BIANCA RAE MESSINGER: Ok, I just have a few questions about publishing, like first on bilingual publishing, second the formation of Gato Negro and, I don’t know, the issues facing publishing now, some things that you are most excited about publishing, and maybe the connection between writing scenes, between the US and Mexico. But first I wanted to ask if you could tell us what was the impetus, the point of departure, for the project?

LEÓN MUÑOZ SANTINI: Something I always say is that all explanations and reasons why this project emerged are always created after the fact. At the beginning, our history was fairly instinctual and unconscious, and it was only afterwards that there was a need to construct an explanation of what it was we were doing. For a lot of the time we were “reluctant,” because there’s this tendency in the world of small press publishing, or publishing at the margins, of being self-referential, of explaining oneself. And sure I’ll talk about how difficult it is to be an independent publisher but with the acknowledgement that the history we invent for ourselves is in a certain sense false.

The form it has now started about 10 years ago. Here too is a place where this explanation has been constructed. But we can now say, without a doubt, that at the start it was a graphic design project more than a publishing project or something with any ambition to translate or what have you. I have 20-odd years of professional experience in graphic design, I have my studio, and this idea of publishing independently came out of that. And as it happens in many professions that work as a function of someone else’s content, which is certainly the case in editorial design, it often happens that designers reach a certain point in their career in which being a designer just isn’t enough. Or we could say that in general having to live with that contradiction between making creative content but being at the mercy of a company or system that’s much larger than you starts to get under your skin, especially when the designers have some level of intelligence or ambition or talent.

And so I guess that was the case where I found myself in that moment, and it was also due to my own professional trajectory, of understanding a bit how the editorial ecosystem functions and how it functioned specifically at that moment in Mexico. So that’s a bit of the sources that led to looking for a way to publish independently. But I’ll tell you now, yes I remember, the main goal at that time was to strip away any type of mediation, to make the kind of design that I wanted to make, throwing away the generally poorly-founded opinion of an editor or an author or a client. And generally, more in the context of Mexico or Latin America, in the chain of production for a book, thinking about it as an industry, the prerogatives that it has for design are fairly minimal—where generally it is circumscribed to the designer making something pretty, choosing the font but not the typography, where later the main goal of the design at the press is generally only economical, with the goal being the economy of the book in circulation. And also understanding that the panorama and the ecosystem of independent publishing here at that time was very different from how it is in the US, or how it was or how it historically existed. There is a vibrant publishing scene here that inhabits an important genealogy; the history of the book in this country is a powerful and interesting and long history which we feel we are a part of, we feel we inhabit part of that ecology.

But we might say that the ecosystem of independent publishing that existed at that moment has changed for the worse in recent years. There was a lot of independent publishing, deeply independent in the service of the public. And deeply independent from, let’s say the “perverse stimuli” in publishing, of circulating content that essentially wants to approximate the industrial scale of publishing production, without having material connections or the circulation of content to be able to inhabit it in a viable way. And that generated, well, a non-viable economy, an unreal one, which, over time, affected the quality of production and circulation of books. Also, inhabiting often times that sort of promise, a very toxic one at times, that a publisher has of—I don’t know, sometimes there are texts that don’t necessarily have a thousand readers or need or merit a thousand readers, which is bad, because you need to make a thousand books and edit at the scale of a thousand books. And so a bit of the model Gato Negro chose was to try to find a way of publishing independently, on our own, that would be completely outside of that ecosystem, to subtract from the process of the book everything that was unnecessary, to find the shortest line possible so that a given content could arrive at the form of a book.

In that first moment, at the beginning, in this vein of finding the shortest line possible so that the content could become a book, this meant foregoing a ton of things that weren’t essential, from physical, formal concrete characteristics to conceptual procedures around the topic, which also included forgoing the reader. So that first impulse was so that the publisher ends up with a beautiful book in their hands, and you could cut out all the rest. Then came a period of learning in the process in which the book functioned. It made sense to find a reader, for instance, but at first, it was that process of throwing out everything that wasn’t essential or necessary. And I think that it was that and also seeking to subtract the economic stress of that kind of operation and get rid of the expectation of making money from what we’re doing and when you get rid of that expectation you lose the fear of losing money. And even reducing it to a sort of performance or a sort of game, the “publishing game.”

I think this decision to get rid of all these expectations and stimuli, I think it allowed us to be able to find a way to cut down on procedures, to cut costs, to be able to provide a given content with the form of the book. And we were also very “attached,” very wedded to the idea that what we were making were books, not chapbooks, not prints, that we’re attached to the “fetish” of the book. And that included in this that, even in its essential and minimal form, the work has this superpower of the fetish, that the value of the object is infinitely greater than its material condition or circulation. And, finally, if the book is this promise of positions, going two steps backwards, then it is this promise of surviving in time. There’s a saying here, and surely in Argentina, and I don’t know if it exists in English but something like, “the things that make life worth living for free, are writing a book, having a child, planting a tree.” Or that there’s something special that’s associated with this condition of transcendence. And so what we were invested in from the beginning was making books. But as time went on, the books that we made, and their form of production and circulation was closely related to how we printed them, with a little risograph machine. We print them “in house,” which is to say we are the owners of our means of production, and we found in risograph printing, a way which at certain scales, was truly a cheap way to print. We could say that the technology we chose determined to a certain extent, the scale that we could work in, which at the time was small to medium. So things had a bit to do with risograph printing, which as the years go by has had a boom all over, from a perspective which is very different from what we’ve done with the technology—there are, all over the world, many people doing things with risograph, very young, very much from the world of visual language and graphic design, doing things which we aren’t at all what we’re doing, which is at a scale which is very cheap. Our scale is more or less the following: a printing process that allows you to spend the same amount “by copy” of a book printing 100 as you would printing 1000 in offset, using current industrial technology. That’s the gist of it. Or that you can have a standard cost for production of a book of poetry at a dollar which is more or less the median cost for production that you would have printing a thousand in offset. That’s the joke of it all, isn’t it? And we could say that by reducing this proportionally to the wager where, to have 100 books of something printed it becomes about 100 to 200 dollars. So we could say that this was a model that we found for making super simple books, like I was saying stripping the object that we call a book down to its bones, working with the cheapest paper available, working generally with one color, in two or three pre-established formats, and cutting out these things that you don’t necessarily need, like an ISBN, you don’t really need a text on the inside flap, on the back cover, you don’t need it to have an author’s bio and, even to a certain degree to have it translated—the first things we started publishing in English following this process of subtraction, went more or less along the lines of, “Well I can read in English, I don’t really need to pay someone to translate it.” It’s another cost that you can take out.

But as I was telling you earlier, all this explanation is something that happens five years later when someone asks, “What are you all doing?” So the decision to start publishing things in English came about because we had them on hand and there wasn’t the expectation of publishing them, there wasn’t any ulterior motive. And later when we started to circulate things, slowly at the beginning, a bit “reluctant”—like “why are we doing this? for who?”—and rapidly we realized that having content in English opened a ton of doors and helped or helped with this problem of finding a model of editorial production that very consciously went outside of the ecosystem that an independent publisher could build here at that time. And I think that has changed. But that was what, at first, got us started publishing things in English and publishing in places outside of Mexico, and that’s how things were at the beginning.

BRM: That’s so interesting to hear, especially regarding the question of translation and how to expand it, there aren’t that many places doing it independently like that, I don’t think there are that many publishers publishing in multiple languages like that.

LMS: No, I would think not. [laughs] One thing I imagine is interesting is that outside of the Anglophone world or the American or English publishing world things are translated infinitely more than the other way around. Or rather on a new releases table in the United States, the number of books in translation that you see there is infinitely smaller than what you would see at a bookstore in Mexico City or Buenos Aires, and that reflects a ton of things. One being this asymmetrical relation in the circulation of information and content and the importance that it has, and also that it’s a reminder that maybe written and literary culture in English is more provincial than one might think. People read much fewer things that are produced abroad.

But alright, that’s the way things are. In our case specifically, more precisely in a specific part of the United States, we found a space for publishing that was interesting, that we found much larger and at that time more interesting than what we could find here, with its small publishing world, vast, rich, and diverse but also fairly endogamic and so we found some opposition and pushback. So, in the United States but more precisely the Southwestern United States and more precisely, California, and more precisely Los Angeles, there’s something that exists which we might call a more real, vibrant, necessary biculturality, etc. We found a place there where we were generating interest and in a way that produced this model I’ve been telling you about, to be able to find a way of publishing quickly, cheaply, etc., this place allowed us to publish content that never would have become a book otherwise. And this has to do with the industry which adds in the implacable calculations of the market, since if a book doesn’t have 1000 readers then it doesn’t get published. And it also has to do with the fact that being able to publish “by unit” with the same production costs allows you to carry to the form of the book so much content that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. That by itself is what it means to have an editorial mission in this life, right?

But that by itself doesn’t mean expanding the margins of what is publishable. It’s a process that’s very conscious—and I think this comes from the design-based impulse—very conscious of the fact that the form of the book is a language in and of itself, and to be faithful to the idea that the language of printing, publishing, is a unique language and that there are certain things, certain arguments, certain ideas, certain emotions that you can only say in the language of the book. With a bit of trying to “foster that language,” to cultivate that, and inhabiting that way of negotiating limits, we realized that the place we would inhabit would be one with limitations. Or we could say, the limits of the market, the limits but also the limits of what is publishable, and the limits of what is accepted as literature, as poetry, etc. And, most of all at the beginning there was a time when about 10, 8, 7, 5 years ago, those were times when this country, when what we lived through was very ugly and very violent. And also a bit of, I don’t know, because we were living through this I suppose we felt a responsibility, a mobilization in the face of these circumstances—and, as we live by what we do, there was a way to be able to react to this, and so our thing of being able to publish very specific content very quickly in book form allowed us to be able to comment on what was happening in the moment, on what was occurring in the now.

And so, this gave us a very political character, something that with certain things we published we didn’t have. And there is a saying in Mexico and surely in other languages, that “each dog looks like its owner,” where finally this possibility of publishing so many things allows you to end up reflecting on what it is that really interests you, what do you like, what do you not like. We might say that this is also a model that allowed for the luxury of constructing a catalog that for smaller publishing projects is generally far more difficult. I think that in these 10 years we’ve published 220 titles, which for the scale of this publishing world is a ton, but always on a very, very small scale. We realized that we enthusiastically inhabited this sort of mission to politicize everything, to politicize the way in which we published, to problematize it. And that also led to problematizing the form of circulation and to finding as much interlocution abroad as we did no? And a bit of something like at that moment I had the time and the resources to travel etc., and that there was a moment in which we traveled with our books a lot, the books brought us many places, this sort of, and this is another super power that publishing has of, at the end of the day, well this is something I heard from an Argentine publisher, that dedicating your life to publishing will never make you rich but it will greatly increase the quality of your social relationships. And so, this butterfly effect that publishing things has and effectively the cycle that this generation allows us to find a reader.

Oh, and an exciting thing that we learned on our journey was that even the most obscure, most cryptic, most opaque content that you can publish has a reader. There’s someone who will find it, that will understand it and will understand it deeply, who will understand it and will find it deep, meaningful, significant, emotional, powerful, precisely everything that the language of the book can provide, and that the issue, the problem, the challenge is that the more rare the type of reader is the more time the work spends in getting to them, and having a book circulating over time costs money. So that’s a bit of what the challenge is. But anyways, what I wanted to say to you is that we got to this moment where, as things began to snowball, we started to travel a lot and circulate our books in many, many places. And we also started to understand that the interest that these types of things we were publishing generated had to do with playing a sort of role that, more particularly in the global north, goes through a diversity quota. I’ve said this, lived this many times where you have to put on this contrived smile of encouragement—someone sees your table and you say something like, “Oh, hi! Oh, that’s so touching, I’m from Mexico, come look at my books.” And so going along with this form of problematizing, of politicizing everything, meant understanding that we distributed books from a certain position, or to a certain extent from that position. And I think that it was from there where we started working with translation. That was one of the reasons, and most of all it depended on a certain time and certain publications. Translation was a way of saying “no,” of saying that the locus of our project is not what the global north thinks of as its periphery. And so publishing in English was also a place where, when we started translating into English it was a bit of undoing this trick of asymmetry. It also had to do with this other form of being a very open space to be able to accept, to publish things that were outside of the conventional expectations of, “Oh, if I’m Mexican, I have to publish in Spanish.” If an author comes up to us and wants to publish something in Albanian, why not? If someone wants to publish something in a made-up language, why not? And it also has to do with the issue of problematizing and politicizing specifically the idea of addressing this extremely close relationship that Mexico has with the United States, its relation with the publishing world and a bit of this multiplier effect I mentioned earlier, and also this feeling of trying to not be three steps behind things. So that was a bit of what started us off towards these projects that talked about this sort of dual condition and problematized it, what do we understand and what do we not, and also to a certain degree what I was telling you about earlier, about being very conscious of the conditions for the book, using that vanilla expression, “being out of the box,” to think of the book from the outside. This is also a bit of what the book has as its fetishistic condition, that it’s a kind of promise of transparency and understanding.To put it another way, we’re conditioned to think of the book as an archetype of the place where one acquires knowledge, that it’s a place where one understands things by reading, that one understands things deeply through reading. And so, we’re also playing with the concept of being outside of that, that if you’re outside of that framework, this gets translated into things that are very specific, very particular. Because books are thought of so often as cementing the process of literature, books are published on an industrial scale to be transparent, to look attractive, to be easy to read. So, being a little outside of that, it allows you the ability to make a book that’s opaque. For instance, what if the book were elusive about telling you what’s going on? And so that gave us the opportunity to be able to generate and publish projects that were in this vein. And there too, playing a bit with it, with this thing called bilingualism, and so we had a series of very concrete projects that, if you want, I can talk about in more detail.

BRM: You talking also makes me think of projects such as Eloisa Cartonera in Buenos Aires, publishing using cardboard as a cover after the economic crisis in 2001. And I don’t know, having control over the means of production becomes its own politics in a sense, and you don’t lose as much taking risks. So, finally I wanted to ask how you have seen small press publishing change, through the pandemic and after—and what new things are you doing in Mexico that you’re excited about, specifically in independent publishing, outside of the industrial system that you’ve been mentioning.

LMS: So, the story that I told you or the description that I made about what we do is the happy part of things, but we can say that we’ve come up against, over time but most of all recently, a model that has its limits. That, yes, it’s extremely liberating, in what we’ve been saying, being able to publish with a ton of independence, risk, etc., but it also has its limits in the sense that, under this model, which is making very simple books with a short print-run, with an extremely particular circulation in the sense that yes we have achieved the ability to put our books in many places that few editors from here from Latin America in general are able to. But at the end of the day this is not that many places, and often the service we offer the author is that they get read in London but not in their own colony. So, in this way it’s a model that doesn’t work for content that has a lot of work behind it, or that has much larger expectations for circulation, or greater ambition or level of complexity. And so it’s an issue that we’ve had to deal with lately because with that luck and inertia that we had where everything was becoming more open, with more possibilities with access to content, to projects, authors with a greater resonance, etc., if you don’t have a kind of functioning correspondence between the materiality of the book and the form of its circulation and all the work that goes into it, then it’s a relationship that doesn’t work. And it’s something that we’re facing more and more, and to a certain extent it’s something that was happening before the pandemic. I think that fortunately now what’s happening is that we’re in a good place where I feel like, with whatever publication we make, we know we’re going to sell all of it. At some moment, “the sooner the later,” but that we’re going to sell everything. But due to working on such a small scale, we’ve made our own problem of having a medium- to large-sized catalog with the infrastructure of a microscopic publisher. And it’s come to the point where there are certain books that you don’t want to sell because, if you do, it ends the performance, it ends the game of selling books. There are books that we’ve made that, from a catalog of 220 titles that I mentioned, only 20 or 15 titles are in print, all the rest are sold out. And the attention that the pandemic sharpened, or it affected the way in which we circulated books. In a sense it was for the better because it allowed us to stop a bit and rethink certain things. But yes, I think it affected that inertia, that power to carry out larger, more ambitious projects, ones that went outside of that simple, functional model we have. I don’t know. I can talk about concrete examples, for example, a book which you must know because we met through Kit Schluter, that book Beauty Salons, Salones de Belleza, I don’t know if you know it…

BRM: Oh, yes! I have it right here.

LMS: Ah, yes, that book is exactly this case where it wasn’t isn’t printed in-house with a risograph. It’s a book that was made with UNAM, the public university here, and it only could have been made possible in that way, in the sense that, it’s a book that has 70 authors, that has 70 translators, and in that way the work that went into it is infinitely greater. The possibilities and expectations for circulation that it has are infinitely greater and it’s a type of book that wouldn’t make any sense to print 100 of. It’s a print run of 1000 copies. It’s a type of book that depended on a third party, in this case a public institution here to be able to circulate.There are those types of projects that we couldn’t do on our own and that ultimately it’s the limit that I think a press of that type has. For example, there’s a type of book that we can only publish every four or five years, a book like El río, The River, which is a series of photos by Zoe Leonard with text by Dolores Dorantes, who is a Mexican poet who’s lived in the United Stares for a while. And in that case, that was a book project where the project was going to be a book of photographs, this series of fairly abstract photographs of the Río Bravo or the Rio Grande, which is the border between Mexico and the United States. It’s a project that Zoe Leonard started in 2016, and it was this series of photos that dealt with the issue of making abstraction from a space that is politically so problematic, so violent, etc., to simply look at it and it’s only water. For that project Zoe came to us to publish it, and knowing the material, then, we realized that yes it needed a text that could put words to that complexity, she was convinced by a text by Dolores Dorantes that she wrote at first in Spanish, and was translated, Robin Myers translated it, who is a translator here in Mexico City, who you surely know of, but the way in which she decided to edit the content wasn’t to just show the whole poem in English then the whole poem in Spanish, but mix between them and there are fragments that only appear in English and others that only appear in Spanish. So it’s not a book that explains itself or that even wants to, despite being an extremely powerful book, it’s a book that has a bit of this feeling of the possibility that exists inhabiting these two languages, to be able to add complexity to a topic, not clarity. It’s a book that adds complexity to the topic, that doesn’t explain the issue of the border and the violence of narcotrafficking, and all the other things that the book talks about from a fairly insightful perspective. But like I said this is an example of a book that plays with translation, with its possibilities, but that is also a type, a book that because of the fame of its authors, especially in the United States, is a book that could enter another scale and with another form of making it circulate. Because when the project was finished, from a print run of 200 copies, I only have two left. So this is the limit that we inhabit and that to this day we haven’t been able to resolve, or maybe and this is yes ending with a bit of a pessimistic note, but it leaves us in this sort of neocolonial global asymmetry in a place where maybe if this project were in a town in Holland, the economic conditions it would be received in and public financing to make it would be very different and that’s the way things are. So maybe we’re relegated to publishing on a small scale, in the immediate, from the margins.

For example, we were talking about Fernanda Laguna before the interview. It’s an honor and privilege to publish Fernanda, it gives us chills of pride, but Fernanda is an author who is well translated, well published. She should circulate in a market like an English language market, and it’s something that we could do, but paying attention to the way in which an artist like Fernanda, an artist who, and I don’t know if she’d say this but with that kind of talent which is like a stream of emotion or feeling that sometimes gets connected to a pen or a keyboard and boom! in half an hour writes a book of poems or a painting, generates a project, etc. So we could still obviously publish Fernanda in English but that role of taking charge and displaying and making work circulate and making space to circulate in the global English market, because that’s what needs to happen for an author of her stature, maybe that isn’t our role, or maybe we could publish one or two or three or four little poems of hers in a form and with a risk that nobody else would take on.