Political skirmishes between publishing and its environment do not only revolve around the discourse of thinkers, writers or editors; they do not arise from a political stance in the face of a shared reality or from its ideological representation; nor are they a response to the thousand publications distributed clandestinely or through the analog or digital reproduction of a thought.
The countries that make up the Latin American region have a long history of dissident, resistant publishing, as well as brilliant and very necessary representatives who—in tune with the game of ideological weights and counterweights that shaped the geopolitical and social chaos of our continental region—have debated in the open and in the dark against the media that legitimize the forms and privileges of power since the arrival of the printing press to the New Continent. (The very first publisher in America, Juan Pablos, settled in Mexico City in 1536; he brought with him a capital slogan: to print religious books and pamphlets destined for the Christianization of the Indians.) Since then, rebel publications have been among us, often affiliated (sharpened) with insurgent ideals and with a fierce opposition militancy.
Image by Mónica Mejía, excerpt from La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán, published by Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee, Cali-New Orleans 2024.
It is not my interest to review this publishing scene. I am interested in focusing on other editorial divergences, the policies of which distance them from confronting an institutional political system that has already surpassed the limits of cynicism to perpetuate its corrupt denaturalization. In these publishing facets —also dissident, also politicized—the discourse (content) is modulated and has the same importance as our practices situated in a specific context, moment, and space.
There are and will continue to be politicized book makers, conscious and consistent with a political militancy, but today we also understand and seek to extend our influence based on our work politics, collaboration politics, reproduction politics, exchange politics, circulation politics, and property politics, design politics, material politics, politics of the relationship between the body and the object born of the publishing interest.
Since institutional policies are gone, today we publishers are thinking of ourselves as a group of extended localities that recognize each other as remote but familiar in the region; we are moving from a homogenization sustained by uniform codes and practices towards practices and codes that we do not yet know, with the full intention of finding and assimilating them. We are leaving the analogy of the publishing house as a guerrilla towards the analogy of publishing as a rhizomatic organ.
Image by Mónica Mejía, spread from xpan.atlas number 1. Mexico, 2024.
We see it impossible that today's political editorial practices emerge only from a single sensitivity about the socioeconomic reality of the region. This is not the only fuel that feeds our agency now. Today we try to revert the influence flow by creating specific editorial imaginaries that are trying to model gestures whose transcendence manages to modify situations in situ. It is no longer about editing contents. It is also about the possibility of editing time, space, interpersonal and interspatial relations between bodies, emotions and intellectualities exposed to the contamination of our objects-publications; it is also about the repercussions that these house as a guerrilla towards the analogy of publishing as a rhizomatic organ.
We see it impossible that today's political editorial practices emerge only from a single sensitivity about the socioeconomic reality of the region. This is not the only fuel that feeds our agency now. Today we try to revert the influence flow by creating specific editorial imaginaries that are trying to model gestures whose transcendence manages to modify situations in situ. It is no longer about editing contents. It is also about the possibility of editing time, space, interpersonal and interspatial relations between bodies, emotions and intellectualities exposed to the contamination of our objects-publications; it is also about the repercussions that these relationships produce in their context. In this sense all action or omission has repercussions. We do not believe in political nihilism. In this scenario, language loses importance and, on the contrary, the value of gesture increases; the possibility of activating the reader between the lines is exacerbated, without explicitly calling for direct individual or collective action, but rather provoking their political action in the blind spot of the institutional board.
Fuerza Aérea Zapatista, a book from Esto Es un Libro. Image by E Tonatiuh Trejo.
These peripheral editorial practices of Latin America do not try to contribute to the international metrics that define and measure culture and development; we ignore national reading indexes and try to free this exercise by recognizing it as a simple, natural, deintellectualized, everyday activity. The reading experience is plausible anywhere, not only in the spaces that historical discourse has provided for it. Therefore, our editorial anxiety can be deployed in the same way, anywhere.
This essay was published in Spanish by Casa del Tiempo, number 5 October-November 2022. Cultural magazine of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.
E Tonatiuh Trejo is a Graphic communicator from the Faculty of Art and Design at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Founder, editor and designer of the Editorial Laboratory Esto Es Un Libro. He has collaborated in magazines such as Perros del alba, RegistroMX, CinePremier and Revista404. He was editor of the magazine Sensacional de Cineastas and founding partner of the Refud bookstore. www.estoesunlibro.com
Mónica Mejía, from Cali – Colombia, has been collaborating with the artisanal publishing collective Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee since 2015. She works at Antenna, a literary and visual arts organization in New Orleans, coordinating Antenna Press, and Paper Machine, Antenna’s print shop, book bindery and community space.
