Signata (May 2021)
Archive, Practices, and Memory Policies
Abstract
The Centro Editor de América Latina began its activities in response to the violent intervention of the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía at the University of Buenos Aires, in 1966. It survived the military junta of Jorge Rafael Videla and closed its doors during the neoliberal turn in 1995. The first print runs did not fall below 20,000 copies and, according to the materials seized during the last military dictatorship, the confiscated volumes numbered up to 3,000,000 copies per title. Recognizing in the archive that the Mariano Moreno National Library began to build in 2006 the marks and traces of the publisher and their meaning allows us to evoke, through an operation of re-enunciation, the symptoms of the memory of the dictatorships that devastated the second half of the 20th century in the entire Latin American region. The construction and circulation of the Latin American Editor Center archive is understood as a practice, that is, as an operation to transform editorial knowledge, technologies, and policies that enunciate and perform on a diaphanous present for the publishing industry in Argentina. The materials that make up the archive of the Centro Editor of Latin America, the present ones—the documents on the constitution and judicial persecution of the company, the correspondence of the workers, the printing plates, the color proofs, the interviews, the design of the collections, and the newspaper articles, and the absentees: the disappearances of the workers and the deposit burned in 1980 under the subversion judgment—have offered resistance to the practice carried out by the National Library, forcing it to fill the gaps in knowledge and to develop enunciation in a manner befitting the present: curatorships and montages of exhibitions on the good praxis of the editorial are accompanied by interventions in the urban environment. The practices—theoretical, material, and political—which re-enunciate about the Centro Editor of Latin America are practices that make memory and that seek to build denunciations that resist historical revisionism and denialism regarding the responsibilities and crimes of the military junta, even today, in court. The archive of the Centro Editor of Latin America, in this sense, is not only the enunciation of that memory of destruction which it tries to remember but, above all, an action with its own syntax that can act on an editorial and collective present.
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