‘Macondo York’: The gaze of a García Márquez overwhelmed by the Big Apple

Few associate Gabriel García Márquez with the asphalt jungle of New York. Collective memory places the Nobel Prize-winner in the heat of Mexico, the hustle and bustle of Barranquilla or the elegance of Barcelona. But for Colombian graphic designer and author Iván Onatra, the Big Apple was a crucial — and at times, forgotten — stage in the scribe’s life. García Márquez’s time in the city that never sleeps takes on new life in Onatra’s bilingual design book Macondo York, in which he explores the writer’s love-hate relationship that lasted for six months, while he worked as a journalist for the Prensa Latina news agency.

It was a period marked by frustration, which finally led him to leave the city for Mexico. According to Onatra, the trip was a definitive bridge: five years after the exhausting experiment in New York, García Márquez would publish One Hundred Years of Solitude, his masterpiece and perennial bestseller. In Onatra’s view, there is a deep connection between these two worlds. “Gabo saw New York’s magical realism,” and, though the city overwhelmed him, it was a fundamental seed to his creative process.

Macondo York is not a conventional photo book. Onatra, who has lived between New York and Colombia for more than a decade, describes the project as a “comprehensive graphic design approach” that blends literature, history and typography. The book’s visual origin stems from a “typographical safari” Onatra carried out in Brooklyn in 2014, which led him to discover how “the streets are alive.” With his camera, he captured not landscapes, but ephemeral urban messaging: signs, sewers and shop windows that are the true face of New York.

The idea for the book came out of a Gabo Foundation workshop in New York. After a series of mockups, Onatra designed the book’s title and cover, and it struck him that the project had potential. He used his images — capturing graffiti, signs and shop lettering — to tell the story of García Márquez’s relationship with the city. The result is a beautiful editorial object, a work made to delight lovers of graphic books.

Each page is accompanied by a quote from the author of No One Writes to the Colonel. “New York is the greatest phenomenon of the twentieth century… I find it so overwhelming,” wrote García Márquez. “Always so unequal and always so originally American,” he said.

The book also gathers the author’s own experiences, like the music shops he discovered on 116th Street: “They sell all the old Cuban and Antillean music… You can find real gems.” Or his relationship with the people of the city: “In New York, I start out speaking Spanish, and everyone understands me.”

To avoid using erroneous quotes attributed to the author on the internet, Onatra says he worked with the Gabo Foundation to make sure that every reference was verified. The book opens with a phrase from García Márquez that sums up the project’s essence: “Photography will be the best witness to history.”

Onatra also has a close relationship with photography. “I have always taken photographs, since I was in high school,” he says. “I never made a living from photography, but I have always had the camera with me. There’s not a moment on one of my trips that I don’t have a camera. And I took a course on typographical safari with the New York School of Visual Arts that consisted of looking for signs around Brooklyn. That’s when I said, ‘Oh, the streets are alive.’ And ever since, I began to take photos in the street without really knowing what they were for. Some day, I said, I’m going to use them.”

A sensory experience

Onatra presented Macondo York at the Centroamérica Cuenta Literary Festival, which featured more than 80 authors and took place in Panama. After the presentation, he tells EL PAÍS that the book’s impact has transcended its pages, leading to large-scale exhibitions in places like Bogotá’s Casa de Nariño and the International Book Fair, where 88 of its panels were presented.

At Hay Festival, the work was transformed into an olfactory and auditory experience, including a special perfume called Limón de Oro (Golden Lemon), and a band that blended New York sounds with atmospheric notes recalling Macondo, the mythic town of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Its reception among new audiences has been notable. Onatra notes that the combination of two cultural powerhouses — Gabo and New York— creates an added “plus” that attracts even those who are not familiar with the author. The book is bilingual, and its urban aesthetic connects with young people who see design and street art as vital forms of expression.

Onatra says that Macondo York is just the first step of what he calls his “New York trilogy.” He is already working on the next installation, Lorca York, which will explore the homes of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in the city, set against a graphic grid in “acid green,” continuing his mission to portray New York through the eyes of great, Spanish-speaking writers. His aim is to capture the essence of a project that demonstrates that, even if the street signs shown in the book disappear in a few years, the words of a genius like García Márquez will continue to speak to us.

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