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University of Cauca students pay tribute to languages, books, and their writers

9 March, 2026

With a program that included poetry readings aloud, musical performances, and dance, the Bachelor’s Program in Literature and Spanish Language celebrated Language Day with a tribute to the poetic legacy of student Elvia Cristina López Medina and the Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Mario Vargas Llosa.

As part of the celebration of Language Day, the Unicaucana academic community of the Bachelor’s Program in Literature and Spanish Language held its traditional event in the main courtyard of the El Carmen cloister, featuring poetry readings aloud as well as musical and dance performances centered on languages and books.

The current Head of the Spanish and Literature Program, Constanza Edy Sandoval Paz, explains that this space is designed to honor languages, as in our country, in addition to Spanish, around 69 native languages are spoken.

During the event, tribute was also paid, through verse and word, to the poetic legacy of student Elvia Cristina López Medina, who recently passed away. Another posthumous tribute was dedicated to Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate and one of the key figures of the Latin American Boom, a movement that placed Latin America at the center of 20th-century literature.

For Felipe Restrepo David, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Literature, Vargas Llosa was not only a great novelist and essayist, but also an outstanding promoter of literature written by young authors and women. Perhaps what endures is the duality between his literary work and his often rigid and radical political positions, which at times conflicted with the cultural, historical, and artistic interests of his own country.

Professor Restrepo David invites those approaching Vargas Llosa’s work for the first time to begin with his more accessible novels, in which he masterfully narrates human passions. One example is La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter). Readers are sure to enjoy hours of wonderful entertainment, as well as profound reflections on the nature of desire and love, not only in youth but also in adulthood.

The Head of the Spanish and Literature Program, Constanza Edy Sandoval Paz, also highlighted a special moment in this celebration of the word: when first-semester students receive anonymous letters from their ninth-semester peers, welcoming them and offering academic and literary advice that will surely be valuable throughout their professional training at the University of Cauca.

This event serves as a reminder for students to value languages, books, and reading. Quoting Vargas Llosa, Sandoval Paz emphasizes that having the opportunity to read is to have the chance to enter other lives, other worlds, “it is to live other lives, in this life.”