Original manifesto (in Spanish) by La Rueda Cartonera
Translated by David Brendan O’Meara
We at La Rueda Cartonera have no intention of following the path of conventional publishing, still less do we believe in chasing big profits in the literary marketplace. It's doesn't matter to us if we appear in any top ten list, whether of celebrated writers or best sellers, or to join the incandescent luminaries of literary success. But we do make every effort to discover, among those who have been forgotten by the national system of creators, the little seeds and sprouts that stand out for their originality and style. We further believe that there are so many unknown writers in any given country, state or municipality that for obvious reasons their work could never and will never be published. Official cultural policies are just laminated stage sets, false montages with media touches, designed to lure other writers or readers into adoring the supposed creators (with their registered trademarks). La Rueda Cartonera enjoys this double insult: we're grateful that the big institutions have no interest in disseminating the works we release, while our publishing house lives and grows on them. For us, the fucking best thing is to find a new work, one with feeling, brains and style, help the author finish it and bring it to readers.
We conceive of ourselves as cultural activists who promote and disseminate new forms and subversive content in literature, without any intention of dethroning the publishing empire or creating a new one in the name of the marginal and the downtrodden. We are in this from our own trench: we do not want to participate in the game of competition, we only intend to do what we are interested in, without being aware of conventionalisms or political correctness turned into fashion.
La Rueda comes from a marginal cultural movement, part of the counter-cultural movement here in The Pearled Bitch of the West1 (Guanatos) of this country (Mégico). About four decades ago, in the 80's, we began printing pasquines or fanzines in which, as a neighborhood bulletin, we encouraged local people to publish their ideas, texts or poems. These were not ordinary magazines; they had a kind of mismatch in their design, or rather an underground aesthetic: an identity with the marginal, the art and culture of opposition. Already in the streets and writing, the wave was to give shape to a street, neighborhood, urban aesthetic. This led us to create small low-budget publishing houses where we published all our friends. Aways on the opposite side of the cultural policies of the government and the ideological hegemony of the state and its institutions and the mass media. Always believing in the freedom of creation, in all its manifestations. Without bosses, gods or masters, striking and counter-striking from our position at subjugation in any form, we worked to stimulate provocative changes in the structures of language and metalanguage.
Our path intersected with cardboard publishing in 2009, thanks to the search for one of the writers mythologized for his irreverent attitude toward the establishment and the supposed sacred cows of the literary budget. We met Raúl Silva because we wanted to get a book by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, then the door opened and we got to know the cartonero movement. Papasquiaro's work had been published in 8 Latin American countries under the title La Respiración del Laberinto, that is, in 8 different cartonero publishers. That lit a fire under us and when we tried to ask for all the pertinent permissions, the answer came back clear and concise: Go ahead! Get to work! It was then that we decided to form the La Rueda Cartonera and continue with our work as cultural activists.
In La Rueda we make books in a handmade way. Our covers, sewn and glued by hand, are made from cardboard recovered from the trash. Our process is one of openness and inclusiveness to all people who are interested in putting out their own edition or collaborating collectively to make cartonero books. The covers are painted or altered in original ways, which makes them an art object. One of our objectives is to give self-publishing workshops aimed at writers who can produce print runs ranging from a single book to 50, 100, 150 or more copies. (always with the possibility of future editions as needed). We carry out group workshops as a way to socialize and generate community among whatever neighborhoods, collectives, social groups, cliques, tribes, etc. that might decide to make their own cardboard book to integrate collective memory, group identity, microhistory and other elements that unite the community.
It's our great pleasure to join all the other cardboard publishers that spread the art and culture of all peoples. Our work is a blast because, like all cartoneras, we do it with love, although in our work each one of us cartoneras has a different way of working in terms of equipment, creativity and editorial profile. As a Cartonera Editorial we consider ourselves fugitives from the ISBN; we believe in books, we believe that the book is a continent of the common good, of our universal cultural heritage. We call on the rest of the world's population to liberate the contents of the book. We promote "all lefts reserved": so that those who want to take some text, or a whole book, and reproduce it totally or partially can just go ahead and do it freely and disseminate it without any obligation to worry about property because it already belongs to all of us.
We believe that the book-as-object (objeto libro), with its scope for intellectual, artistic and scientific development, does indeed qualify as one of the most marvelous "inventions" of "civilization". However, as this instrument has been transformed in many different ways — from mass production to digital formats — it has lost some of what matters, the stuff that brings it closer to the human. For this reason our project promotes the handmade and collective production of books, a process that links us to an object made by our own hands, allows us to express our creative side when manipulating the materials, painting or intervening in other ways with the cover of the book. And of course, we use materials that our society of extreme consumerism discards in an alarming way. By reinventing these we reinvent ourselves by and through the book.
Guadalajara is known, especially in the marketing world, as “The Pearl of the West” (perla de occidente). The author or authors of this manifesto use the phrase “perra de occidente” which I have translated as “Pearled Bitch of the West.”