Like every September 15, Mexicans were called to honor the memory of the Heroes of Independence, with which it could be verified once again that those same ideals of freedom and justice that drove our ancestors still remain alive within each citizen.
But other were the reasons that on September 17 prompted us to celebrate and celebrate the life of another hero, an endearing character whose weapons were not cannons or bayonets, but a pen, a piano, and a vivid imagination with which he managed to build a dream country that many generations got to know.
The Juan Rulfo Cultural Center, a nineteenth-century enclosure, was the place that warmly welcomed us while outside a rainy atmosphere was observed, which did not prevent the exhibition 100 years, 100 photographs from officially opening at 6:00 p.m. which began the celebrations for the centenary of Francisco Gabilondo Soler, the "Joker of the Keyboard", more popularly known as "Cri-Cri, the Grillito Cantor".
After the intoxicating response of the public who attended the Palacio de Bellas Artes to celebrate the hundred years of the "painter dove", Frida Kahlo, the celebration of the centenary of Don Pancho, as it has been affectionately called, comes to remind us of the importance of childhood as the seed of adult life, as well as the magic that exists in fairy tales, of which Cri-Cri was always a close friend.
It is delicious to remember the happy moments when "La Patita" went out with "her basket and her ball shawl", to go shopping at the market, or when King Bombón I received the news that Princess Caramelo agreed to marry him .
Equally emotional are the memories extracted from the grandmother's wardrobe, such as the colonel grandfather's sword, or the doll with large sea-colored eyes, owned by the narrator's mother, as well as the innocent reflections about why the grandmother no longer she could jump on the beds or why in front of that same wardrobe she used to cry at times.
These and other memories jumped to the minds of all of us who were able to observe the more than 100 photographs that covered the white walls of the galleries of the enclosure, in which the places, the people and the moments that gradually converted Francisco are portrayed in Cri-Cri.
Among others, the images of the forests near the Orizaba from the beginning of the 20th century stand out, from which surely the stories of the hair and feather inhabitants who inhabited a large part of the stories that the Grillito Cantor narrated in the radio broadcasts of the XEW from the 1940s.
Family portraits abound, both from childhood and from Cri-Cri's adult life, of which the kind figure of his maternal grandmother, Doña Emilia Fernández, and of his mother, Emilia Soler, stand out, pillars of artistic training. and the affable personality of Don Pancho.
Always surrounded by friends, Francisco Gabilondo Soler is observed, in the XEW sets, in the ring, in the observatory, abroad, in the multiple tributes that were paid to him in life, which, even today, continue to fill with pride to his children and grandchildren for whom Cri-Cri was simply Francisco, their father.
