Gabriel Garcia

Early life[edit]

García Márquez billboard in Aracataca: "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work".—Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927[4] in Aracataca, Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán.[5] Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved, with his wife, to Barranquilla, leaving young Gabito in Aracataca.[6] He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía.[7] In December 1936, his father took him and his brother to Sincé, while in March 1937, his grandfather died; the family then moved first (back) to Barranquilla and then on to Sucre, where his father started up a pharmacy.[8]

When his parents fell in love, their relationship met with resistance from Luisa Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: he (Gabriel Eligio) was a Conservative, and had the reputation of being a womanizer.[9][10] Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telegraph messages after her father sent her away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to him.[9] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him[11][12] (The tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of Cholera.[10][13])

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of his life,[14] his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.[15][16] His grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",[15] was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days War.[17] The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly respected.[18] He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres that took place the year after García Márquez was born.[19] The Colonel, whom García Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality,"[20] was also an excellent storyteller.[21] He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United Fruit Company store.[22] He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't imagine how much a dead man weighs",[23][24] reminding him that there was no greater burden than to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.

García Márquez's political and ideological views were shaped by his grandfather's stories.[23] In an interview, García Márquez told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, "my grandfather the Colonel was a Liberal. My political ideas probably came from him to begin with because, instead of telling me fairy tales when I was young, he would regale me with horrifying accounts of the last civil war that free-thinkers and anti-clerics waged against the Conservative government."[25][26]

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