Libraries from the South

Decolonize the Libraries. A Handful of Notes reflects on the need to subject knowledge and memory management spaces — libraries, archives, and museums — to critical revision, drawing on professional experiences developed in Latin American communities. The text questions the normative definitions and conceptual frameworks inherited from academic librarianship, arguing that manuals, guidelines, and international discourses represent only a fragment of reality: that of a small majority of institutions, while rendering invisible broad minorities and multiple possible forms of what a library can be.

Through concrete episodes that took place in Indigenous communities in northeastern and northwestern Argentina, the author exposes fundamental tensions: the question "Why do we want a library?" in a territory assumed to be "without libraries"; the possibility of preserving textile fragments within an archive; the critique of fragmenting memory into separate categories of library, archive, and museum; and the exclusion of Indigenous languages, orality, non-written media, and non-legitimized formats from institutional collections. These experiences lead to a profound reconsideration of the "why" and the "what for" of memory institutions, as well as of the political nature of library, archival, and museological practices.

The text analyzes these spaces as contested territories, shaped by processes of memoricide and epistemicide, and as institutions that, while responding to state, institutional, or private agendas, can function as both colonized and colonizing spaces. It examines mechanisms of exclusion linked to the predominance of written or printed formats, official languages, hegemonic discourses, large publishing houses, consecrated figures, and official history, as well as historical processes of acculturation in Latin America, including the imposition of models of "high culture" and the marginalization of local knowledge, oral narratives, and traditional cultural expressions.

In response to this diagnosis, the author proposes understanding decolonization as a critical, collective, and action-research process that does not entail discarding the achievements of libraries, archives, and museums, but rather revising their structures, ideologies, practices, and meanings. Decolonizing implies transforming these spaces into genuinely collective places, physically and conceptually appropriated by the community, open, plural, and inclusive, and committed to human rights, social justice, and collective well-being. It involves questioning external guidelines, revising acquisition and organization policies, assessing whether content and services truly represent the community, and allowing the institution to evolve and adapt to its contexts.

The text acknowledges that this is a conflictive process, marked by power disputes, yet emphasizes that experiences developed in Latin American margins and peripheries demonstrate that another way of managing knowledge and memory is possible: one that transforms cultural spaces into arenas of resistance, rebellion, activism, and struggle, and that reconfigures the notions of library, document, and preservation from horizons of integration, diversity, plurality, and recognition.

Sounds and silences in libraries develops a critical reflection on the role of libraries, archives and museums in the management of sound, memory and knowledge within contexts marked by colonization, hegemonies and epistemic exclusion. Originally framed as a conference on digital libraries and the preservation of Indigenous sound heritage in Latin America, the text expands its scope to question the very definitions of "library" and "document," and to interrogate the colonial biases embedded in knowledge and memory management disciplines.

The text begins by redefining the library beyond its etymological meaning as a "book container," proposing instead an inclusive conception of spaces — physical or virtual — where knowledge and memory connect with communities. It highlights the existence of diverse practices developed by public, rural, community, school and Indigenous libraries, rogue archives and community museums, including mobile libraries, houses of knowledge, exclusively digital audiovisual collections, oral "word circles," and initiatives rooted in identity resistance, political struggle and social activism. These experiences, often ignored by theoretical manuals, public policies and international guidelines, reveal the gap between hegemonic librarianship and lived practice, producing invisibilities and silences.

The text then turns to the concept of the document, drawing on documentalism to argue that any element capable of supporting knowledge — engraved gourds, painted fabrics, scarifications, beadwork, graffiti, murals, gestures, oral narratives, digital audiovisual media — constitutes a document. While some institutions have gradually incorporated audiovisual, graphic and sound collections, and underrepresented languages, a book-centered paradigm continues to dominate information sciences, generating exclusions and reinforcing epistemic hierarchies.

From this perspective, libraries are analyzed as colonized and colonizing spaces. Collections typically privilege printed materials in dominant languages, produced by hegemonic voices, thereby marginalizing oral traditions, minority languages, traditional practices and non-written formats. Cultural and educational policies implemented from centers to peripheries, often in top-down fashion, contribute to the erosion of cultural diversity, social memory and local identity. Within a framework where the written word becomes law, sounds — and their silences — are among the first dimensions to disappear.

The notion of silence is examined as absence, invisibility and historical debt: silenced communities, muted languages, erased histories, discredited knowledges, memoricide and epistemic manipulation. At the same time, silences signal possible paths for recovery, resistance and reconstruction. The text emphasizes that human memory is a heterogeneous fabric composed of oral stories, landscapes, craft practices, migration narratives, union archives, ephemeral objects, recordings and countless other strands. A memory reduced to books and institutional archives becomes partial, manipulated and fragile.

Opening the library to sounds — spoken word, songs, music, soundscapes, oral history archives, digital interviews, minority language recovery programs — represents both an epistemic and cognitive shift. Such initiatives, often emerging from the margins, challenge a paradigm centered on books and reading and call for alternative methods, tools and theories capable of engaging with "other" spaces, "other" documents and "other" practices.

The text concludes by affirming the collective nature of knowledge and heritage, rejecting appropriation, academic gatekeeping and extractive translation practices. It advocates open access, grassroots work and community participation as conditions for equitable knowledge management, and suggests that what is commonly labeled "decolonization" may be understood instead as the appropriation and subversion of knowledge and memory spaces by the communities to whom they belong.

Los otros documentos presents a series of narrative case studies that explore material culture, ritual objects, textiles, architecture, musical instruments, and artisanal practices as carriers of memory, identity, authority, spirituality, and social organization. Through ethnographically grounded descriptions drawn from Latin America and Africa, the text expands the notion of "document" beyond written records, proposing attention to embodied, crafted, performed, and ceremonial forms of knowledge transmission.

The work opens in Rari, Chile, with the horsehair weaving tradition of local women recognized as Tesoro Humano Vivo by UNESCO. It reconstructs the historical transition from weaving poplar roots to using horsehair reinforced with ixtle fiber, details techniques of washing, dyeing with artificial anilines, and hand-weaving, and situates the practice within processes of resource depletion, commercialization, intergenerational transmission, and collective organization. The artisanal object appears as both economic strategy and repository of localized ecological and technical knowledge.

From there, the text moves to the Andean chumbi or chumbe, woven belts used by Misak, Nasa, and Inga communities in southern Colombia. It describes materials, natural dyes, symbolic designs, uses in securing clothing and carrying children, and mythic narratives such as the birth of Juan Tama and the weaving of the first belt from threads of the rainbow. The chumbi emerges as textile archive, mnemonic device, and marker of identity, cosmology, and kinship.

In Burkina Faso, the painted adobe houses of Tiébélé are examined as architectural documents. The Kassena murals, created communally by women using colored earths, stones for polishing, and varnish derived from boiled néré pods, encode symbols drawn from daily life and religious belief. Their protective function before the rainy season and their transformation into tourist attractions reveal tensions between preservation, economic necessity, and cultural continuity.

The Nigerian-Cameroonian ukara textiles of the Cross River region are presented as ceremonial fabrics marked by nsibidi symbols associated with the Ekpe society. The text details industrial cotton cloth dyed with indigo, resist techniques using raffia stitching, the intermediary role of Aro traders, the specialized knowledge of nsibidi signs restricted to Ekpe members, and the diaspora extension of Ekpe as Abakuá in Cuba. Ukara cloth operates as visual script, coded authority, ritual marker, and instrument of social regulation.

In northern Argentina and southeastern Bolivia, the wooden áña áña masks of the Ava (often labeled Chiriguano) are described within the context of migration, conflict with the Inca, colonial encounters, the War of the Chaco, and labor exploitation. The masks, carved from yuchán wood and used in the aréte abáti festival, represent ancestral spirits and the Owners of animals. Testimony from Rodolfo Rojas addresses commercialization, ecological depletion, spiritual danger, and the transformation of ritual objects into marketable "artesanías."

The final section focuses on the uruá aerophones of the Alto Xingú peoples in Brazil, particularly within the kwarup funerary ceremony. The narrative details the ritual sequence, the role of the "owner" of the festival, agricultural preparation, communal fishing, trunk representations of the deceased, huka huka wrestling, pubertal reclusion of young women, and the sounding of the long bamboo free-reed instruments. The uruá function as sonic documents embedded in cycles of mourning, initiation, inter-village diplomacy, and mythic cosmology.

Across these cases, the text foregrounds weaving, painting, carving, dyeing, architecture, music, ritual performance, oral testimony, and ceremonial practice as documentary systems that encode social memory, territorial belonging, cosmological narratives, authority structures, and ecological knowledge. By situating these objects and practices within processes of colonization, tourism, commodification, secrecy, intermediation, diaspora, and modernization, the work challenges the restriction of "document" to written formats and calls attention to the multiplicity of material and performative archives that sustain communities across Abya Yala and beyond.

Apuntes sobre bibliotecas y Epistemologías del Sur examines the implications of the Epistemologías del Sur framework for librarianship and information work in Latin America and the Global South. Starting from the recognition that libraries operate within contexts marked by political crisis, social inequality, economic precarity, censorship, unemployment, exclusion, and cultural conflict, the text rejects the notion of librarian neutrality and situates libraries as potential spaces of resistance, socio-cultural activism, identity recovery, and community strengthening through information and knowledge.

Drawing primarily on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the article presents the Epistemologías del Sur as a proposal for epistemological rupture: a reorientation away from knowledge systems historically produced in Europe and institutionalized by hegemonic elites, and toward the validation of knowledges generated by communities engaged in struggle. It argues that contemporary crises are not only political or economic but epistemological, requiring new ways of knowing and understanding reality before transformation is possible.

The text develops key concepts central to this framework, including capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy as articulated mechanisms of domination; ontological degradation and the production of invisibility; abyssal lines that render certain populations nonexistent within dominant epistemologies; and the sociología de las ausencias, which seeks to identify, make visible, and value what has been rendered absent by hegemonic universalism. Complementing this, the sociología de las emergencias focuses on the knowledges that arise within movements of resistance, emphasizing collaborative methodologies based on knowing with rather than knowing about, and rejecting extractivist research practices.

The article further elaborates the notion of ecología de saberes, understood as the articulation of heterogeneous forms of knowledge — including scientific knowledge when necessary — within struggles for rights, territory, and dignity. It addresses intercultural translation, hybrid knowledges, epistemic incompleteness, and the recognition of limits to translatability. Knowledge is presented as necessarily partial, situated, and consciously incomplete.

Applied to librarianship, archives, reading promotion, and open access movements, the Epistemologías del Sur offer a framework for supporting social movements, articulating struggles across sectors, and radicalizing professional practice by continuously identifying those who remain beyond the abyssal line. The text concludes by proposing an artesanía de las prácticas: a reinvention of ways of knowing and doing that acknowledges the heterogeneity of knowledge and requires careful, deliberate, and situated articulation.

The article positions Epistemologías del Sur as broadly applicable to both theoretical and practical dimensions of library and information science, especially in contexts marked by exclusion, invisibility, and epistemic injustice.

Una biblioteca en donde quepan muchas bibliotecas proposes a radical rethinking of the contemporary library in Latin America through a process of bibliotecas en descolonización and the construction of a library model grounded in Abya Yala. The text argues that the modern library, like the book and the writing system on which it relies, is historically a foreign institutional structure in Latin America. Although widely assimilated, it remains a transplanted model that has not fully adapted to the cultural, epistemic, linguistic, and social realities of the continent. Instead, it has frequently imposed eurocentric structures, hierarchies of knowledge, written formats, official languages, classification systems, and normative definitions of users, thereby excluding or marginalizing other forms of knowing and being.

The article examines the contemporary library as simultaneously colonized and colonizing: shaped by hegemonic paradigms rooted in capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and elite cultural production, and functioning as an instrument that legitimizes certain knowledges while silencing, omitting, or invisibilizing others. It critiques the written-word bias of traditional librarianship, the stratification of authorship and authority, the prioritization of academic or "recognized" voices, and the reproduction of dominant narratives through collection development, cataloguing, and service design. In this context, the library is described as a "casa de los saberes" historically reserved for specific sectors, now inadequate for plural, heterogeneous societies.

From this diagnosis emerges the call for a library model conceived from Abya Yala as a plural, inclusive space capable of containing multiple epistemologies, identities, languages, memories, temporalities, and forms of transmission. Such a library must reconsider who its users are, why they would want a library, and what needs they expect it to address. It must integrate oral traditions, community knowledge systems, local classification frameworks, indigenous and regional languages, non-written formats, and culturally grounded measures of time and memory. It must move beyond neutrality and ivory-tower detachment to become an active participant in community life, social movements, popular education, and critical cultural practice.

The text outlines the necessity of identifying absences, structural "huecos," and epistemic gaps within existing library services and institutions, and proposes a process of research-action and grassroots development to construct a critical, socially engaged, anti-systemic librarianship. This process requires questioning imported models, resisting neo-colonial admiration for foreign paradigms, and prioritizing locally produced knowledge, initiatives, and conceptual vocabularies. It calls for alliances with universities, publishers, and community actors to support the (re)collection, organization, production, and dissemination of regional knowledge, as well as sustained inclusion of traditional modes of information transmission alongside digital and multimedia tools.

Ultimately, the article advocates for a bibliotecología latinoamericana that abandons hierarchical distinctions between "higher" and "lower" knowledge, rejects the imposition of a single epistemic framework, and creates a space in which many libraries can coexist within one institution. It frames this transformation as urgent, necessary, and inseparable from broader processes of cultural decolonization, epistemic justice, and community self-determination in Latin America.

Libros cartoneros: olvidos y posibilidades offers a critical historical and analytical study of the Latin American cartonera publishing movement from its emergence in Buenos Aires in 2003 to its continental expansion during the following decade. Anchored in the socio-economic crisis of Argentina after 2001 and the visibility of urban recyclers known as cartoneros, the article reconstructs the genealogy of Eloísa Cartonera and traces the proliferation of independent, cooperative, and community-based publishing initiatives across Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, Ecuador, Mexico, and other countries. Drawing on manifestos, interviews, academic research, press coverage, blogs, and direct documentation, the text examines the ideological foundations, production methodologies, editorial practices, catalog development, distribution strategies, copyright arrangements, and organizational structures that define the heterogeneous universe of editoriales cartoneras.

The study analyzes the libro cartonero as both material artifact and socio-political proposal: a hand-bound book made from recycled cardboard, produced through do-it-yourself techniques, small print runs, horizontal collaboration, and low-cost distribution. It interrogates key concepts such as democratization of reading, access to culture, decommodification of the book, alternative publishing models, cooperative production, cultural autonomy, grassroots organization, countercultural economies, and resistance to neoliberal market logics. At the same time, it critically evaluates tensions within the movement, including aestheticization of marginality, symbolic use of excluded communities, limited social impact, professionalization, market insertion, art-object commodification, institutionalization, and academic appropriation.

Beyond descriptive history, the article explores the unrealized possibilities of the cartonera methodology as an open, replicable, low-cost editorial infrastructure capable of supporting literacy programs, school and library publishing projects, rural and peri-urban educational contexts, minority language revitalization, indigenous cultural expression, community knowledge dissemination, and local information management. It argues for the systematic documentation and open distribution of technical knowledge related to handmade bookbinding, small-scale printing, cooperative workflows, legal frameworks, and open-access content circulation, in order to prevent cooptation and expand emancipatory applications.

Concluding with a reflection on the paradox of global recognition and Northern university collection practices — where cartonera books circulate as curated artifacts rather than living tools of cultural production — the article situates the movimiento cartonero within broader debates on cultural production, political economy of the book, intellectual property, cultural democratization, social transformation, and the limits of alternative publishing under global capitalism.