In many respects, Vuelta's beginning does not begin in 1976, but in 1971 with its progenitor, Plural (1971-1976) (see C1479). In Vuelta's first issue in December 1976, Mexican poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz (1914-1998), the editor of both journals, states: " Vuelta, as its name implies, is not a beginning but a return. In October 1971, a journal appeared, Plural. It continued, against all odds, for almost five years; when it reached issue 58, it disappeared; now it reappears, under a different name." [1]

The transformation of Paz's Plural to Vuelta was a direct response to the golpe gubernamental, a government sponsored coup that happened on July 8, 1976 that became known as the Excélsior affair. Plural was inherently connected to Excélsior on the account of being housed and financed by the newspaper. The editor of Excélsior, Julio Scherer Garcia, had offered Paz the opportunity to start a new journal after his resigning from diplomatic service abroad and returning to Mexico. Despite it being housed and financed by Excélsior, Plural was to be an independent monthly publication, allowing Paz the freedom to select content and assemble a separate staff. Throughout Plural's near five year run, tensions between Julio Scherer Garcia's Excélsior and the Mexican government heightened as Excélsior became more critical of President Luis Echeverría's administration. On July 8, 1976 Julio Scherer García and his editorial group, were ousted from the Excélsior cooperative and from editorial command on false grounds of illegally taking purchased lands in Paseos de Taxqueña, embezzling funds, and acting with unbridled power.

In response, on July 28th, 1976, Octavio Paz and Plural's editorial staff issued a statement of resignation from Excélsior's ties in Siempre! and stated that "[it] is impossible not to interpret what has happened as a sign that Mexico is moving towards the authoritarian darkness that covers almost all of our America".[2]

By December 1976, the same staff that consisted of Plural collected start-up money from private donations and the sale of a Rufino Tamayo painting to fund the first issues of Vuelta. As so, Vuelta emerged as an independent venture, an essentially Latin American literary journal open to the international currents of the 20th century world. Concurrently, the journal shared its name with an anthology of poems and a titular poem Paz published with Seix Barral in Barcelona months earlier in 1976.

Like Plural, the journal's four main concentrations included poetry, literary criticism, narrative, and political essay. It also maintained its cast of Spanish language writers and international contributors, and regularly featured works by Daniel Bell, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, Saúl Yurkiévich, Mario Vargas Llosa, Hans Magnus Ensenzberger, Milan Kundera, Fernando Savater, Leszek Kolakowski, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Susan Sontag, Pere Gimferrer, George Steiner, Irving Howe, and Joseph Brodsky. Paz himself was a regular contributor to the journal. Paz's writing topics included his own life, the 1994 campesino uprising in Chiapas, the Berlin Wall, the pictorial art of Wolfgang Paalen, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's intricate intellectual universe, and Anglo-Saxon poetry. On occasion Paz will publish a new poem or a translation of Chinese, French, or English classics.

Vuelta's editorial group initially consisted of Plural's editorial group which included Juan García Ponce, Gabriel Zaid, Salvador Elizondo, Alejandro Rossi, Tomás Segovia, and José de la Colina; Kazuya Sakai had accepted a position at the University of Texas at Austin in 1975 and left the editorial group before Plural ended. Enrique Krauze joined the group after Vuelta's fourth issue, and become a central figure in the journal's management for the rest of Vuelta's run. Aurelio Asiain arrived at Vuelta in 1982 and also stayed with the publication until 1998.

By the mid-1980s Vuelta opened a South American branch in Buenos Aires, Vuelta Sudamericana (1986-1989), with Danubio Torres Fierro and Enrique Pezzoni as editors. In 1987, Vuelta expanded as a publishing house, Editorial Vuelta, that was largely devoted to translations and to promoting the books of the journal's contributors. Its efforts were crowned in 1993, when Paz and his staff were awarded Spain's Príncipe de Asturias de Comunicación y Humanidades award for their major contribution to the development of Latin American and Spanish culture.

Vuelta remained in publication until August 1998, ceasing production after Paz's death earlier that year. After Vuelta, Enrique Krauze founded Letras Libres, which remains in publication to this present day and regularly pays tribute and homage to Octavio Paz's legacy in Plural and Vuelta. Moreover, many of Vuelta editors and contributors continue to publish work through Letras Libres.

[1] Quoted in John King, The Role of Mexico's Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture, (Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), 185. Orignal quote: Octavio Paz, Vuelta 1, no. 1 (1976): 4.

[2] Quoted in John King, The Role of Mexico's Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture, (Palgrave Macmillian, 2007), 179. Original quote in Julio Scherer, Los presidentes (Grijalbo, 1986), 221.