How to Turn An Essay Into Cardboard

Olga García Echeverría

It's true. I have spent the last semester torturing a wonderful group of students at Cal State LA with cardboard and paper lunch bags. Our 3200 Chicanx Latinx Studies class, Pre-Columbian Myths in Latin American Literature, was a standard class in the sense that we met regularly, had assigned reading, took quizzes, participated on online Moodle forums, did presentations, and had plenty of in-class wiri-wiri on topics such as the Popol Vuh, the destruction of pre-Columbian texts during colonization, Joseph Campbell, a little Carl Jung. We explored some of the texts of Julio Cortazar, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, Edwidge Danticat, Yuri Herrera, Sandra Cisneros, and Myriam Gurba, who came to our class and dazzled us with her insight on and obsession with mythology and ghosts. If anyone can tango with La Llorona and Juan Rulfo's ghost, it's Myriam!



In the Beginning was Cardboard 

I will blame my cardboard obsession partially on my mom. Thanks to her, my siblings and I grew up always having the almighty recycled cartón at arm's reach. Recycled cardboard served many purposes--childhood playpens, Moses-looking writing tablets, scattered rugs to cover up peeling linoleum, to name just a few.

Eloisa Cartonera, an Argentinean publishing house that  prints, distributes, and sells handmade cardboard books in Buenos Aires, is also an inspirational culprit. As is Cuba. In the 1990's, I traveled to an international poetry festival in La Habana and found cardboard book wonders, intricate and incredibly beautiful, cardboard things to fall in love with, really.

My obsession deepened in 2010, when my good friend tatiana de la tierra (a long-time fan of Latin American cardboard books) and I embarked on our own self-publishing adventure. Cardboard was our chosen medium that allowed us to take publishing into our own hands. The result was late night rendezvous with boxes, X-Acto knives, Mod Podge, and the creation of about 100 poetry chapbooks each. To read a previous blog on this self-publishing cardboard adventure: https://labloga.blogspot.com/2010/05/cardboard-creations-homemade-libros.html

The thing is it's easy to get obsessed with cardboard. It's a material that gives. And its pretty accessible and abundant. Almost everywhere you look, there is used cardboard to be given or collected. It's workable. With a good blade, it cuts easily. It bends without much resistance. It's incredibly versatile; it can be canvas, paper, book cover, protest sign, or even life-size political cutout. The work of Ramiro Gomez, another major inspiration, illustrates how versatile and powerful cardboard can be. Gomez uses life-size cardboard cutouts to disrupt social spaces and bring attention to marginalized people/workers. Cardboard is also contagious. Take my colleague, Alejandro Covarrubias. We used to share an office and talk cardboard. Inspired by Ramiro's work, he has taken cardboard into his classrooms the last two semesters. These are life-size testimonies and narrative on issues of race, class, gender, police brutality, and more.



A.K. Toney's Paper Bag Literacy Books


Another primary inspiration in the creation of handmade books is poet A.K. Toney. It was A.K. who first introduced me to mini-poetry books made out of paper lunch bags. We were at a Poets & Writers Workshop Leaders Retreat about 3 years ago when A.K. pulled out a wallet-sized poetry book that captivated me so much I later emailed him, asking him for an interview and a lesson in the bookmaking process. He graciously complied to both. A.K. and his wife Kristi Toney have been using these handmade mini books to teach literacy and the arts to inner city children via their organization Reading is Poetry. To read a previous blog on A.K. Toney, and his paper bag books: https://labloga.blogspot.com/2014/09/passion-power-and-paper-bag-poetry.html

Taking Cardboard and Paper Bags Into the Classroom

For the past few years, inspired by the previously mentioned people and places, I have been teaching students how to make their own cardboard and paper bag books. This has been mostly with 5th graders in Wilmington, California. Thank you, Angels Gate Cultural Center and LAUSD for providing creative writing to 5th graders! Everywhere I go, cardboard and AK Toney's paper bag books seem to go with me.



To read a previous blog on how fifth graders are using paper bags to showcase their own creative writing: https://labloga.blogspot.com/2016/04/all-that-and-bag-of-poetry-creative.html

This past year (first in the Spring and now in the Fall), I decided to bring cardboard into the college classroom. Why did I wait so long? My Pre-Columbian Myths in Latin American Literature class at Cal State LA seemed like a good place to start. My primary goal—to disrupt (if even a little bit) traditional writing assignments and to challenge students to engage with course material and their own ideas via recycled materials, visuals, and text. Aside from wanting to engage students in new and interesting ways, I confess that bringing cardboard into the college classroom was also for me. When you've taught writing and literature for an extended period (22 years and still counting for me), the writing assignments and the grading can, well, to put it mildly, begin to kill you softly. There is nothing more dreadful than reading disengaged essays written in formulaic five paragraph structure. Mátenme, please. Even when we attempt to “unteach” that old pedantic dinosaur, the five paragraph essay, persists. What I learned this past semester, however, is that cardboard and paper lunch bags can bring down dinosaurs.

Pre-Columbian Myths in Latin American Literature 

The assignment I gave my Pre-Columbian Myths class was to engage with a myth using, among other things, recycled cardboard and paper lunch bags. Images could be created or they could be cut out from magazines or taken (for collage-type visuals) from the Internet. For their topic, they were free to chose a myth covered in the course, a myth not covered (the chosen myth could be from any place/culture in the world), or students could also opt to retell a myth from their own family and/or create their own original myth. They could, if they chose, flesh out their story in stages, using Joseph Campbell's concept of the monomyth and the Hero/Shero's Journey as a guide.

Students were given specific guidelines. For instance, every one's book had to include a summary of the chosen myth, a discussion of the myth regarding its deeper meaning or what it reflects about the culture from which it originates. Lastly, a re-envisioning of the myth; if you could change anything, what would you change, and why? Students writing their own myth had to answer a few brief questions on the creative process and make connections between their original work and course material. Aside from having students post short reflections and pictures of their books in a class forum, students also presented their books to one another. Our presentations were our final exam and although I know presentations can be nerve-wracking for some, I don't think anyone suffered too much during our final. We were, after all, munching on tamales, brownies, carrot & celery sticks, and listening to myths and ghost stories from, for example, a rancho in Jalisco...



We got to hear about El Sombreron, who seduces women with his guitar and then bewitches them by braiding their long beautiful hair. (If you want to render him powerless, get a pixie cut).





Fantastic, no?



A womyn of color femynista in the class dismantled Coyo, the Aztec Moon Goddess, and then lovingly put her back together again. This is cardboard, paper bag, broken pieces of glass, and critical text that unfolds as you read. It's one of the most beautiful "essays" I have ever seen.






We looked at the far away and the local. Tongva creation myth because we're on Tongva soil, after all. This one was a book housed within a book.

This student, who wrote about La Llorona, created transparencies of her own drawings and text. She said she wanted to stick solely to recycled material, but that she also wanted to use transparencies to highlight the theme of invisibility. It's hard to capture in Iphone pictures, but the way this book works, when you're holding it in your hands, you can't really read the text or see the pictures clearly. You have to put a blank pieces of paper behind each page and then the scenes of the narrative appear like ghosts as you read. 









Who in their right mind wouldn't want to read Chela, Mi Abuela, y Los Duendes? 



There were students who chose to write about the cultural or familial myths they grew up with. This student, for instance, wrote about duendes, which her mother believes in. Inside one of the book's pockets are two family duende stories handwritten by the students' mother. How awesome is that? I felt like I was reading a letter from a relative in Mexico. The fact that this student's immigrant momma was participating in our myths class in this extended way meant so much to me. The details of her cuentos were full of Latin American flavor. They are oral stories, "cuentos verdaderos," passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. This daughter-mother-duende-duo se aventó. More evidence that creative projects open up unexpected windows and that if you put your heart (or your momma) into it, you can start off with cardboard and end up with gold.


Of course, there was overlap of topics sometimes. But every approach and cardboard creation was completely unique, each its own art piece. More Coyo...



The books weren't free of their technical errors, glue glitches, or gaps, but these things were minimal compared to what they produced. The level of work they put into their books was evident. Really, thse are so lovely, it's going to be hard to give them all back.




This is La Loca Sigunaba. Chiquita pero picosa y asustosa...





And this is The Story of Dreams, done by a student who insisted, "I'm not creative..."




There was a book on the flower of Day of the Dead...




There were mini-book wonders on Myriam Gurba's work that opened up like this...




Books that wept and wept and wept until they became A Pond Full of Tears...



Hold onto your horses, everyone, here comes El Jinete de La Muerte. Ajua! I wished for popcorn while reading this one.


And even when they appear quiet and small, don't underestimate these libritos. In this one lives a Chichen Izta pyramid.




And you can't have a cardboard museum of world mythology, without the Greek Goddess of the Underworld, Persephone...







This student delved into Aphrodite, Greek Goddess of sexual love and beauty. She wasn't feeling the cardboard as much, so she created a pamphlet-like book. She shared during her presentation that she works with elementary-aged kids, and as she was put finishing touches on her book in her classroom (they have lots of crafts, so aprovechó), the kids circled around her and asked her if she would read them her book.  Sex Goddess and elementary school, yeah right! She managed to keep naked Venus away from view and dodge the reading request.




This student dyed the pages of her book in tea, crumbled them for texture, and then burned the edges. She said she wanted the book to appear old and magical, similar to the book given to Ofelia, the child protagonist in Pan's Labyrinth.




Aside from contemporary film, Indigenous Mexican myth (via Subcomandate Marcos) was also presente.


As were stories from the Popol Vuh...




One student wrote about her family's traditions on Dia de Los Reyes. Remember, if you get the baby inside the rosca, you have to make tamales!


We went to Haiti and learned about Voodou. This book opened up into a portable presentation and addressed the vilification of Voodou and racist media depictions of this spiritual practice. Did you know that the first major African slave resurrection in the Americas, which led to the Haitian Revolution of 1791, was initiated with a Voodou ceremony?



And we traveled to Japan and into the sea. Urashima Taro, who fell in love with a mermaid...



One student discussed the Aztec mythology in the structure of Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World...



And as a cardboard bonus, she recreated her mother's bedroom with a shoe box! Now we're really going 3D. That's the crazy Changuengue trying to be sneaky, sticking his head out from behind the closet door.




"This project was very different, in that I had never done anything like this before in my college career. I think this project made me have to think, and make more connections between what we have learned in class, and art. I liked that we had the option to make our own myth up, and I felt I had to make even more connections, and engage more with previous class content in order to make up a meaningful myth. I also think by using an art component, it made it more engaging, and less monotonous than what we normally have to do with essays. This project should continue to be the final for the class because it requires deep thinking in both the art, and the writing component."

Thanks to my students who were so open-minded with this project. Despite a good number of them claiming, "I'm not creative," they did an amazing job. I have no doubt their right and left brains were activated. Did I mention that they had cardboard for the midterm too? That was warm up. We made archetype-like Loteria cards with an image on one side and text on the back. Here they are standing by their thematic cardboard Loteria cards, which we displayed on the 3rd floor of King Hall at Cal State LA. Look, there's actually a dinosaur being overtaken by cardboard in the display case! Evidence of co-existence as we move forward onto multiple ways of learning and writing.