Eight years have gone by since I came back to live in

Puerto Rico, the same number of years that I lived outside

the country. It’s hard to imagine a future from the present
context, shut up in my rental apartment in Santurce during
the global coronavirus quarantine. I dream of buying a
big house where I can set up my workshop, La Impresora.
Someday I won’t owe rent to anybody. I want to live near
the beach, establish a seasonal residency for writers and
collaborators, and begin to create a network with nodes on
other Caribbean islands. I want to grow vegetables, install
solar panels, and build a cistern to store rainwater—all of
this is part of the project. And of course, I want to continue
making books of poetry.

I agree with Dorothea Lasky that poetry is not merely a proj-

To the memory of Esteban Valdés (1947–2020) ect.1 Rather, life itself, insofar as it permits the creation of
poetry, is really the primary project. And the sustainability
of life as a poet is without a doubt a difficult mathematical
problem, a project of survival—even more so recently, as we
bear witness to the collapse of institutions that used to be
dedicated to education and art. The repercussions of these
budget cuts have been severe for the sustainability of all
kinds of cultural production.

This is what my daily quest is about. I’m calling up the

stereotypical specter meant to scare young poets: you’re
going to die of hunger. But the challenge goes beyond not
dying of hunger. The challenge—the project—is to live with
dignity, to achieve real quality of life, to create community
in the process and find joy doing so. The project is to live
with/in poetry: poetry is the­project’s basic unity.

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I

Ricardo León Peña Villa was a Colombian outsider poet

who lived in a house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
in the nineties and early aughts. The building, tucked
between 2nd and 3rd streets on Avenue C, was known
as the Umbrella House. Ricardo was, I think, one of the
poorest people I’ve ever known. Also one of the most
generous. His apartment, #3D, was the refuge and meet-
ing place for a vast menagerie of Latin American artists
who arrived in New York with or without papers. I
traveled into the city on weekends from Albany, where I was
studying for a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies.
The university did not strike me as a productive site of
action. But in Ricardo’s house there was a real network of
cultural exchange, beyond hierarchy and capitalist logic. Improvised text by Peña Villa on one of the walls
of Umbrella House, circa 2008.
As in the popular story Stone Soup2 with cooperation and
a little ingenuity there was always food for everyone—also The project was going well, and the poetry was going well—
drinks, music, poetry, art, and love. Between Nuyorican thanks for asking. But capitalism played a trick on Ricardo.
Manhattan and Colombian Queens, this impossible logic He died prematurely in March 2011, in large part because
supported the creation of many intergenerational DIY he couldn’t pay the high price of medical care in the city.3
projects: poetry marathons, individual and collective publi- I like to think of him as my first chosen teacher. Thanks
cations (like the magazine Casa Tomada), and a Spanish to him I traveled to Colombia to publish my first book of
language poetry festival that we celebrated for several poetry with a small, almost invisible press in Medellín that
years running. Ricardo also threw some of the biggest and his friends had started. I was only twenty-three; I was not
most beautiful parties in the whole area. His project, with- especially ready. But in the days of preparation for this
out a doubt, was to live well in New York—while speaking trip, sitting in the living room of his apartment, Ricardo
Spanish and writing poetry. León urged me to write “poet” as my “occupation” on the
customs form.

Soon after that trip, I learned to make books by hand

thanks to Tanya Torres, a Puerto Rican artist and poet

4 5
who had lived in el Barrio since she was a teenager. after finishing my Masters degree, I’d chosen not to pursue
Tanya had training in printmaking, but during a battle a doctorate. I felt at odds with the academic environment,
with cancer she had adapted her practice to smaller scale and I wanted to learn more about Latin America—beyond
projects produced with non-toxic materials—like books. the books. I wanted to integrate myself, finally, in “real
When we met she had a gallery in her apartment called life.” I spent a little more time working in New York and I
the Mixta Gallery where she offered bookmaking work- saved some money. I daydreamed of studying film in Cuba.
shops. A few years later we became coworkers at the same When the possibility of Mexico came up I had already
community college in Brooklyn, where we both designed saved enough to stay there for at least a year without work-
syllabi and lesson plans for classes focused on stimulat- ing (thanks to the favorable exchange rate). I enrolled in
ing critical thinking and emotional development. She a creative writing program in Mexico City, but I left that
specialized in arts education and I was taking advantage behind too when I realized my education was better served
of the opportunity to share the basics of feminist theory by my everyday interactions—events and conversations
with my students, who were mostly single mothers from with writers of various generations that I got to know on
Latinx neighborhoods around the city. Tanya made use the road.
of lunches, coffee breaks, and free periods to teach me
how to make books. With her help, I edited, designed, and I began to translate miscellaneous texts online, to make
published a small run of Secretos Familiares, my second my money last, to trust strangers, to travel wherever I
poetry collection, a kind of #MeToo testimony ahead of its was invited—to live in Mexico day by day. I almost always
time. I didn’t know it then, but learning to make books felt safe, even though I knew that many people suffered
would be the key to my whole life. horrible violence at the hands of the narcostate. Over
time I learned to trust—and refine—my intuition. That
○ first year I didn’t even have a cell phone. I adapted to a
new rhythm: I learned to take people at their word, to
In November 2006 I traveled to Mexico for the first time— surrender control, and to wait. As cliché as these affirma-
to take part in the “Encuentro de Mujeres Poetas en el País tions may sound, they led me to many waterfalls, towns
de las Nubes,” a gathering of women poets in the Sierra full of birds with flying bridges, pyramids half-hidden by
Mixteca mountains in Oaxaca. I lost my suitcase at the dense jungle, deserts blooming with peyote, beaches and
airport, so I traveled light by necessity. Over the course of cenotes where I stripped and swam. And I had friends:
the week, I turned twenty-six. I made friends with other friendship acquired a primordial importance. With
women who would go on to become important sources of my new sisters from the poetry festival in Oaxaca, we
emotional support and co-creators. I decided, impulsively, started to meet in our domestic spaces to read and work-
to move to Mexico—to write, and walk. The year before, shop poems between mezcals.

6 7
 An Argentine feminist graphic design. In fact, I didn’t even know the name of
named Miriam Djeordijian the machines we were using. Ten years later, I would real-
managed the CICAM ize—thanks to kinetic memory—that the machines at
(Centro de Investigación y CICAM were exactly the same Risos that I use now in La
Capacitación para la Mujer Impresora. More on that later.
/ Research and Training
Center for Women), a femi- The work is not to think of new things but to make them in a
nist organization in Colonia different way
Roma, and in those years, The work is not the answer but the problem
she began to use the space The work is the journey not the port of arrival
to host a series of poetry The work is not the genre but the singularity
readings for women called The work is not the product but the process
“Barcitas.” CICAM had The work is to create spaces of pleasure, of intensity, so that
published La correa femi- desire comes naturally
nista, a Latin American
journal of feminist thought, for more than ten years.4 From “Our Editorial Style,”
When I began to visit CICAM they were no longer printing La Correa Feminista, Num. 15, 1995
the magazine, but the workshop was still there in the back
of the kitchen—two Risograph printers, a small offset My friends and I began a free poetry workshop that gave
printer that didn’t work, inks, paper remainders, paper us a rhythm for writing and meeting. We borrowed a
cutters, and many other light tools for artisanal publish- megaphone from CICAM and formed a kind of sorority
ing. Miriam invited me to reactivate CICAM’s press, and that we started to call “Las Poetas del Megáfono.”5 We
as an inaugural gesture I improvised a bookmaking and organized a weekly “open megaphone” in a café in Colonia
poetry workshop. Around ten women participated. I didn’t Roma, where we collectively chose a theme for the next
have much experience, but I needed to make money some- week’s poems. Megaphone Tuesdays became a busy hive
how and the opportunity excited me. I shared two types of experimentation, attracting forty or fifty poets each
of bookbinding I’d learned in New York, and together— week, and supporting many different collaborations.
with lots of experimentation and technical support from Sometimes I like to think we were characters pulled from
Miriam, who helped us decipher the workshop’s tools— a little novel Bolaño never published: young women poets
we made small runs of poetry books printed on one of living alone in Mexico City and cooking together, shar-
the Risographs and bound by hand. This was long before ing clothes, learning to make books learning to make
today’s golden age of Riso workshops for editorial and books by hand, buying paper downtown, visiting presses,

8 9
passing around pirated music on CD’s, traveling by bus materials scavenged from the beach, theatrical produc-
for hours to get to the beach, performing rudimentary tions, musical performances, and campfires every night on
rituals to burn photos of ex-lovers on the rooftop of an the shore. The hosts are the local fishermen, who organized
apartment building of Salvadoran students on the Calle the Festival’s daily schedule and feed the gathering—often
República de Cuba, very close to Plaza Garibaldi. with the catch of the day—in a rustic cafeteria on the sand.
With minimal resources, they’ve created an experience of
I began to attend festivals in Central America that I could improbable beauty and resilience. When I imagine my ideal
reach by bus. I accepted every opportunity that came my cultural event, I always think of the Festival of Navachiste.
way to leave the city and explore towns in Mexico beyond
the capital. I camped for whole weeks with people I barely I felt good in Mexico. I was learning things, I had stopped
knew and I experienced moments of real connection with paying my students loans, and I was publishing poetry.
the ecosystem and with the road itself. It was a heady The literature my friends and I made was rudimentary,
time of true freedom, maybe the happiest time of my life. anti-academic, rebellious, political, erotic, without theory,
Even though I can see the accumulation of privileges that and often naïve. We thought out loud, in the shared dimen-
allowed me to make those choices, I should also point out sion we were building one poem at a time. I don’t think
that back then I had less money and fewer belongings than I had a “project” during this period. I was just connect-
ever before or since. ing the dots. I listened, immersed in a profound process of
poetic investigation without any methodology.
The Festival of
Navachiste claims a The work of the small independent Mexican press
special place in my Proyecto Literal (who also created the Colección Limón
memories of that Partido and the Latin American poets’ biennial in Mexico
period. For more City “El Vértigo de los Aires”) helped me draw a map of
than twenty years, alternative literary production. This Latin American
artists and fisher- network became aware of itself 6 through the circulation
men have convened of libros cartoneros,7 autodidactic bookmaking workshops,
over Semana Santa and road trips. Alongside the small independent Mexican
on a remote beach in Sinaloa full of birds and cactus. The presses that operated with state subsidies, the cartonera
Festival is only reachable by boat, and every person must editorial model went viral. The cartonera design and
set up their own camp. They offer a workshop under a palm development process was cheap and practical, artisanal
roof with an invited writer, a poetry contest with modest but relatively standardized. Even with our shallow poets’
publication for the winner, a sculpture competition with pockets, we were able to build a global (or at least Latin

10 11
American) digital network of autonomous initiatives they still just didn’t see our generation as significant
supporting low-budget local literature, with the help of cultural producers.
the internet and the emergence of social media.

In November 2009, while I was still in Mexico, the Puerto

Rican poet Xavier Valcárcel and I decided to start a
parallel project: Atarraya Cartonera. We were long-dis-
tance friends for a few years: we went to the beach together
when I was visiting the island, and when I was away we
would exchange readings and write poems together by
mail. In that way—me in Mexico City and Xavier on the
island—we conceptualized our project. We designed three
distinct editorial collections: new editions of out of print
Puerto Rican poetry, contemporary Puerto Rican poetry,
and contemporary Caribbean / Latin American poetry. Some time in those days a copy of Ulises Carrión’s
We also thought of Atarraya Cartonera as an art project. El arte nuevo de hacer libros (The New Art of Making
We used cardboard discarded by the multinational book- Books) fell into my hands, and it became a kind of credo
store Borders to make covers printed with stencils and for me. The Mexican poets Inti García Santamaría and
spray paint, in dialogue with the political graffiti that Alejandro Albarrán had put a sign up in the empty
proliferated in San Juan. The arrival of Borders in Puerto living room of their new apartment in Colonia Roma
Rico in 2000 had resulted in the closure and dismantling —“Multipurpose Room Ulises Carrión”— and they’d
of many local bookstores; using their trash as our raw begun to host events and poetry readings right there,
material was our critique.8 During our most active years, at home. To celebrate the “inauguration” of the salon,
we published twenty-five titles made of cardboard and they printed a free, pirated edition of Carrión’s already
photocopies and organized many bookmaking workshops legendary manifesto. Years later I too have photocopied
which, in the midst of the financial crisis, 9 inspired our the document Inti gave me and circulated it among
comrades to explore more accessible avenues of publica- friends. The manifesto was not at all new: it had been
tion. The Puerto Rican publishers were collapsing under published for the first time in 1975, in the Mexican
the weight of the recession and those that remained were magazine Plural, edited by Octavio Paz. But for me it
closed circles most responsive to institutional interests, was revelatory even thirty-five years later. It felt like a
charging the authors large sums to publish their books friend’s finger pointing the way:
while excluding them from the editorial process; maybe

12 13
On October 29, 2015 I posted this note on my blog, with run I’d worked on up until that point. My friend Marina
this photo: Ruiz, who had also been part of the Poetas del Megáfono
collective, helped me print and bind the books. Now she
was directing the artisanal press Astrolabio in Cuernavaca.
Between serendipity and luck, this trip coincided with the
first RRRéplica, a conference for “disobedient presses” where
I made connections with other publishers using Risograph
printers. This experience renovated and redefined the terms
of my relationship with Mexico. I always try to visit with
some frequency to catch up with friends, exchange books,
buy materials, recharge, and rest from the daily struggle of
life in Puerto Rico.
MAOF Materia y oficios

History emerges from each object

What’s important are the insignificant moments
Resisting technology’s speed
Crafting workshops without teachers
Accompanying ourselves
Learning to be
Communicating with passing birds
Exhibition of usefulness
Repetition as an opportunity to be with yourself

Presentation of the second edition of Sucede que yo soy América in the public
At the end of the year I had the opportunity to return to library of Aeromoto in Mexico City, January 21, 2016.
Mexico for the first time since I’d moved to Puerto Rico.
I did a residency focused on editorial production at the ○
Cooperativa Editorial Cráter Invertido, in the neighborhood
of Colonia San Rafael in Mexico City, where I produced the In January of 2016 the poet Amanda Hernández came
second edition of Sucede que yo soy América and learned into my life to do an internship with La Impresora as
some of the administrative aspects of operating a Riso work- part of her Master’s in Cultural Administration and
shop. We made five hundred copies of the book, the biggest from that moment on we’ve worked side by side, building

26 27
up the workshop along the way. We won some grants Grateful and enthusiastic, we began to make ourselves at
that helped us buy the rest of the equipment and tools home in the neighborhood, which turned out to be much more
we needed for our setup and we taught ourselves to use hospitable than Avenida Fernández Juncos.24
them through trial and error. On a one-year contract
with the city of San Juan, we developed a free program of In June of that year we organized “Edit: Encuentro de
recurring presentations and workshops for all ages organized gestión editorial independiente” (Edit: A Gathering of
through FLIA and the Casa de Cultura Ruth Hernández Independent Publishers) in collaboration with Beta-
Torres, a vibrant space in Río Piedras that reached a high Local, with the intention of seeding a conversation among
point under the direction of the multidisciplinary artist colleagues about editing, publishing, and circulating
Gisela Rosario Ramos. We also began to print projects materials responsive to our particular realities. Various
and publications for the artists in the Beta-Local network Mexican projects participated alongside some of the
and to define the services we could offer to guarantee the independent publishers that regularly presented at FLIA.
sustainability of La Impresora. Little by little we began Although we would’ve liked more local participation, there
to publish books of poetry. 2016 was a year of evanescent still remains work to be done to bridge the divide between
prosperity, just before the PROMESA law imposed new, the world of visual art (represented by Beta-Local, the
asphyxiating austerity measures affecting every aspect of site of the event) and other cultural development efforts,
Puerto Rican life.23 including literary publishing.

We were at MAOF until May 2017. The owners had new plans A few months later Hurricane Maria hit.
for the building and we had to leave. With the generous help
of friends, we moved La Impresora to our current studio on Without electricity, amid rubble and widespread confu-
the famous Calle Calma, in Barrio Machuchal, which is also sion, we were able to temporarily relocate the Riso to El
the neighborhood where Amanda and I live, a few blocks Almacén, a garage in the barrio of Trastalleres (also in
from each other. Calle Calma is, as they say, the “backroom” Santurce) where a friend wanted to start a hackerspace.
of Calle Loíza: this part of the neighborhood, the poorest Javier Rodríguez, musician and inventor, was repairing a
and most stigmatized, is known for being the birthplace of good number of broken solar panels that had flown off in
the great salsero Ismael Rivera and an enclave of Puerto the storm. In this way, he was able to establish a small
Rican popular music from rumba to reggaeton. Our friend power grid. Faced with the urgency of finding communal
and neighbor Lío Villahermosa (a multidisciplinary artist solutions to the disaster we were living through, he invited
and bomba dancer) grew up here, and he offered to rent his various friends to work from El Almacén for a few weeks
family’s empty apartment, betting on our ability to keep the and use the solar panels in exchange for helping him
project afloat and our shared dedication to the local community. reanimate the space and keep him company. We took the

28 29
Riso and began to do “solar Riso.” There wasn’t much work a process of collaboration: editing, design, and production.
for obvious reasons, but all the same we were able to print We make poetry books as well as comics, gallery catalogs,
a few things from there. Those hot and terrible months prints by local illustrators, signs for marches, and flyers for
we were forced to consider, again and again, why we were events and concerts. We offer workshops in Riso printing,
doing the work we were doing. creative writing, and bookbinding. We organize readings
and literary events. Our space has been a refuge for friends
First, we ratified our choice in favor of manual labor, small and young artist-writers whose educational opportunities
tools, and analog processes. Thanks to the nature of this and general life chances are more threatened every year
work (and the support of El Almacén, which allowed us to by budget cuts, political corruption, climate change, and a
plug in the Riso for two or three hours a week), we could keep growing sense of insecurity and uncertainty. Under these
binding books on Calle Calma, more or less like we’d done circumstances, we’ve becomes facilitators and workers in
before, without depending on electricity. Keeping our hands a network of processes and exchanges centering on the
busy buoyed our spirits, even though we weren’t making a independent creation of books on an island in crisis. I’ve
profit and outside everything was destroyed. We also decided come to think that the books we make by hand are not
to slow down the rhythm of our commercial printing services properly commodities, but rather points of encounter that
and look for a way to subsidize the publication of poetry, our adapt and circulate among our communities under another
project’s main objective. We applied for emergency funds more noble, more fluid logic. Personally, poetry is what
and grants to make books in line with our main editorial drives me.
objectives; we published personal projects; both of us wrote
our own poetry. At the urging of our friends—poets, editors, June 2020
illustrators, and artists—we reactivated FLIA in makeshift San Juan, Puerto Rico
form, even though we didn’t have a budget to produce it, as a
pretext to gather together around our books.

Even though the disasters have continued to accumulate

around us, we fight, alongside many other people, to adapt
to our changing circumstances and continue to make
poetry and books available locally in Puerto Rico. We try
to facilitate spaces where we can share, create, and learn a
craft that isn’t taught in any of the island’s universities. La
Impresora now functions almost like an informal school of
poetry and editorial skills. Each book we make testifies to

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