CCNY Libraries News & Events

Ambivalent Encounters Cartonera Exhibit

This fall, Cohen Library hosts the writing and artwork of CCNY freshman students in Prof. Daisy Domínguez's fall 2018 history course “The Conquest of Latin America: Ambivalent Encounters and Historical Memory.” Students were asked to create cartoneras, or cardboard books based on an art and publishing practice popular in Latin America, revolving around the theme “My Conquest Diary.” Students were asked to write three diary entries written from the perspective of several historical figures studied in class: Malintzin, the 16th century indigenous woman who served as interpreter for Hernán Cortés; the 17th century native Andean historian Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala; the 17th century mestizo writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega; and Christopher Columbus. While they were asked to base their entries on the historical record, students were also encouraged to be creative with their language as well as the artistry used to design the cartonera.

The course, like the exhibit, was a team project. Paloma Celis Carbajal, NYPL Curator for Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Studies shared her considerable knowledge of cartoneras when she headed uptown to the CCNY campus in Harlem to talk with the class about the history and production process of cartoneras and brought her very own cartonera collection for them to view and handle. She also showed students how-to videos and discussed several techniques which inspired them with ideas for their own projects. Students also visited the NYPL's main research branch where Celis Carbajal led a manuscript workshop with Thomas Lannon, Curator of Manuscripts. The workshop was the first time the students were able to examine and handle 19th century manuscripts of documents they had studied throughout the semester by such figures as Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, and other unnamed Nahua scribes. Prof. Domínguez also teamed up with SALALM colleague Sarah Aponte, Head Librarian at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (DSI) Archives and Library, which is also part of the CCNY Libraries system. Students learned about the DSI’s First Blacks website during two sessions led by Aponte and the former DSI Associate Director Anthony Stevens Acevedo. In addition, students were asked to visit the National Museum of the American Indian’s bilingual (Spanish and English) exhibit “Taíno: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean” in lower Manhattan. Curators and designers included former students Jennifer Espinoza and Jeffrey Daniel; Celis Carbajal; and several CCNY Libraries librarians and support staff (Eva Alcántara, Sarah Cohn, Ebe De Leon, Xena Mayalen Hernandez, and Sean O’Heir)

“I was very pleased with the cartonera project as an assignment,” noted Domínguez. “The diary entries turned out to be the most poignant assignments! Students demonstrated they had done the readings and listened in class, but their thoughtfulness and creativity were reflected in touching as well as hilarious entries. And they created beautiful pieces of art, too." One student, Marzea Mukarrama, also validated the project’s intellectual content, noting “the entire semester, from the readings about all the historical characters, I had a concrete opinion about them. I always spoke up about whether I thought the decisions they made in their time were big mistakes or if they were admirable. However, when I worked on the diary entries for the cartonera, I had to put myself in their position, and it taught me a critical skill. I had to keep stopping myself after each sentence to think, ‘Wait this isn’t what they would say, this is what I would say.’ It made me realize that I probably would’ve made similar decisions or thought about things a different way than now if I lived in their time period and society. That’s an important skill to have for anyone who analyzes history.”

Prof. Dominguez’s course was part of the Open Educational Resources (OER) effort at CUNY under the category “zero textbook course.” The syllabus, assignments, rubrics, open access readings, and other resources (including the cartonera resources that Celis Carbajal shared) are all available online via the CUNY Academic Commons page The Conquest of Latin America: Ambivalent Encounters and Historical Memory.

Photo: Professor Daisy Dominguez and 2018 student Jennifer Espinoza in front of Ambivalent Encounters exhibit.