Meet the poets, publishers, and survivors using zines to fight historical revisionism and build safe spaces in Manila.
Naya Cabuello beams as she takes in the warm applause from her audience. Her bold sense of style and bright disposition paint a sharp contrast with the poem she just recited in front of everyone—soft, mellow, and achingly romantic. “Laong Laan” draws heavy inspiration from the famous street in Dangwa and Cabuello’s own fascination with flowers. Cabuello transforms her stanzas into a zine, a charming pocket gallery where her words live against pictures of wildflowers.
Here at Sikat Studios, the annual BLTXmas is in full swing. The air is vibrant, filled with a sea of young, fashionable writers and cultural advocates who treat self-publishing not as a last resort, but as a deliberate choice.
Young writers like Cabuello are the lifeblood of Filipino culture. Cabuello is able to publish her own work by making her poem into a zine, transforming the piece from simple literature to a charming pocket gallery, with stanzas lining the pages against pictures of wild flowers. The local writing community supports self-publishing.
The “waste of space” that built a movement
Adam David, co-founder of Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX), has spent 16 years filling the gap left by mainstream publishing. In the early 2000s, David, a high school teacher with an extensive background in writing and publication, notes that young writers had no place to release their work because major presses and bookstores viewed poetry as a financial liability.
“Para sa kanila, hindi mabenta ang poetry,” David recalls. Major bookstores often phased out books that garnered low traction within a month, and the biggest waste of space at that time was poetry. Walang nagbabasa ng poetry.”
To break this chokehold, David and many others at that time turned to self-publication—and zines were the perfect medium. Zines, instead of being bound like books, take the form of a pamphlet folded and stapled together. They are often made using a printer or Xerox machine. In fact, this is where BLTX gets its name from.
The zine-making process makes it cheaper to produce and easier to distribute, with the added bonus of supporting the local economy. David stresses that literary work doesn’t stop at writing. There are industries of people behind the scenes making, distributing, promoting, and selling.
David is against the idea that the Filipino public aren’t readers. “Supposedly walang reading public, pero actually meron. It’s just that yung reading public hindi ma-afford yung presyo ng karamihan ng libro na binebenta.”
Decentralizing the narrative through the power of community
BLTX has expanded beyond the Manila-centric literary bubble. By collaborating with local organizers, David has helped establish small press events in Davao, Baguio, Cagayan De Oro, and La Union, prioritizing regional languages that mainstream companies often neglect.
Ian, the co-founder of Makô Micro-Press, shares this spirit of collaboration and zine as a tool for community journalism. In 2019, he worked with residents of Sitio San Roque to document their fight against displacement.
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“Residents started creating zines as a way of circulating information within their community,” Ian explains, noting that similar strategies have been used to document the killings during the War on Drugs.
To Ian, this project is one of the most significant collaborations he’s worked on, with Save San Roque (now called Inklusibo). Residents of Sitio San Roque began creating zines to disseminate information within their community and the surrounding sitios after taking crash courses on news writing.
Community archiving, documenting, and storytelling have long relied on zines as a method. Zines have always anchored their history in challenging dominant narratives and fostering counterculture.
Back in 1920 during the Harlem Resistance, a “little magazine” called “Fire!!” emerged as a means for Black writers to express themselves more freely. Since then, zines have been present throughout subcultures such as sci-fi, rock and roll, punk, the queer community, and transformative fanworks. Institutions like the Tate and the British Library have established archives dedicated to zines, underscoring their historical significance.
Ian says he owes the BLTX’s success to the power of community. “Kung walang community, hindi magpapatuloy ‘to.
A global “salubong” and writing as an act of defiance
The community at BLTX serves as a sanctuary for those displaced by more than just urban development. Among the tables of zines stands Laila, a half-Palestinian, half-Filipino artisan who evacuated Gaza three years ago.
While her relatives remain trapped behind shut borders, Laila crochets trinkets to support her family in Manila. “I like the people, the place, and the cause. I feel safe,” she says of the BLTX community. Attendee Jean Valencia echoes this sentiment, drawing inspiration from the “passionate creatives” who initiate these spaces.
In a world with no community support and no avenues for self-publication, people like Cabuello, Ian, and Laila will remain footnotes in the stories shaped by the powers that be.
As it stands, generative AI threatens to render photographs and historic accounts obsolete, eroding trust and making us question reality. Because of this, writing becomes an act of defiance. A zine becomes a proof of memory, a proof of a life lived well. Filipinos easily forget that they owe their liberation from one of the world’s most powerful empires to two novels and that the Philippines as a nation was shaped by literature circulated in secret.
Rejecting the status quo, returning to our real-life communities, and forming connections through literature: these are what made the Filipino.
Back in 1920 during the Harlem Resistance, a “little magazine” called “Fire!!” emerged as a means for Black writers to express themselves more freely. Since then, zines have been present throughout subcultures such as sci-fi, rock and roll, punk, the queer community, and transformative fanworks.
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