About

A personal library tells us a great deal about someone. It tells us, for example, what stirs their curiosity, what questions they ask, what searches accompany their passage through existence. It also tells us with whom they are in dialogue — present and past — whom they invite to become their fellow travelers in both community and dissent. A personal library is a concrete record of someone’s unique, irreplaceable, and radically subjective activity — of the lives and undulations of their spirit.

The personal library is also a way of keeping others present in the intimate space of the home. It is a way of making our interiors a little more public and open — of dismantling the false capitalist dichotomy between the public and the private — just as reading and writing are ways of deprivatizing the spiritual space, of offering oneself as a participant in an inexhaustible and fertile conversation, and of offering oneself as someone who listens.

The most expansive expressions of this deprivatizing impulse are, of course, public and community libraries — those spaces where the intellect has, as one might say, free rein, where all people can contemplate and feel, with fascination and revulsion intertwined, this strange and contradictory way of being that we have agreed to call humanity. Where we learn about the injustices of the present and past world. Where we find hope and energy to “remain in the struggle,” as Haraway says.

If social struggle — I was thinking just yesterday during a visit to the Biblioteca José Vasconcelos (a history book open before me) — defeated the divine right of kings and colonialism, we can also behead capitalism, current hegemonies, and climate change (let us not forget: the problem is a hydra). A library gives hope; it invites the spirit to know itself in order to remake itself, to create new forms without nation-states or subject-object division, without imperialisms or colonialisms, without racism or misogyny, without discriminations or exploitations. To know oneself in radical subjectivity and collectivity with all people and all life on the planet. Although some insist that some of us don’t belong, a library is and has always been a liberated space where we can experience that world in which many worlds fit, of which the Zapatistas speak. (To live it even if only in utopian form, for that world can only flourish after a radical change in the mode of production on a global scale).

The personal library is fundamental to the process of literary creation. If we were to ask Walter Benjamin, he would tell us that writers “write driven not by lack but by dissatisfaction with the books they can buy but do not like.” The writer’s personal library reveals the springs of their literary act — the frictions and alterities that the texts on the bookshelf helped to create — which their writing repaired with their gaze, with the seed of their free association sown as a gift for the future.

Some years ago, during a research adventure, I visited the home of Luis Zapata to consult his personal library. For those unfamiliar with him, Luis Zapata was a foundational writer in the Mexican and Latin American queer literary tradition. I was investigating the international circulation of John Rechy’s City of Night, a key novel of Latinx queer writing in the United States, published in 1963. I had already encountered the novel in the personal library of the Mexican poet Abigael Bohórquez and, later, in the home of Robert Brady, a cultural agent of bourgeois Mexico who lived in Cuernavaca. My intuition was that this novel would be on Zapata’s shelves — and it was. In other words, Rechy’s narrative touched the creative lives of several important cultural figures in late twentieth-century Mexico.

It seemed to me that other researchers might find inspiration in his library for their own projects and questions, so I set out to build a digital catalogue accessible from anywhere. The semester before, I had taken a digital humanities course, and I was in the grip of a particularly intense instance of what is called “momentum”: an energetic disposition for action that knows itself to be momentary (hence the term, from physics) and must therefore be seized the moment it takes hold. This digital catalogue is the result of that work, which would not have been possible without the help, trust, and generosity of others: Tadeo Zapata and Martín Zapata, Michael K. Schuessler and Christian Piedra Berchelt, and above all, Alex Gil. This work would also have been impossible without a grant from Yale’s LGBT Studies Center, which helped cover expenses.

I catalogued all the books I had access to — more than two thousand (hard not to succumb to the capitalist fetish of quantity). Much Hispanic and Latin American literature, as one would expect. Much also in European languages, primarily English, French, and Portuguese; and German is not absent: Luis Zapata was a polyglot and a translator. Books on cinema and theater, his personal and creative passions as we well know. Poetry and critical thought to nourish language and ideas. The anthology from Gay Sunshine Press, through which Zapata contributed, as a writer, to the queer liberation movements in the United States. In sum, the living traces of an existence that helped open and democratize literary culture — a process that has not ended.

There is one book in the catalogue that has never stopped pulsing through my memory. It is a copy of El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). The original cover features only an image of a nopal cactus. Zapata’s copy has a photograph of a bird affixed to the cover. It is as if the writer were inviting us to take action from our own spaces — to change, as he did alongside many others, the reality around him.

We must keep struggling and working, the writer’s intervention suggests, so that the bird may have a free, clean, and breathable sky in which to fly.