In 1919, Puerto Rican feminist, writer, and anarcho-syndicalist Luisa Capetillo would rent rooms of her apartment on Twenty-Second and Eighth in New York to fellow workers, for whom she would also serve delicious vegetarian meals, even if they didn’t have any money.
In addition to operating a boarding house and a restaurant, Capetillo wrote fiction depicting feminist and workers’ utopias, and she shared them through her work as a loudreader in cigar factories. Before they were banned by authorities, loudreaders (lectores) read aloud for workers who were often denied any other means of formal education. Capetillo read her own stories alongside the words of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Together with the tobacco workers she turned the intellectual void opened up by repetitive work into an advantage, filling the shared communal space of capitalist exploitation with the subversive ideas of an underground anti-capitalist culture. Loudreading motivated networks of solidarity across the continent and fueled general strikes demanding access to a dignified life.
We argue that loudreading should be recovered as a critical practice, because loudreading was a model of solidarity that was generated to oppose the brutality of the tobacco plantation, and we live in a world in which this regime of cruelty has expanded across the planet. We founded the Trade School of Loudreaders during the first wave of Covid-19 to reach geographies that would have been impossible during the time of the original lectores. Since then, the platform has hosted numerous loudreading sessions, provided a free and accessible online trade school and publishing house, and fomented the production and diffusion of tools of critical discourses and action.
A few institutions that historically assembled and maintained the status quo have recently attempted their own settler moves to decoloniality. These days it is not a surprise to find lecture series coordinated by Samia Henni and collaborations with Dark Matter University, DAP, and the Black Reconstruction Collective sponsored by some of the most expensive private universities in the country. We watch and welcome this cautiously. To expand these discussions beyond exclusive schools and closed committees, we published Un-Making Architecture: An Anti-Racist Architecture Manifesto and A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education.
Presented in Loudreaders sessions, the English and Spanish versions of Un-Making Architecture were shared in many anti-racist reading lists and organically republished and referenced in several international media outlets and public discussions. Apart from a few personal attacks made online, we received numerous messages from students, designers, authors, and educators across different fields, professional organizations, and academic programs letting us know how important and useful the document was for them. Since the summer we have loudread the manifesto in the streets of Pittsburgh during Black Lives Matter protests and discussed it in many forums and lectures for the general public and college and high school students in Australia, the US, Brazil, South Africa, the UK, Malaysia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education was downloaded from our webpage over 10,000 times in the two weeks following its publication online. Among the avalanche of messages of gratitude and invitations to discuss it in different educational settings, we learned from many people within and outside the design disciplines how it has helped them discover or articulate the central role that architecture plays in systems of racial oppression. What all this proves is that now is a time for planetary solidarity.
We hope that Loudreaders will help create a planetary curriculum and practice that is anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonialist at its core and one that—just like Luisa Capetillo—serves all, particularly those who can’t pay for it.