Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America

By Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and Patrick O'Hare

2023 LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

The first comprehensive study of cartonera, a vibrant publishing phenomenon born in Latin America.

A publishing phenomenon and artistic project, cartonera was born in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. Infused with a rebellious spirit, it has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. Taking Form, Making Worlds is the first comprehensive study of cartonera. Drawing on interdisciplinary research conducted across Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the authors show how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically engaged network of writers, artists, and readers. More than a social movement, cartonera uses texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions to foster community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. For various groups including waste-pickers, Indigenous communities, rural children, and imprisoned women, cartonera provides a platform for unique stories and sparks collaborations that bring the walls of the “lettered city” tumbling down. In contexts of stigma and exclusion, cartonera collectives give form to a decolonial aesthetics of resistance, making possible a space of creative experimentation through which plural worlds can be brought to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477324981

Book preview

Taking Form, Making Worlds

Cartonera Publishers in Latin America

LUCY BELL

ALEX UNGPRATEEB FLYNN

PATRICK O’HARE

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bell, Lucy, author. | Flynn, Alex Ungprateeb, author. | O’Hare, Patrick, author.

Title: Taking form, making worlds : cartonera publishers in Latin America / Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Patrick O’Hare.

Other titles: William & Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: William and Bettye Nowlin series in art, history, and culture of the Western Hemisphere | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021110 (print) | LCCN 2021021111 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2495-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2497-4 (PDF library e-book) ISBN 978-1-4773-2498-1 (ePub non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Cartonera books—Publishing—Latin America. | Cartonera books—Publishing—Social aspects—Latin America. | Cartonera books—Latin America.

Classification: LCC Z231.5. L5 B45 2022 (print) | LCC Z231.5. L5 (ebook) | DDC 070.5098—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021110

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021111

doi:10.7560/324950

To cartonera collectives across Latin America

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Translation

Introduction

1. Histories: Tracing Trajectories of Resistance

2. Methods: Trans-Formal Research for Transformational Practice

3. Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action

4. Encounters: Existence as Resistance and Sites of Plurality

5. Workshops: Cardboard and the Material Sociality of Practice

6. Exhibitions: An Artistic Proposition to Reorder the Social

Conclusion

Works Cited

About the Authors

Index

Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Lúcia and Maria constructing Arquipélago books in Dulcinéia’s workshop within the Glicério recycling cooperative.

Figure 0.2. Mixtec family making books with La Cartonera in Cuernavaca.

Figure 0.3. Dulcinéia by Thiago Honório and Dulcinéia Catadora.

Figure 0.4. The Glicério recycling cooperative in São Paulo.

Figure 0.5. Dany and Nayeli of La Cartonera.

Figure 0.6. General view of La Cartonera’s tenth-anniversary exhibition in Cuernavaca.

Figure 1.1. Poster for the Seventh International Encounter of Cartonera Publishers in Santiago, Chile.

Figure 1.2. Eloísa Cartonera poster.

Figure 1.3. Andreia displaying her book Passagem at the Senate House Library in London, with Lúcia.

Figure 2.1. Espejo y viento book launch at Puente Grande prison in Mexico.

Figure 2.2. Cartonera workshops in Puente Grande prison.

Figure 2.3. (a) Maria’s diagonal line technique and (b) Puente Grande books.

Figure 2.4. Sonia’s front cover.

Figure 3.1. Four cartoneras, four binding techniques.

Figure 3.2. Maria in the Dulcinéia workshop, with Arquipélago collages.

Figure 3.3. Seu Toco Pequi in his front room in Cordisburgo.

Figure 3.4. The cajado in action in the cerrado of Minas Gerais.

Figure 3.5. Trazos de resistencia copublication.

Figure 4.1. Mirian La Osa Poderosa Soledad Merlo in Eloísa Cartonera’s workshop in Buenos Aires.

Figure 4.2. Roundtable at the encuentro cartonero in Chapultepec Park art gallery in Cuernavaca.

Figure 4.3. Temok Saucedo looking on during the encuentro cartonero in Cuernavaca.

Figure 4.4. Encontro cartonero in São Paulo.

Figure 5.1. Sergio and Israel at the Ixtlahuacán del Río book festival in Jalisco.

Figure 5.2. Cartonera bookmaking materials for the Ixtlahuacán book festival.

Figure 5.3. Sergio sourcing cardboard in Guadalajara.

Figure 5.4. Cochineal workshop in Guadalajara.

Figure 5.5. Children experiment with cartonera and cochineal in Guadalajara.

Figure 6.1. Andreia reciting at the 2019 São Paulo Virada Cultural.

Figure 6.2. Dulcinéia Catadora’s installation in the exhibition O abrigo e o terreno at the Museu de Arte do Rio.

Figure 6.3. Solange with Brasinha in his community museum in Cordisburgo.

Figure 6.4. Júlio with Seu Manoel in Cordisburgo.

Figure 6.5. Poster for the Cartoneras: Releituras latino-americanas exhibition at Casa do Povo in São Paulo.

Figure 6.6. Staircase module in the Cartoneras exhibition.

Figure 6.7. Workstation at the Cartoneras exhibition.

Figure 6.8. View of the Cartoneras exhibition.

Figure 6.9. Andreia and Maria with members of Warmís, MILBI, and the Colectivo Feminista de Argentinxs en São Paulo.

Figure 6.10. Somos mulheres imigrantes.

Figure 6.11. No Woman Is Illegal placard held during the Women’s Day demonstration, São Paulo, March 8, 2019.

Figure 7.1. Scenes from the London Cartonera Book Festival.

Figure 7.2. Sol and Júlio with Catapoesia books in the Senate House Library, London.

Acknowledgments

In the years following her first encounter with a cardboard book in Buenos Aires in 2011, Lucy sought out cartonera publishers, workshops, and books wherever her academic work took her. In Mexico City in 2013, Lulú Lecona and Ocelotl Galván met her at a café to talk cartonera and student protests and share the cardboard-bound books they produced as La Verdura Cartonera. Later the same year, Juditzin Santopietro took Lucy to her favorite Coyoacán market stall to eat pozole (corn soup) and tell her about Iguanazul Cartonera, a community publisher she had set up in 2010 to revitalize Indigenous languages from Mexico through literature and the oral tradition. Enjoying Juditzin’s company and stories too much to say goodbye, Lucy suggested they meet up the following Saturday at La Cartonera’s bookmaking workshop to which she had been invited in the nearby city of Cuernavaca. And so it was that Lucy painted her first cartonera cover (badly), with the warm welcome of Dany, Nayeli, and friends. Special thanks go to Juditzin, Lulú, Ocelotl, Dany, and Nayeli for these first encounters that would lead Lucy to travel across Mexico and Brazil to begin connecting the dots of Latin American cartonera publishing networks. Thanks are also due to the Mexican collectives that shared their stories and books with Lucy in the early days of the research: Shula Cartonera and La Regia Cartonera (Monterrey); La Rueda Cartonera, Viento Cartonero, Ediciones el viaje, Ediciones del Varrio Xino, and El Pato con Canclas (Guadalajara); Mamá Dolores Cartonera (Querétaro); Nuestro Grito Cartonero and Pachuk Cartonera Editorial (Pachuca); 2.0.1.2 Editorial (Mexico City); and La Ratona Cartonera (Cuernavaca).

For Alex, the initial connections to cartonera were proposed by artists with whom he was working in São Paulo: Thiago Honório, Maíra Dietrich, and Ícaro Lira. And it was as a result of Ícaro’s project as part of the Residência Artística Cambridge and his invitation to contribute to a cartonera book that Alex began working directly with the collective Dulcinéia Catadora. This contact soon expanded to other collectives in Brazil and beyond, and he would particularly like to thank Lúcia Rosa, Andreia Emboava, Maria Dias da Costa, and Eminéia Santos of Dulcinéia Catadora for their unfailing friendship and support; Solange Barreto and Júlio Brabo of Catapoesia for taking him into their home in Minas Gerais; and many other cartonera publishers for sharing their particular worlds and practices. Among them are Douglas Diegues of Yiyi Jambo, Washington Cucurto, María Gómez, Alejandro Miranda, and Mirian Soledad Merlo of Eloísa Cartonera; Idalia Morejón Arnaiz of Malha Fina Cartonera; Wellington Melo of Mariposa Cartonera; Gaudêncio Gaudério of Vento Norte Cartonera; Edmario Jobat of Universo Cartoneiro; and Ademar Marchi of Sereia Ca(n)tadora.

The Guadalajara-based publishers Sergio Fong and Israel Soberanes and the wider community at La Rueda Cartonera and café first took Patrick under their wing, making him feel immediately welcome and at home there. In just a few weeks, Sergio had not only entrusted him with the creation of books in his catalogue but also invited Patrick to live at his home and regularly took him out for pozole after late-night discussions between friends at La Rueda. A few months later, Patrick was welcomed by Nayeli and Dany into their beautiful cultural world in Cuernavaca after an experience at another field site took an unexpected turn. We are eternally grateful for their warm welcome. La Cartonera’s wider community also brought Patrick into the fold, with Mafer and Victor Hugo particularly deserving of a shout-out. We are also indebted to Oscar Edgar López for his work with Patrick in Zacatecas. Oscar showed open-mindedness and kindness as they collaborated on the creation of a short film with Marco Casillas Jácquez (2018) and delivered workshops in Oscar’s lovely school in San José del Carmen and other rural schools in the Zacatecas region. Finally, Patrick would like to thank Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, who played an important role in bringing him into the research team, and her wonderful mother, Rosario Ezcurra, who generously provided a home for him and his family on their stopovers in Mexico City.

The research team’s journeys were separate but also linked, and one person in particular brought them together: David Lehmann, a friend and emeritus reader in social science who introduced Lucy to Alex. We are extremely grateful to David for his insight in bringing our research paths together and for his continued support throughout the research. Other academics have also been key to the success of the project. We would like to extend our most heartfelt thanks to Érica Segre and Ben Bollig, who were involved in early discussions about the project. Many other academic colleagues helped by reviewing early funding applications and publication drafts, including Lúcia Sá, Yulia Egorova, Nayanika Mookherjee, Hannah Brown, and Jonas Tinius, as well as the four anonymous reviewers of our book project. Our greatest debt in this sense, however, is to our editor at the University of Texas Press, Kerry Webb. Kerry’s enthusiasm for the project was evident from our first exchanges, and we would like to offer our thanks to Kerry and the team at Texas for their knowledge, expert reading, and all-around support, which in turn allowed us to be more confident about the kind of book we wanted to write.

We would also like to thank the librarian and curator Paloma Celis Carbajal, who is a point of reference for cartonera publishers around the world. Paloma has been crucial to our research throughout the project, a key guest at our events, and an expert interlocutor in our discussions, always happy to answer our questions. One event that was important for this research project was a panel on Informal Economies of the Book convened by Magalí Rabasa at the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference, held in Barcelona. There we would meet Marcy Schwartz, whose Public Pages (University of Texas Press) has been an important point of inspiration and reference for this book. Along with Marcy, Jessica Gordon-Borroughs and Magalí offered advice, support, and friendship that have been vital throughout and beyond this research project.

The transnational collaboration from which Taking Form, Making Worlds resulted would have been impossible without the support of our own institutions and UK funding agencies. Between 2017 and 2020 we were able to develop the Cartonera Publishing project as a collaborative, action-based project through two Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grants, Precarious Publishing and Activating the Arts, both funded under the Global Challenges Research Funding stream, and an additional grant from Durham University’s Higher Education Funding Council for England allocation. We are deeply grateful for the generous support we have received from these research councils and from our respective institutions: the University of Surrey, where Lucy has been based throughout the project and Patrick was employed for the first phase of the project; Durham University and UCLA, where Alex has been able to pursue his research; and the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, and St. Andrews, where Patrick has developed his academic career following his time working with Lucy and Alex.

We would particularly like to thank our colleagues in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey for their invaluable input into and feedback on our research plans, drafts, and activities: Diane Watt, Adeline Johns-Putra, Ana Frankenberg García, Stephen Mooney, Sabine Braun, Justin Edwards, Oliver Bond, Greville Corbett, Matthew Baerman, Bran Nicol, Alison Stubley, and two wonderful Hispanists, Catherine Barbour and Julia Ker. We are also grateful to a fantastic group of Hispanic studies students—Gemma Drake, Anna Fisher, Georgia Green, Ellie Hamill, Annie May, Isabella Panayiotou, Paloma Sanz, Georgina Sutton, and Chrissy Waymark—for bringing all their energy and imagination to the community translation project for Espejo y viento (Wind & Mirrors), a collection of writings by imprisoned women.

One of the practical aspects of this project has been building cartonera collections at three of the most important libraries in England: Senate House Library (London), the British Library, and Cambridge University Library. For their time, energy, and commitment to the project, we are extremely grateful to our project partners María Castrillo, Rebecca Simpson, and Richard Espley at Senate House Library; Elizabeth Cooper, Philip Abraham, Iris Bachman, and Andrew Rackley at the British Library; and Sonia Morcillo García and Clara Panozzo Zénere at Cambridge University Library.

Cartonera is a Latin American phenomenon, and throughout the project, we were fortunate to be able to count on the support of Latin American institutions that opened their doors and generously hosted the project’s events. We would like to thank all the staff at the Casa do Povo in São Paulo, particularly Benjamin Seroussi, Laura Viana, Laura Daviña (who also was responsible for the graphic design of the Cartoneras in Translation coedition), Marilia Loureiro, Ana Druwe, and Alita Maria, all of whom welcomed our project and helped to make the exhibition such a wonderfully convivial space. Thanks are also due to the curation and education team for the exhibition, particularly the curator Beatriz Lemos, and to Pombo de Barros, for their work on production, and the Grupo Inteiro (Cláudio Bueno, Vitor Cesar, Carol Tonetti, and Ligia Nobre) for their exhibition design. We are also grateful to the education team, David Rubio, Tabita Lopes, and Maria Paula Botero, led by Graziela Kunsch, for their wonderful public program and to everyone who participated in the workshops and events. We would like to extend our thanks to the State Libraries of Jalisco and the Department of Culture and the Department of Security in Jalisco.

A significant part of this project has been about bringing cartonera to a wider audience, and we were fortunate to work with talented filmmakers who helped achieve this goal. We are very grateful to the director Isadora Brant and editor Marcelo Delamanha for their brilliant work on the documentary Cartoneras (2019), filmed in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. We would also like to thank Carolina Caffé for her videos with Andreia and Maria, and Julia May for her filming in London. Another strategy for bringing cartonera to a wider audience was a website for the project, and Federico Martínez Montoya is to thank for this.

On any collaborative project such as this, some all-around great people accompany you along the way. We would like to offer our special thanks to these interlocutors for their insightful and provocative perspectives: Javier Barilaro, Cecilia Palmeiro, Mariela Scafati, and Pablo Rosales in Buenos Aires; Isabella Rjeille, Yudi Rafael, Thais Graciotti, Juliana Caffé, Júlia Ayerbe, Ícaro Lira, Thiago Honório, Maíra Dietrich, Flavia Krauss, and Camila Maroja in São Paulo; Ricarda Musser and Ulrike Mühlschlegel at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin; Raúl Silva de la Mora in Mexico; Tim Ingold, María Soledad Montañez, Linda Newsome, and Jo Bradley in London; and a special mention for Emma Balch, who helped us put on the alternative festival Hay Cartoneras! in Hay-on-Wye, England, at the Story of Books.

We would also like to thank the friends, family, and partners who have supported us as translators, panel moderators, workshop facilitators, critical friends, interlocutors, proofreaders, and cartonera bookmakers. Lucy would like to thank her partner, Marco, for always being up for painting cardboard book covers, hanging out in Sergio’s café, venturing to some unusual holiday destinations, and generally putting up with a large amount of cardboard over the years of the project. She is extremely grateful to her parents and sister—Roger, Sheena, and Katie—for their unconditional support and for helping out so much over the years of this research. She would also like to thank her friends Chandra Morrison, Elsa Monique Treviño, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Ana Frankenberg García, Ricardo García, and Joey Whitfield for providing huge amounts of academic and moral support throughout the project. Three remarkable women deserve a particular shout-out for their ongoing, unwavering support and friendship: Catriona McAllister, Alice Swift, and Paola Ugalde.

Alex would particularly like to thank Beatriz Lemos, with whom he curated the cartonera exhibition in São Paulo. Beatriz was a constant inspiration and wonderful critical interlocutor; no thanks can do justice to having the opportunity to learn and work together in her extraordinary curatorial practice. Alex’s greatest debt, however, is to his wife, Noara Quintana, whose own artistic practice and theorization offered such an important point of reference to the modes of work that cartonera encompasses. Noara’s reflections brought questions of positionality and hierarchy to a sharp focus and drove the need to conceive of better modes of collaboration, to which we hope this book makes a contribution.

Patrick is grateful to his partner, Mary, and daughter, Rosie, for their wonderful company in Cuernavaca. Starting at two Mexican nurseries in the space of two months must have been tough for Rosie, but she took it in her stride, rewarded by the nursery staff with incredible hairdos and even more incredible school lunches. After having followed Patrick to a landfill in Montevideo, Mary found in Mexico a slightly more comfortable experience, albeit with the added difficulty of supporting Rosie, which she managed with great dedication and care. Mary has since surpassed Patrick in cartonera craft, grasping the method as a way of continuing collaboration with her dispersed artistic collective, Lost Properties.

Finally, we would like to dedicate these pages to the four cartonera collectives to whom we owe the book: La Rueda Cartonera and La Cartonera in Mexico, and Dulcinéia Catadora and Catapoesia in Brazil. Without any exaggeration, it is their passion, energy, dedication, and openness that have made this book possible. From an early stage, these publishers have been so much more than research participants; we are proud to count them as friends, compas, and coconspirators. We hope this book does them justice and that they might think of it as forming part of their colorful and eclectic catalogues. We likewise hope that these pages will inspire readers to delve into the wider cartonera back catalogue and emergent publications and to get involved in creating two, three, many more cartoneras!

A Note on Translation

For reasons of space, only the translated English versions of all Spanish and Portuguese quotations are included in the text. All translations are our own, unless stated otherwise. Titles of literary works, exhibitions, and installations are provided both in their original languages and in translation.

Introduction

It is March 9, 2018, and we are in downtown São Paulo making a book. Above us, traffic thunders down a four-lane highway overpass in a constant flow on the Radial Leste, one of the principal arteries of this metropolis of twenty million people. We are at the Glicério recycling cooperative, where recyclable refuse arrives every day on carts pulled by catadores (waste pickers) to be sifted, cleaned, sorted, crushed, packaged, and then sold on up the chain.* One kilo of cardboard collected from the street is worth five US cents; with prices low and volumes high, the site is stacked with piles of cardboard and metal and bales of crushed cans and plastic bottles.

In 2007, waste pickers at this recycling center, in collaboration with the artist Lúcia Rosa, formed an art collective they named Dulcinéia Catadora. Inspired by an emerging publishing phenomenon originating in Buenos Aires, the collective began making cartonera books in the coop using cardboard recovered from the street. The book we are making is called Arquipélago, the result of a collaboration between Dulcinéia Catadora and the artist Thais Graciotti. The collective invited Thais to bring her artistic practice into dialogue with their work. We join them at a meeting of worlds, techniques, and forms.

Figure 0.1. Lúcia and Maria construct Arquipélago books in the Dulcinéia Catadora workshop. Photograph by Lucy Bell.

Within the Glicério recycling cooperative and built along the perimeter wall is a row of simple structures. There is a meeting room and bathroom for the co-op’s workers and adjacent to this, the Dulcinéia Catadora bookmaking workshop itself. Inside this cramped space is a waist-high trestle table and a large graffiti-style mural, the result of a previous collaboration. Shelves box in the space where the collective stores its stencils, tools, paper, stamps, and all the other paraphernalia accumulated in creating more than 150 titles over the collective’s first eleven years.

It’s a relief to get inside, where the roar of traffic is less overwhelming, but even here perforations are visible: the joint between the corrugated roof and the wall, the gaps around the windows, the little holes where mosquitos enter. In a heavy storm, rainwater will gush from a fissure in the overpass, depositing thousands of liters of asphalt runoff into the space of the collective below. It is impossible to keep the sheer density of São Paulo’s urban reality outside and similarly, despite the barriers and walls, the stigma and violence, as the cooperative’s members leave their base to circulate across the city every single day collecting recyclable materials. This is circulation under duress, as they have to weather the daily challenges of life on the streets.

All over São Paulo we encounter Dulcinéia Catadora’s books, in a housing occupation under daily threat by the police and in a prestigious private art gallery, placed carefully on the shelves of independent bookstores in middle-class neighborhoods, and circulating freely on the streets off the back of a waste picker’s cart. But the recycling co-op is the point of origin. Dulcinéia Catadora’s manifesto (2015) argues that the encounters and exchanges between participants from different strata of Brazil’s highly unequal society that take place in the creation and consumption of the collective’s books are more important than the books themselves. The books are conceived of as objects of resistance that dismantle prejudices and destabilize the canon (Dulcinéia Catadora 2015). As we researchers work side by side with the waste pickers in the co-op, the theoretical notion begins to take form of calling into question aesthetic concepts connected to a world that’s still being built on inequalities and privileges (Rosa 2018).

As she works with Lúcia to put together fifty unique copies of Arquipélago (figure 0.1), Maria tells us that many people have passed through Glicério: university professors, PhD students, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, and cartonera publishers from across Latin America. You’re not that different, she says with a laugh. Later, Ademir Demarchi, a cartonera publisher from the city of Santos, will tell us that Dulcinéia is the mother of all Brazilian cartoneras. We hear this repeated from the southern city of Florianópolis to the most rural corners of Minas Gerais, from the northeastern city of Recife to Copacabana Beach in Rio. Dulcinéia’s fame precedes them. Readers across the country and the world have been enticed by their catalogue, a diverse collection of aesthetic forms, including neoconcretist poetry, experimental artists’ books, children’s fiction, and community-led advocacy. But readers have also been seduced by the many social forms through which Dulcinéia operates: workshops, exhibitions, and encounters involving presentations, book fairs, conferences, talks, and training sessions. These women have inspired collectives across an entire continent to work in vibrant communities, creating voracious readers and vivacious publishers.

Work finishes, for now. Tomorrow we will make fifty more books, completing a series of one hundred. Maria walks us to the large front gates. As we are leaving, it is impossible not to notice how the aesthetic of Dulcinéia’s published work is present in the wider Glicério compound and vice versa. All around, we see graffiti art, the industrial, machined stencils of the recycled cardboard, and the spray-painted labels that identify equipment as belonging to the Glicério recycling cooperative. Stacked inside the collective’s workspace, these motifs are echoed through the collective’s books, and we think back to how Lúcia and Eminéia, another member of Dulcinéia Catadora, when cutting the cardboard to size, took care to make sure that the industrial stencils remained visible. This way, Lúcia explained, you know that the cardboard is reused and not somehow fake, that is, a representation, a mock-up of a very particular aesthetic that comes directly from the street. The environment of Glicério is inextricably tied to the social dynamics present therein, and this same interweaving is also present at every stage of the aesthetic process of making the books.

As we say goodbye, Maria, the recycling cooperative’s president, lights up another cigarette. Looking around her workplace with fondness, she tells us that the whole co-op is actually an occupation, a way of making productive use of dead space, and as such, under constant threat of eviction. We walk off down the streets of this tough, inner-city neighborhood, our eyes drawn to the many signs of the remainders cast aside by the endless churn of market economies, and Dulcinéia’s choice to work with cardboard makes more sense: recovering material that has been discarded is a powerful statement. Art, poetry, advocacy, prose, all emerge from beneath the weight of that overpass, from within a complex sociality. We wonder how to begin to read a cartonera text, where every page seems to enclose both an aesthetic gesture and a social proposition, bound together by recovered cardboard and colored thread.

A month later, a world away. It is April 1, 2018, and in Mexico’s City of Eternal Spring, Cuernavaca, a diverse group of adults and children is gathered around a table in the center of the city’s ravine park, the Barranca de Chapultepec. The park, with its centuries-old fig and ahuehuete trees, is the most beautiful reminder of what Cuernavaca once was, the lush garden city that Malcolm Lowry describes in his 1947 magnum opus Under the Volcano. Nowadays, the pure water that runs through the park is polluted almost as soon as it reaches the city, and the ravines that grant a confusing, spectacular topography are strewn with plastics. Yet around the table, a workshop coordinated by the cartonera publishers Dany Hurpin and Nayeli Sánchez is playing its small part in tackling the city’s contamination. Instead of littering the streets or weighing down the landfill, sheets of recovered cardboard are being transformed into the colorful covers of new books.

The 2018 workshop in Chapultepec is one of several offered to the public as part of an exhibition held in the park’s art gallery to celebrate ten years of La Cartonera, Mexico’s first cartonera publisher. Alongside the authors are members of the public who have come to take a look and cartonera publishers from Mexican states including Sonora, Tabasco, and Jalisco as well as Mexico City. Some of these publishers grew directly out of La Cartonera; others could be considered third-generation Mexican cartonera publishers, having been taught by those who had been instructed by Dany and Nayeli; some had picked up the practice autonomously. This workshop is thus a reencounter for some, while for others it is the first opportunity to meet their cartonera publishing peers and plan future collaborations. They are a diverse bunch, from middle-class professionals from the provinces to tattooed punkanarchists who have taught bookbinding but also Molotov cocktail–making in the heat of occupations.

The publishers all set out to learn La Cartonera’s way of doing things, a two-stage process that first involves painting pieces of cardboard that Dany has already cut to size using a stencil and a retractable blade, then assembling the books by ordering, perforating, and stitching their pages, before gluing the back pages onto the inside of the cardboard covers.* Today, as ever, the covers of the books are being painted by workshop participants inspired by the texts they will be binding, the palettes that Nayeli lays out in front of them, and conversations with neighbors. The book is the 2018 volume of Kosamalotlahtol: Arcoiris de la palabra (Rainbow of words); Kosamalotlahtol is a series of bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl texts, begun in 2014, that La Cartonera brings out every year at the Festival of Mother Languages in Xoxocotla, an Indigenous village a short drive south of Cuernavaca. Its diverse contents include a recipe for traditional mole sauce and poetry lamenting the gentrification of Mexico City and the disappearance of native fauna. We read some of the poems aloud with the group that has gathered, opting for Spanish rather than Nahuatl, and soon we also hear an Indigenous language being spoken at our table. It comes from a family of six siblings ranging in age from infancy to late teens who have been drawn to our activity (figure 0.2). Immigrants from neighboring Guerrero state, they greet the friendly gallery guard with a familiar salute: he’s partial to a raspado, the colonial-era ice slushy that their parents sell in several stalls around the center of the city.

The children speak Mixtec rather than Nahuatl, so they will look to the book’s Spanish translation if they decide to try out any of the recipes. Even so, it is important that they will take home a book in the most widely spoken of Mexico’s seventy-two or more Indigenous languages. Part of La Cartonera’s commitment is to promote Nahuatl as a written as well as a spoken language. One of the poets published in Kosamalotlahtol, José Carlos Monroy Rodríguez, told us, The decision to write and to publish in a minority language is in itself a political act. Just as the recovery and reuse of cardboard acts to shame unimaginative waste-disposal methods, so too does the decision to seek out and publish Nahuatl poets challenge commercial Mexican publishing that reserves so little space for such linguistic diversity.

Cover-painting is a free-for-all with La Cartonera. The pre-Hispanic language inspires someone to paint the Xoloitzcuintle dog, of the hairless Aztec breed, which is a much-loved mascot that can be found wandering around the park. The boyfriend of one of the Mixtec sisters adopts a different aesthetic entirely, painting a rose and chains onto a black cover as though it were a tattoo, and he declares his love in gothic font for the teenager by his side. The younger siblings, meanwhile, seem more concerned with painting their hands and the soles of their shoes.

This playful spirit is encouraged by Dany and Nayeli, who always tell participants that they can paint covers that relate to the inside texts of the books or that bear no relation to them whatsoever. The variety is borne out in the display of cartonera covers that form the main exhibit inside the gallery, where a range of abstract and figurative styles can be found, painted by diverse artists. In making the selection, Dany told us, he wanted to ensure a balance between inclusivity and excellence, choosing the most accomplished pieces but also at least one from each friend and collaborator who would visit the exhibition. In this way, La Cartonera’s social relations and aesthetic values and its social values and aesthetic relations can be found both inside on the gallery walls and outside in the lively painting and bookmaking session. The painting session reveals an important aspect of cartonera: an open-ended plurality, a refusal to prescribe value or predetermine meaning.

Figure 0.2. Mixtec family with Nayeli and Dany in the Parque Chapultepec workshop. Photograph by Patrick O’Hare.

April is experienced differently in separate hemispheres. The spring of Cuernavaca is not the autumn of São Paulo, and the bilingual Spanish-Nahuatl texts of La Cartonera’s Kosamalotlahtol could hardly be more different from the visual collages of Dulcinéia’s Arquipélago. So, what connects cartonera publishers over thousands of miles, beyond the simple material of cardboard? What is the magic of a cardboard-bound book that allows for such diversity of practice and form? And how does that magic weave its way into the stories told in cartonera books? In passionate discussions all across Latin America, these questions have variously puzzled and fascinated us, left us doubtful or inspired, and taken us to convivial and surprising places. Some of the most fleeting encounters have led to lifelong connections, and we hope that through the pages and chapters of this book and as we set out to answer these questions, more people will fall in love with the rich and unexpected world of cartonera.

Looking Back to Look Forward: Key Ideas

Cartonera is a grassroots Latin American publishing movement that has grown from a single collective in Buenos Aires to hundreds of practitioners around the world. Since its beginnings in 2003, a rebellious DIY spirit has underpinned the production of affordable cardboard-bound books in the publishing of marginal poets, voices from the peripheries, children’s literature, Latin American classics, Indigenous scholars, and almost everything in between. An aspect of cartonera that makes it unique is the way the books are bound. The cardboard used in the binding process is collected from the street, and each book is individually painted or otherwise adorned before sale. Cartonera is also tightly networked in specific communities, and publishers often reflect local concerns. Through a type of workshop practice, cartonera creates a space between visual art and literary narrative for people to tell their own stories by making their own books.

Before we began thinking about a collaborative project on the cartonera phenomenon, Lucy, a literary theorist, had gained an initial insight into these unusual grassroots publishers. In the early 2010s she read some of the earliest books published by the first cartonera publisher, Eloísa Cartonera, in its birthplace in Buenos Aires, took part in one of La Cartonera’s Saturday workshops in Cuernavaca, interviewed cartonera publishers in Mexico City, and started a small collection of cardboard-bound literature. But she knew that to fully engage with cartonera, it would be necessary to approach these texts through a different kind of reading. This conviction only grew when, in April 2014, she set foot in the Glicério recycling cooperative for the first time and was shown round the space and publishing workshop by