3Chronicles of Things Made

A log of recent writings, sounds, and gestures

Published June 28, 2026

Over the past weeks (June 15 to 28), four new texts have moved across palm-leaf manuscripts, community libraries, peatlands, and the compost pile of Quisquiza. Their materials are very different: written leaves, institutional structures, waterlogged bogs, and steaming rot. But together they return to a shared concern: how fragile systems of memory survive not through permanence, but through care, restraint, renewal, and the careful management of decay.

The sequence begins with The Book That Must Be Tended, a text on palm-leaf manuscripts and the labor required for written memory to endure. Moving across South India, Sri Lanka, Bali, and Myanmar, the post challenges the assumption that writing automatically stabilizes memory. A manuscript may carry sacred, scholarly, practical, or ritual authority, but its survival depends on preparation, handling, storage, repair, copying, custody, and competent reading. The text argues that preservation is not a property granted by inscription alone. A book endures because it is tended.

From there, Community First, Institution Later returns to community-centered librarianship and the problem of authority. It distinguishes community input from community governance, asking what changes when library work begins not from institutional permission, but from a community mandate. The text examines collection development, description, access, programming, evaluation, and professional expertise as fields where participation is not enough. At stake is the order of design: whether communities are invited into a structure already defined for them, or whether institutions learn to support knowledge infrastructures whose legitimacy begins elsewhere.

The question of preservation changes terrain in What the Bog Refuses to Decay, a chronicle on peatlands, slowed decomposition, and fragile archives. A bog does not preserve by active care, but by reducing exposure: limiting oxygen, light, circulation, and disturbance. The text uses this ecology of inhibition to rethink memory systems that cannot always survive through visibility, digitization, circulation, or institutional activation. Some materials endure because certain processes are delayed, restricted, or refused. The problem is not whether knowledge should breathe, but under what conditions it can continue without being consumed too quickly.

Finally, From Quisquiza | Compost brings the matter back to the high-Andean forest. Compost appears at first as accumulation, but up close it is managed transformation: bacteria, fungi, insects, heat, moisture, air, and fragments working through what has lost its former shape. The note reads decomposition as a way of thinking about archives and institutions whose failures cannot simply be hidden, patched, or preserved unchanged. Some categories must be retired, some descriptions rewritten, some systems dismantled, and some residues metabolized into usable knowledge. Someone still has to turn the pile.

Across these four texts, memory does not appear as storage alone. It appears as maintenance, mandate, inhibition, and transformation. Palm leaves show that writing survives through repeated care. Community libraries show that knowledge infrastructures must be governed by those whose lives they organize. Peatlands show that preservation may require refusal, delay, and reduced exposure. Compost shows that breakdown can become fertile only when the conditions of transformation are tended. Together, the texts trace a movement away from preservation as possession, display, or permanent stability, and toward memory as a living arrangement: fragile, accountable, situated, and always in need of work.

4Coming Soon, If the Fog Allows

Upcoming writings, events, and works-in-progress

Published April 21, 2026

Over the coming months, new threads will begin to surface here — if conditions allow.

One of them is the relaunch of Wayrachaki Editora, an independent imprint devoted to open-access digital books written from the margins: manuals, chronicles, and editorial texts on libraries in resistance, insurgent orality, fragile archives, and knowledge practices shaped by conflict, scarcity, and territory. The imprint resumes its work with the same nomadic spirit that first gave it form, publishing texts that would never survive academic vetting and were never meant to.

Another thread takes shape through Tela de Araña, a set of consulting and advisory services focused on semantic design, metadata systems, community archives, and knowledge infrastructures where conventional models fail. This work unfolds slowly and situationally, through accompaniment rather than solutions, and will be documented here as it happens.

Alongside these developments, the chronicles, notes, and essays will continue. Writing will keep moving between forests and libraries, between theory and ground, following questions as they arise rather than as they are planned. Nothing here is scheduled in advance. Some things will arrive quietly. Others may never appear.

Fog, after all, has its own timing.

5Collected Texts, Sounds & Traces

Archive of published works and recorded materials

Published April 21, 2026

Over time, I have been reorgaizing my earlier publications into a structured archive. Texts once dispersed across journals, conferences, and digital platforms now inhabit defined sections that reflect the terrains from which they emerged. The archive currently includes Libraries from the South, Libraries in the Margins, Public Libraries, Librarianship and Research, and Digital Divide, alongside curated selections from Blog Bibliotecario, Bitácora de un bibliotecario, and the Princh Library Blog.

These sections are not a museum of completed work. They remain active spaces: updated, expanded, and occasionally recontextualized as questions evolve and threads reconnect. Together, they trace the long arc of a professional trajectory concerned with decolonial critique, marginal territories, institutional responsibility, technological inequality, documentary practice, and the politics of memory.

What appears in the present writing grows from those earlier layers. The archive is not a backdrop. It is the foundation.