Cajón de sastre

Cajón de sastre (a Spanish expression which literally translates as "a tailor's drawer" and that actually means "a mixed or grab bag, a catch-all") is an open-ended space where diverse topics converge, always anchored in the universe of libraries, knowledge, and memory. Here, unexpected explorations, unforeseen connections, and reflections that defy conventional frameworks illuminate new ways of thinking about information and culture.

Last published posts

Series Nemboro. The Power of Fictions

This series follows the trajectory of the so-called Embera woven "masks," from their seductive presence on a gallery wall in Panama to the unsettling discovery of their invented origins. These essays weave personal encounter with critical librarianship, showing how even fictions acquire ontology and metadata power. The series explores the ethics of classification, the seduction of invented traditions, and the dangers of libraries and archives legitimizing market-driven myths as heritage. It is both a narrative of enchantment and rupture, and a call for decolonial cataloging practices able to hold absence, contradiction, and invention as data in their own right.

Keywords: Critical librarianship | Decolonial cataloging | Metadata ethics | Ontology of fictions | Invented traditions | Embera woven masks | Nemboro | Document theory | Cultural appropriation | Commodification of heritage | Marketed authenticity | Epistemic rupture | Archives and absence | Library ethics | Memory and power

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (06 of 06) | Even Fictions Have Power [read]

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (05 of 06) | The Library That Watches Back [read]

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (04 of 06) | The Fiction and the Void [read]

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (03 of 06) | Metadata Fictions [read]

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (02 of 06) | A Mask is a Document [read]

  Nemboro. The Power of Fictions (01 of 06) | The Gaze of the Nemboro Woven Masks [read]

Conference Telling to Remain

Text presented at a BibloRed Meeting (Bogotá, Colombia, 2025). Bogotá's libraries form a powerful but fragile ecosystem: diverse, uneven, often precarious, and rich in knowledge that rarely gets written down. This conference and its accompanying academic reflection argue that systematizing experiences, communicating with intention, and writing from practice are not bureaucratic duties but acts of memory, resistance, and professional continuity. From community libraries improvised in neighborhoods to university systems with established infrastructures, all generate situated intelligence that risks vanishing if not narrated. The talk and text together propose a simple, urgent idea: the future of the city's libraries depends on their capacity to tell what they do, why it matters, and how they survive — transforming everyday practice into collective memory rather than institutional amnesia.

  Conference Telling to Remain [read]

Archive

To keep this website focused on the latest publications and manageable in size, while ensuring access to past content, older blog posts are periodically removed from the website and compiled into PDF files, which can be downloaded from this archive.

Conference. Living Libraries in Latin America

Text presented at the 2025 Cachapoal Provincial Library Meeting (Rancagua, Chile, 2025). This conference reimagines rural libraries as living systems: adaptable, fragile, and deeply rooted in the territories they serve. It analyzes how imported management models clash with local realities, exposing the colonial framework of "modernization" and revealing, instead, a silent and persistent intelligence born of care, improvisation, and ecological interdependence. A journey through the smallest libraries of the Global South, where management becomes translation, structure becomes lifeblood, and survival itself becomes a political act.

  Conferencia Living Libraries... [ver]

Conference Libraries, indigenous peoples, identity and inclusion

Text presented at the Meeting of Public Libraries of Cundinamarca (IDECUT. Girardot, Colombia, 2025). This lecture offers a lively look at libraries as territories of memory: spaces where Indigenous and rural voices intertwine with the echoes of paper, where classification reveals its colonial backbone, and where disobedience can be a form of care. A tour of libraries that breathe, that listen, that accompany — and that, at times, choose to become invisible to let the community speak for itself.

  Conference Libraries, indigenous peoples... [read]

Conference. Spoken Word, Woven Word, Embodied Word

Text presented at the First Biennial of Written Culture (BibloRed. Bogota, Colombia, 2024). This conference challenges the hegemony of the written word and argues for libraries and archives that recognize orality, gesture, objects, graffiti, textiles, and territory as legitimate media of knowledge and memory. It exposes the colonial roots of literocetrism (textual supremacy) and calls for decolonial, multisensory, and materially grounded approaches that place diverse forms of knowing on equal footing.

  Conferencia Spoken Word... [ver]