Akal celebrates 15 years in Mexico with a vast program of activities and launches.

▲ Image of some of the titles published by the Spanish label in Mexico. Photo courtesy of the publisher.

Reyes Martínez Torrijos

La Jornada Newspaper, Friday, May 2, 2025, p. 4

Akal Publishing is celebrating 15 years of operations in Mexico, where it has published more than 100 titles conceived, designed, and produced in the country. Therefore, throughout 2025, it will be running a program of activities that combines talks with authors, editors, and specialists, as well as the launch of its new titles.

Raymundo Cruz, the label's manager for North, Central America and the Caribbean, told La Jornada that one of the purposes of Akal's arrival is that from this nation Latin American thought could be exported to Spain and to southern Latin America .

With a 50-year history in Spain, the company was also interested in achieving better distribution of its entire brand here, and from where it could serve the Central American and Caribbean markets.

This means that Ibero-American and Latin American thought can be distributed on both sides of the Atlantic.

Cruz emphasized that "one of the cross-cutting themes of this publishing collection is the decolonial theme; of course, it was obvious that it would be created from Mexico, from an epicenter of the global South, and it began to highlight authors and philosophers.

"The first book we published was Philosophies of the South by Enrique Dussel, which launched this line. This year we also celebrate a decade of our Inter Pares collection, which is multidisciplinary and captures Latin American thought."

The 15 Years-15 Collections publishing program began in 2025 with the launch of Toward a Theory of Modernity/Coloniality (La Jornada, 4/1/25), coordinated by humanities PhD Katya Colmenares, the first title from the Enrique Dussel Library; as well as the launch of the Revolutionizing Democracy collection. coordinated by John Ackerman, and the arrival of two new collections: Agora and Artifacts.

Cruz highlighted the Akadémica series, which compiles much of the national research, especially from university students, and Akal Infantil, which emerged from Mexico because of its tremendous talent and the enormous population of children, which is giving us quite good results and much joy. It's a multi-award-winning collection. With it, we're going against the grain of Spanish publishers, who always ship from there. We do it the other way around: we publish for the entire Akal group from Mexico, with a single editor .

He announced that there will be themed talks and talks about their collections, along with discounts on the imprint's titles; for example, for Children's Day, they launched a children's book campaign with a free gift.

It is important, the editor continued, to rescue Akal's presence in Mexico and to have a wide distribution of a diverse catalogue, ranging from classical literature, political, sociological and historical essays, and children's literature .

Activities will also cover the Great Books collections, with their annotated and illustrated editions of essential classics; Great Themes and its new Grimoire Art, which will be presented in June; Pocket Basics and its Classics of Literature, Classics of Political Thought, Utopias, Science, and Crime Novel series; and the Art, Music, Architecture, and Gastronomic Library series.

The balance, according to Raymundo Cruz, puts us on an academic and discussion level at the level of major publishing houses, which gives us a presence beyond the commercial, in the academic world, by bringing together some authors, above all, philosophers from the south, such as Franz Hinkelammert, Pablo González Casanova and Dussel, as well as many other contemporary thinkers, such as Ramón Grosfoguel, director of the Inter Pares collection .

Cruz announced that the closing of its activities, which will be announced through the publisher's social media channels, will take place throughout the remainder of 2025 and conclude at the Guadalajara International Book Fair.