February 6, 2024
University of Southern California

Ryan Greene, MaryHope Lee, and Claudia Nunez de Ibieta (Cardboard House Press)

On February 6, 2024, we held a hybrid book-making workshop with Cardboard House Press, a collective working in the Cartonera tradition of book making that emerged from Latin America in the early 2000s.

During the workshop we not only developed our skills to produce books but also read poetry from the publications of Cardboard Press. Their publication program is centered mostly on poetry from Latin America, in Spanish and translated into English, published in beautifully designed and carefully produced cardboard books. View their catalogue.

We produced copies of Cardboard Minutes / Libro de Cajas. Cardboard House Press published this as a part of the Tripwire Pamphlet Series in 2019. It situates the history of the Cartonera Collective within the broader history of the cartonera movement, and it features testimony from participants in the Cartonera Collectives in Phoenix, Santa Cruz, and New York. The brief essay at the very end by Paloma Celis Carbajal provides a great summary of the cartonera movement broadly. Paloma was a participant in the Cartonera New York collective and is a librarian who studies the cartonera movement. She’s currently the Curator for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies at The New York Public Library.

Student participants in the workshop are part of The Future of Facts in Latin America course that Prof. Andrea Ballestero is teaching at USC in the context of the SSRC funded project of the same name. As their final project for the course, students will produce cardboard books on a fact of their choosing. They will conduct independent research to examine: What idea of what is a fact is at play? Who produces this fact? Where is it produced? How is it circulated? How is it discredited? What is obscured by this fact? Who is affected/benefited by this fact, and how?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has put together a page with resources on Cartonera Publishers / Editoriales Cartoneras where more information is available. There is also a Facebook page where people can learn more about the movement Libros Cartoneros: Reciclando el paisaje editorial en América Latina.