by Jorge Galván Flores, Jen Hofer, and John Pluecker, a.k.a. the makers of the Antenamóvil

(This piece originally appeared in the Sierra Nevada Review in 2015. We are re-printing it here for the archive.)

Antena is a language justice and language experimentation collaborative that takes language as a site for creative and nerdy approaches to radical thought and action. Antena is both localized (in Houston and Los Angeles) and placeless (on the internet, in books, in our minds and imaginations). For the past nearly-five years, we’ve been doing collaborative writing and translation projects, social justice interpreting and organizing around multilingual spaces, book-making and installation-installing and performance-instigating.

 

And for the past nearly-five years we’ve wanted a bike mobile that could carry books, typewriters and more. We wanted to get homemade and small press books out into the streets. We wanted innovative poetry and writing in translation to move into public spaces. We wanted to bring the conversations that often happen only in the back corners of bookstores and at the bar after a poetry reading out into the weather, where folks who may not visit bookstores or attend readings might participate in them. So we made a mobile bike unit that we hoped would do all of these things.

 

And we hope this story of the creation of the Antenamóvil will give you some ideas for making your own mobile units for whatever purposes you can dream up. Rather than providing a how-to or detailed instructions, we thought we would just tell you how we made our unit in our own place, our own context, our own small corner of the world. And then we will tell you what we ended up doing with it! We imagine you’ll end up doing something entirely different with yours: that prospect is very exciting to us!

 

Step One: JP Finds a Used Cargo Trike

 

In my neighborhood in the East End of Houston, I see guys riding by on their trikes every day selling snacks and raspas. It’s something you would see all over Latin America (and in many parts of the U.S.): these mobile vendors slowly pedalling up and down neighborhood streets. The guys (and I have only ever seen guys) are inspiring on so many levels: defying this sprawl car city with their cargo bikes.

 

I wondered how to get one of those bikes myself. I went to my local neighborhood bike shop, Enrique’s, and asked Enrique. Enrique had previously kept some trikes in stock and I had seen them for sale there. Enrique said he didn’t have any.

 

So then, every time I saw a guy biking past with one of the cargo trikes, I would wave the trike down, buy something, and then ask about where I could get one like that. Every time, the guy would say that he had extra ones at home. Every time. I think if you make your living selling things off of a cargo trike, you have to keep a few at home so that when one breaks, you have another one ready to go. I would ask the guys what their extra cargo trike(s) looked like and they would describe it. Sometimes I could tell immediately that it wouldn’t work. I knew I wanted one with an awning to protect Antena-ites from the sun and the rain. I knew I wanted it to have a place where we could put shelving. For weeks, I’d stop and ask guys. I went and checked out a few trikes at various abandoned lots and yards and garages. No dice.

 

It wasn’t until I met Anibal Gordillo that I found the bike that would work. I ran into Anibal selling snacks at the baseball fields near my house. He said he had several trikes and invited me over to his place. I went to check his goods out by myself the first time. Anibal was a funny guy. Anibal wanted to tell stories and jokes. Anibal was interested in what I was doing. Anibal had the perfect trike with an awning made of recovered billboards and tarps, with beautifully welded shelving and plenty of space for book storage and book display. A few days later, Jen, Jorge and I want back to see the trike. Everyone agreed it was the one. We bought it.

 

Step Two: Jorge Designs and Retrofits the Antenamóvil

 

When JP and Jen brought me to see the cargo trike, we needed to make sure that it was in good working order since it needed to be outfitted to carry books. So together we looked at the things that were wrong with the bike. There was some metal rot, some chipped paint and loose screws, but there wasn’t anything too wrong with it so we bought it and rode it a few miles over to our house.

 

Here we started to fix things that needed fixing on the trike. I called in a friend, Hugo, to help me with the restoration and repair of the bike. Hugo and I sanded the bike down and got it ready for a new layer of paint. We spray painted it the same original yellow color that was on it when we found it—we all agreed that classic unmistakable yellow was perfect for the AntenaMóvil. We used bondo to fix the holes that had rotted into the steel tubes, and that gave the structure more strength and integrity. We re-greased the bike chain and spec-ed out the various shelving units.

Images: Jorge Galván Flores

 

I knew that it was important to JP and Jen for the trike to be able to transport books and I thought about the usage of the Antenamóvil. I figured that if they were going to be parked somewhere they’d need space to set up displays or to have a little seating area, so I designed shelving-seating-storage units. Basically, these were four wooden boxes that were the height of stools so they could be used as seats or stacked as book display, and then when the AntenaMóvil was being packed up they could carry the books to allow the whole unit to travel with all the books safely stowed away. I also designed a new awning for the AntenaMóvil. For the awning, I took the dimensions of the roof and added a few extra inches along the sides and then sewed ties so that the awning could be tied on.

 

It’s important to note that these trikes are not really standardized. Each owner customizes the trikes for their own needs. I wanted to keep the history that was in the material of the bike, so rather than removing parts, we worked with the pre-existing structure and integrated it with materials I had in my studio: clear acrylic and wooden boards for shelving. We also kept some old tin shelving that came with the trike when we bought it.

 

Overall, it was really fun to find a way to customize the bike for Antena’s needs. Each new re-use of these bikes is going to be different from the one before and the one after. That is part of the fun and the challenge of making these bikes. Work with what you’ve got! Look for a structure that will suit your needs and then retrofit away!

 

Images: Jorge Galván Flores; alternate designs for possible future mobile units

 

Step 3: The AntenaMóvil Hits the Streets!

 

The first place the AntenaMóvil alighted after Jorge and Hugo finished retrofitting it (i.e. book-mobile-ifying it) and tricking it out was the Blaffer Art Museum at University of Houston, where Antena (JP and Jen), along with curator Amy Powell, were just putting the finishing touches on the installation of Antena @ Blaffer, Antena’s semester-long foray at the museum.

 

The installation included over 2000 small- and tiny-press books from autonomous editorial projects all over the U.S. and Latin America, with a particular focus on innovative writing by people of color, queer and genderqueer and feminist writers, translation into English from all over the world, and experimental writing in Spanish from Latin America. The books were arranged on the shelves in alphabetical order by press project, alongside works by 11 visual artists whose practice troubles the division between the textual and the visual, or involves translation in some direct or indirect way. We exhibited the AntenaMóvil as part of the show at Blaffer–which thankfully has pretty wide double doors!

Photo: Tom DuBrock, Courtesy Blaffer Art Museum

 

As you can probably tell from looking at it, the AntenaMóvil is a pretty weighty ride, even without the addition of four plywood boxes filled with an assortment of small-press books. Riding it is an exercise in patience (it takes up most of the lane and hence needs to be followed by a friendly car with its hazards on), stamina (the AntenaMóvil is slow and lumbering, though a super fun ride) and muscle (even the slightest uphill incline requires a lot of extra oomph!).

 

Photos: Jen Hofer

 

We enjoyed developing our patience, stamina, and muscle as we slowly biked to various events around Houston, chatting with neighbors along the way. Repurposed cargo trikes get a lot of attention on the street—they’re a fantastic conversation-starter and opportunity to engage in many unexpected interactions. The AntenaMóvil set up outside the Social Practice Social Justice Symposium at Project Row Houses, at the Houston Indie Book Fest at the Menil Collection, and during one of Houston’s monthly Sunday Streets events. Students who took Antena’s UH class titled “In The Between: At The Intersections of Writing, Art and Politics” took the AntenaMóvil to well-trafficked spots on campus and to art shows they organized, helping our installation to spore in ways that might seed elsewhere in the city.

 

 

             

Photo: Raj Mankad                                                      Photo: Jen Hofer

 

The Antena @ Blaffer installation also invol ved a range of bilingual programming, spanning workshops, performances, open conversations, and an Encuentro (gathering) that brought together all the artists who participated in the show. One of those artists, Nuria Montiel from Mexico City, transformed the AntenaMóvil into an ImprentaMóvil (mobile printing press) during her workshop at the Encuentro. The design Jorge and Hugo actualized is tremendously versatile, allowing for all kinds of mobile adventures and interventions.

Photos: Pablo Giménez Zapiola

 

Step 4 to Infinity: The Future of the AntenaMóvil, or the AntenaMóvil of the Future

 

The AntenaMóvil is going from the Gulf Coast to the West Coast! Antena Los Ángeles, the first local iteration of Antena—co-founded by Jen Hofer, Miguel Morales Cruz, and Ana Paula Noguez—began working locally in Southern California in 2014 to support organizations and community groups as they build well-functioning multilingual spaces. Thanks to support from the Kindle Project, the AntenaMóvil will make its way west, where we’ll retrofit it again with motorized pedal-assist to encourage it to be more nimble (and not wreck its riders) in the hilly Los Angeles topography. Antena Los Ángeles will outfit the AntenaMóvil as a mobile language justice unit. We plan to use the trike on local neighborhood streets, at parks and outdoor plazas and spots with heavy foot traffic (we’re currently thinking of the endless lines outside the Mexican Consulate), and at cycling festivals and events like Ciclavia, to raise awareness about issues of multilingualism, language access, and language justice.

 

As you can see, our initial dream of a bikey book mobile for Antena has become a reality that continues to evolve and develop. Hopefully, this recounting of our experience making and using the AntenaMóvil has been helpful for you to see and will inspire some ideas for how to make your own mobile bike unit!

 

If you do use any of these tips, please let us know! We would love to hear from you and see photos of your mobile bike unit adventures at antena@antenaantena.org.