Taller Leñateros

Taller Leñateros describes itself as "a contemporary editorial collective operated by Maya artists in Chiapas, Mexico." It was founded in 1975 by the poet Ámbar Past with the explicit goal of reviving Maya bookmaking, and it remains, by its own account, the first and only Tzotzil Maya bookbinding workshop in Mexico — a collective of largely women artisans, based in a colonial house in San Cristóbal de las Casas, who make paper by hand from recycled fiber and maguey (the same plant used for tequila and mezcal) and then print and bind it into finished books.

The workshop's best-known achievement is Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women, which the studio and independent accounts both describe as the first book written, illustrated, printed, and bound entirely by Maya people in over four hundred years — and the first of its kind published by Maya women specifically. The workshop's publications carry Tzotzil songs, poetry, and oral history into print in a language that had rarely if ever seen its own press before. In 2021, Mexico's Ministry of Culture awarded the taller its National Prize for Arts and Literature in the Popular Arts and Traditions category.

Beyond books, the shop's current catalogue runs to handmade notebooks, posters, photo albums and frames, woodcuts and engravings, postcards, and sheets of handmade paper sold on their own, all produced on-site by the same collective that keeps the bindery running.