
The Origin of La Pepita
The Pepita Project was born from a desire to recognize the work, vicissitudes, and struggle of women like us, who, dreamers that we are, want to change the world and improve it. If you are like us and you are tired of what the cultural vision, the taboos imposed by gender, as well as the cosmogony of the global world, create in the male imagination about women, we want you to join us.
Our group of capable women (determined and relentless in their pursuits) want to create paradigms that allow us to stop being considered seré-brute, to become seré-smart; to transform from being unheard and dismissed to being listened to and taken into account.
We intend to transform our world by getting rid of our insecurities; admonish to shame our internal ghosts, and send the anomie that sometimes possesses us to the gym to begin a spiritual catharsis captured in literature, wether it be stories, poetry, and or essays.
In addition to promoting the writing of women, we want to learn from those who, like María Josefa García Granados y Saborío, fought, actively and passionately, to change the limitations of the oppressive reality they faced. If someone like her had an impact on the literary culture of 19th century society, we have a good chance of doing the same almost 160 years later.
This group of Quixotes, named so after Maria Josefa, seeks to rescue the values that led her to found literary salons, newspapers, and write under a male pseudonym (so that she would be taken into account), as if she were our own Guatemalan George Sand.
We declare ourselves apolitical. Your personal philosophy, politics or religion have no bearing on our project. Instead, we want to learn from our grandmothers and from all those women who tried to change the traditional, Latin American, and Guatemalan misogyny (via the Judeo-Christian world, from which they learned: “men first, second, and third”). We want to inspire future generations; our daughters, granddaughters and their great-great-granddaughters, to take up the torch. We have already taken a long time trying to enact change. We have to speed it up a bit.
We would love for you to participate in our project. Those of us who are in this do it because we are cherubs of charity dressed in...bright colors. And, although we know that fame is ephemeral, and recognition is fleeting, we want to learn to feel more comfortable with ourselves and to be grateful, as Gioconda Belli would say, that we were born women.
This publisher wants to publish works by women, both young and not so young, to rescue Guatemalan writers of all time from the library shelf where the little production they may have received condemned them to insignificance, triviality, and nothingness by colleagues from other genres whose names we do not want to remember. We want them front and center, known by everyone and appreciated for what they are worth. We hope you get your act together and write, or help in this enterprise of hope and affection for all.