Plural : revista cultural de Excélsior

Plural was founded by Mexican poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Octavio Paz (1914-1998) in Mexico City in 1971. Prior to Plural, Paz was living abroad intermittently as a diplomat since 1945. He was living in India as the Mexican ambassador in 1968, when he resigned in protest against the Mexican government's violent supression of student demonstrations in Tlatelolco during the Olympic Games. Upon returning to Mexico, Julio Scherer García, editor of the newspaper Excélsior, offered Paz the opportunity to start a new monthly journal. 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.

Plural was not strictly a literary journal. Beginning a new journal after resigning in protest against the actions of the Mexican government in Tlatelolco allowed Paz the platform to critically discuss Mexico's state of government and democracy. It also allowed Paz to open up Mexico to international intellectual cultural exchange. From its beginning, Plural strove to be a convergence for Latin American and other international intellectuals to write about trends in art, culture, and politics. For its first issues in late 1971, Paz reached out to a wide international list of contributors that included Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Claude Lévi Strauss, Susan Sontag, John Cage, Noam Chomsky, Severo Sarduy, Paul Goodman, Harold Rosenberg, Roman Jakobson, Henri Michaux, Dore Ashton, and Charles Tomlinson. Plural was imagined to be a Latin American journal that covered a wide range of disciplines including essay, criticism, and translation. This, juxtaposed with its historical location in post-1968 Mexican society, made Plural one of the most innovative and culturally significant monthly publications of its time. Its interdisciplinary nature and broad scope put the publication ahead of its time.

As Paz fulfilled various academic responsibilities abroad as visiting professor at various institutions like Cambridge and Harvard, he relied on an initial staff of Tomás Segovia and Sonia Levy-Spira to run the editorial office while he managed editorial capacities through telephone and written correspondence. Later, Plural's editorial staff consisted of Kazuya Sakai, an Argentine-Japanese painter and critic, who replaced Segovia as managing editor; Uruguayan writer Danubio Torres Fierro, and Mexican writer and translator José de la Colina. Other editors and staff included Gabriel Zaid, Alejandro Rossi, Salvador Elizondo, and Eusebio Rojas Guzmán.

Plural remained in publication until 1976 when the Excélsior workers' cooperative was dismantled in a golpe gubernamental, resulting in the government complicity in defaming and firing Julio Scherer García and his staff. Paz and other members of the Plural advisory committee printed their reaction and resignation from Excélsior's ties in Siempre!. Issue 58, published in July 1976, was the last Plural issue published under Paz's directorship. Both Excélsior and Plural continued as publications without the editorialship of Scherer García and Paz. Scherer García went on to begin a weekly magazine called Proceso and Paz began Vuelta. For more on Vuelta, which Paz edited until his death in 1998, see Vuelta Editorial Files (C1480).