "We want to exploit Garcia Marquez's name in the best sense of the word," Sanchez said Sunday. "In honoring the maestro, the community will perceive tangible benefits."

Mayor Sanchez said that he felt that the low turnout for the referendum showed that the result is not really an accurate reading of the town's feelings on the subject. Somehow we get the feeling that Mayor Sanchez isn't going to let the issue lie. We expect the tiny town in Colombia to face another referendum in the near future.