Heredad
Words to Walk the Earth
Heredad is an editorial project dedicated to publishing books on art, history, philosophy and community work. We are organized as a cooperative sustained in voluntary contributions by a group of university professors, artists, researchers, activists and social workers that have sustained a long-term relationship with violent contexts in Mexico and other countries. Our books celebrate the beauty of the world, collect experiences in defense of life and nourish reflections on the construction of a more just society.
Currently Heredad has three collections:
Andares is dedicated to protecting, disseminating and celebrating artistic and cultural manifestations of resistance that stand up and confront violence.
Voces y miradas brings together historical research and philosophical reflections from around the world that are shaped by a commitment to the defense of life.
Testigos offers fictions and first-person narratives of dignity that we see important in current discussions about collective memory around the world.
Our first four books were in press when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Their titles were Vida que resurge en las orillas. Experiencias del Taller Mujeres Arte y PolÃtica en Ecatepec (Life that resurfaces on the shores. Experiences of the Womens, Arts and Politics Workshop from Ecatepec), which brings together ten years of experiences of one of the most important groups fighting against gender violence in Mexico's most dangerous neighbourhood; Cartas a la primavera (Letters to Spring), a collection of photographs and texts by Shantà Vera, one of Mexico's most important dancers, that were made to commemorate Shanti's sister, the human rights defender Nadia Vera, who was murdered in 2015; Nuevos estudios sobre genocidio (New Studies on Genocide), a new version of a classic book by Argentinian scholar Daniel Feierstein that was fundamental in the trials against the military forces that sustained the dictatorship in Argentina; and La senda del corazón. SabidurÃa de los pueblos indÃgenas de Norteamérica (The Path of the Heart. Wisdom of the indigenous peoples of North America), a travel diary of the Amazonian poet Pedro Favaron and his encounters with First Nation intellectuals from the United States and Canada.
In 2021 Heredad published three more books. They include Silvana Rabinovich's La Biblia y el dron (The Bible and the Drone), a theological and philosophical critique of the political uses of the Bible in the colonial war discourse of Israel; Pensando pensamientos (Thinking about Thinking), a collection of 31 intimate, keen and nourishing essays where Margaret Randall gives the younger generations its memories and reflections on today's world; and Marcus Rediker's El indomable Benjamin Lay (The Fearless Benjamin Lay), an astonishing intellectual biography of a Quaker dwarf who was one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world and called for a new relation between humanity and all living creatures.
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In 2022 Heredad published Margaret Randall's autobiography Nunca me fui de casa: poeta, feminista, revolucionaria (I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary), a powerfull testimony of the social and aesthetic revolutions of our time. We started distributing our books in Spain, Ecuador and Chile, and made agreements with some of our authors to release some of their books in Open Access format.
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Currently we're preparing a collection of non-published texts on Mexico by the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge. We're also editing Francesca Gargallo's La Madre Tierra, a series of three Science Fiction novels on the battle against extractivism and the protection of native seeds. We're also working on books for children living in conflict zones in Mexico.
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Heredad also provides free editorial services in community processes, and has already done two books to help activists and social workers working with children in the recent upheavals in Chile. We have a dedicated collection called "EfÃmera" in which we freely offer these and others materials in PDF format. Other books in this series includes a selection of essays by Avijit Pathak, a radical pedagogue from India whose work has been fundamental to recover the means of education in times of crisis.