'That’s when I found out my mum could access other worlds — ones that neither we nor my dad nor any of us could reach. Especially not my dad.
I remember one of many days watching him flipping through Maga’s notes. I remember him starting off slow, scanning left to right, top to bottom and back again. I even saw him turning the notebook around, just in case the other side made more sense than the one before. From a child’s perspective (I was about seven years old), it was almost comical. I remember him flicking through the pages with increasing speed, slamming the first, second, then third notebook back onto the table. With each one, he spent less time than the one before. My dad looked frustrated. His power-hungry curiosity hadn’t hit a wall — it had hit paper. Sheets and sheets of it, notebooks filled with dots and lines that he could not understand.
There was, at last, something in my mother’s domain to which he had no access to. A separate realm.
Her indecipherable shorthand notes.'[1]
A title, a premise.
I have been carrying a notebook — A5, flexible, worn — since 2020.
One at a time.
I call them Libre‑tas (libreta + libre + –tas). They are neither sketchbooks nor polished journals. They are archives in motion: surfaces for drawing, writing, annotation, collage, erasure, shorthand and marginalia.
La libreta es mi testiga. She attests to what is unspeakable and uncollected.
La libreta es la protagonista. She mediates between interior experiences and the external world.
La libre-ta translates grief into gesture, shorthand into speech, prayer into code.Across the thirteen volumes of libre-tas I have put together (so far), I have recreated various representations of La Virgen found in Mexican spiritual and visual culture — Tonantzin, the Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgen Morena, la Guadalupana Zapatista — not necessarily as religious icons but as resonant figures for maternal lineage, ritual and resistance. I see an uncanny resemblance between the leaves of the Begonia Maculata plant and the starry veil of the Virgen de Guadalupe.
Scrawled notations in pencil gestures on the margins of language — non-linear, relational, non-hierarchical.
Sometimes, my entries hold quiet grief; 'alguna vez un pie diabético?/ ever a diabetic foot?' is a record of watching pain in the quotidian moments of my dad’s last years. There were times when mi papá, or don Ponchito as he was called, was a source of my pain. I would at times think of myself as his diabetic foot and him as mine. A relationship tender, inflamed and scarred but held close, cared for and healed over time.
How does one hold onto painful memories while tending to the very wounds that caused them?I’d like to think of the libre-tas as living artifacts: like bodies, they carry scars and healing, mapping the terrain of mortality and translating it into marks, gestures and memory — these notebooks are protagonists, witnesses, translators and at times curanderas (healers).
Within the Libre-tas, handmade envelopes are often stuck on to preserve significant memorabilia such as pressed ginkgo biloba leaves: I hold a special memory from my childhood of my mother applying ginkgo ointments to help with her blood circulation. I also often refer to her 1963 thesis from Academia Moderna where she wrote about teaching shorthand — a coded language that gave her access to the workforce in the 1970s as a secretary. Shorthand, once used almost exclusively by women, is now part of my artistic research: a subversive, embodied language that speaks through silence, speed and survival.
In Libre‑tas, the notebook is not a container but a co-conspirator: a site of feminist knowledge production, embodied memory and coded communication. La Virgencita, for example, becomes a site of layering — ancestral memory shaded by present struggle, murmured names in private lines of code. The archive grows slowly, quietly and sideways. It is not meant to conclude but to keep unfolding.The pages are unfinished prayers, smeared ink, rewritten captions, collage fragments of devotional images pinned next to handwritten taquigrafía. They are not statements of faith, they’re searchings, questions, small acts of devotion as inquiry.
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[1] Marcela Alejandra Gómez Escudero, anecdote titled Introducción a la Taquigrafía [2] in Libre-tas Vol. 4, p. 22, unpublished notebook, 2022.