Cajón de sastre

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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 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, identity and inclusion [read]