Bibliobandido at Brooklyn Public Library, 2022. Photo by Marisa Morán Jahn featuring Karla Mejias.
Bibliobandido is a public artwork and literacy movement by artist Marisa Morán Jahn. The project began twelve years ago as a collaboration between Jahn and the community of El Pital, in rural Honduras. According to the legend they created, Bibliobandido is a masked bandit who eats stories and playfully pesters little kids to feed him stories they’ve written.
As Bibliobandido’s fame eventually rivaled that of Santa Claus, the project grew to encompass thousands of young people across 19 participating Honduran communities. Bibliobandido workshops also spread to thousands of youth in North and Central America, taking root in institutions ranging from the Seattle Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Studio Museum in Harlem, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, and universities, festivals, schools, and museums.
In 2023, Bibliobandido will become a film directed/produced by Marisa Morán Jahn and Benjamin Murray.
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Marisa Jahn
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Bibliobandido: The Story of How a Hyperlocal Legend
Grew into Ludic Activism on a Hemispheric Scale
By Amy Rosenblum-Martín
“In our town we celebrate Bibliobandido way more than Santa Claus. What about you?”
— girl at a bus stop in Honduras speaking to another child
How can artists create joyful models of justice? Bibliobandido, for example, is a play-based literacy movement. This Honduran cultural export has grown exponentially, reaching 20,000 children locally and as far north as Canada since 2010. The artist Marisa Morán Jahn (b. 1977, U.S. Chinese/Ecuadorian) sparked this movement by co-creating nothing less than a living legend–Bibliobandido, a book bandit hungry for stories–that kids grow up believing in, like Santa Claus.
Initially, Morán Jahn co-designed this impactful project with the Library Club of rural El Pital, Honduras. The Club had eight books. What they lacked in books, however, they made up for in abuelas (grandmothers) making reading and writing fun. Bibliobandido was born when the Library Club invited Morán Jahn to help them come up with a creative solution to one of their region’s biggest challenges: 80% illiteracy. They devised this now legendary child-friendly villain. According to the myth, Bibliobandido is a loveable bandit who “eats” stories and playfully taunts little kids until they offer him tales they've written. Any adult can don a mask and hat to play the character, just like Santa Claus. Since 2010, Bibliobandido descends from the mountains surrounding El Pital where people of all ages have prepared their monthly sacrifice of stories to appease his appetite and avert general calamity. Children urgently make books to save their town.
Kids in the region are raised in the Bibliobandido tradition. Adults enjoy playing along. Coki, the man with a burro — who didn’t know how to read but wanted to learn — often played Bibliobandido, embodying the community’s decolonial aspirations and abundance mindset. Thus, Bibliobandido affirmed El Pital’s existing resources, knowledge, and desires. The idea worked. Playing along actually made kids excited about writing, and so El Pital shared the legend with surrounding towns. The children documented in Morán Jahn’s initial Bibliobandido video are now professional educators who have created their own Bibliobandido curriculum. The demand for their visits in communities even more rural than El Pital is so high that these educators walk up to ten miles each way, deeper into the Honduran countryside, to play Bibliobandido with ever-widening circles of Honduran children.
Beyond Honduras, the artist and the Library Club’s youth leaders have been invited to bring Bibliobandido to places where storytelling and literacy-building is equally urgent, spawning thousands of Bibliobandido believers in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Seattle, Miami, New York, and Regina. As the movement grows, kids, caregivers, teachers, and librarians continue to adapt the myth, carrying on the tradition beyond Morán Jahn’s direct involvement. The artist measures success by how many people adopt Bibliobandido mythology, make it their own, and continue to pass it on without her — sparking infectious creative agency beyond the initiators’ wildest dreams.
With Biblibandido, Morán Jahn initiated an imaginary core so contagiously joyful and meaningful that entire towns, civic bodies, organizations, and tens of thousands of participants adopt, reshape, and carry on the legend themselves as if it were real and, indeed, making it real, by creating processions, mock sacrifices, altars, and other rituals rich in symbolism. Despite the fact that the legend is a syncretic invention, participants themselves helped construct and bring to life, they nonetheless experience catharsis and transcendence, strengthening Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that “Man cannot live by bread alone but by the myths upon which he willingly deceives himself.” Underpinning the public’s willing suspension of disbelief and escape from everyday tasks is the artist’s extensive research into the people and conditions of each place, its local talents and concerns, and quotidian quirks. By rooting the legend in hyperlocal logic and beliefs, this artwork operates as a self-replicating machine that multiplies itself abundantly with or without the artists’ direct orchestration.
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Photos by Don Hall
