[Click photo to enlarge. Article courtesy of My San Antonio.]Anisa Onofre and Juan Tejeda have been working on their small business — Aztlan Libre Press — for the last year.
Aztlan Libre Press opened in January. The couple said their daughter Maya Quetzalli, is the inspiration for one of the independent publishing company's newest projects, a new coloring book titled, “Aztec Calendar Coloring Book.”
“We decided to do a coloring book based on the Nahuatl language,” said Tejeda.
He added, “We wanted our daughter to know part of her culture, and the symbols looked so simple we thought we could use them for a coloring book.”
Aztlan Libre's first endeavor, a book and tour for celebrated Chicano poet Alurista, went well, said Onofre. They are hoping Aztlan's second project will get off the ground in a similar way.
“Juan saw the Sun Stone in Mexico at the Museo Nacional de Antropología and has always admired those depictions on the stone,” she said. “He wanted a way of introducing the Aztec language, Nahuatl, to children, combining it with Spanish and English to make it easier to understand.”
Tejeda said when he began studying the images, he realized they might easy to teach to his 3 year-old daughter.
“They were so simple and fantastic,” he said.
Nahuatl is not a language Tejeda speaks fluently, and he's aware not many other people in the United States speak it either. He said many people in Mexico still speak Nahuatl.
“I took a class at The University of Texas a while back, and I know a lot of words. This is kind of a process of recovery for one of the many indigenous languages of Mexico,” he said.
Another Aztlan project titled, “Nauhaliiandoing Dos,” is an anthology of poetry in Nahuatl, English and Spanish.
A fourth project, also in the works, is a collection of poems from Reyes Cardenas, whom Onofre said she has greatly admired for years.
“He's been writing for 30 or 40 years, and Juan has known him for quite a while,” she said. “I just got to met him when Alurista was in town. He came to our home for the tour, and we took it from there. We don't think he's received as much attention as he's deserved.”
The couple's passion for art came from their own creativity, said Tejeda.
“Anisa and I are both writers, and she's the director of writers and communities at Gemini Ink,” he said. “It was always a dream of ours to start an independent publishing Chicano publishing company.”
Tejeda added, “We have received so many (written works) that it just proves there's a great need for more Chicano publishing houses to publish our stories, novels, drama and poetry.”
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