Making my way to Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, recently to take the Interoceanic Train across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, I spent two days in Oaxaca de Juárez, a city I hadn’t been to since 2019. Oaxaca was as charming as ever. However, without the first-time visitor’s rush to visit Hierve el Agua or Monte Albán, I was able to dedicate more time to my real tourism passion: visiting bookstores. Here are the best I found in Oaxaca (the city, not the state).
La Jícara Librespacio Cultural
La Jícara, which celebrates its 16th anniversary this year, is the powerhouse on this list. Walk up its stone steps and you’ll be greeted by a corkboard offering months’ worth of workshops, concerts and author talks staged in the cultural center. You still won’t be among the books yet, but rather in the center’s restaurant, which serves delicious French fries and drinks that won’t hurt a poet’s wallet. In addition to a broad range of contemporary literature and social sciences from independent publishers across Latin America, I found a book by philosopher Fernando Martínez Heredia that I didn’t even know you could get in Mexico. The bookstore sells very underground Oaxaca-based magazines and prints in formats you never thought possible.
Walk across the covered-patio-cum-restaurant area and you’ll find not only a gift store selling local crafts but La Jicarita, the children’s section of La Jícara, which takes up a room on its own. In addition to an expansive selection of picture books in multiple languages, including bilingual editions of stories in Oaxaca’s Indigenous languages, La Jicarita also features a floor covered with toys so that young readers (or future readers) can play while their adults enjoy a meal or browse books over at La Jícara.
Porfirio Díaz 315, Colonia Figueroa
El Ático
Steps away from La Jícara, you can duck down into El Ático, whose quirky side is immediately made evident by the hollowed-out 1960s-era TV on the sidewalk that serves as a shelf for the store’s discount offerings. The staff’s rapport with their customers and knowledge of the bookselling landscape was quickly apparent, with several people stopping in to pick up books they’d asked for previously and inquiring about hard-to-find editions that the bookseller on duty confirmed she had a connection for.
El Ático makes good use of its small space — a single room with shelves on every wall stocking classics and contemporary literature, including a good deal of international works translated to Spanish. It has a robust selection of books on local and state history, art and culture that are sure to please Oaxaca aficionados, as well as a shelf of bilingual children’s editions in regional varieties of Indigenous languages like Mixtec and Zapotec.
Porfirio Díaz 1105, Colonia Figueroa
El Burrito
El Burrito’s logo is a donkey with a stack of books on its back. According to owner Jorge González, it represents him. Before he had a bookstore, this FES Acatlán graduate sold books out of a sack on the pedestrian-only street called the Andador Turístico and through the beach towns of the Oaxaca Riviera.
“You can take anything away from a Oaxacan except the street,” González told me.
El Burrito’s owner is outspoken about social issues like gentrification, and González’s concerns are reflected in the store’s offerings. You’ll find not just vintage editions by storied progressive publishers like Ediciones Era, Losada and Grijalbo but also hard-to-find texts published by Mexico’s social movements as they were happening. These include magazines of the 1980s student movement at the National Autonomous University (UNAM). There are also rare editions, a great Oaxacan history section, and well-stocked French- and English-language shelves with contemporary titles like Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.”
If you don’t find anything to your liking, a visit to El Burrito, located in the charming historic neighborhood of Jalatlaco, is still worth it. The bookstore, true to its community-building mission, hosts frequent reading circles and often participates in popular literary tianguis. And González sells a delicious, stomach-warming mezcal made by a palenquera aunt who brings her wares down from the hills.
Aldama 315, Jalatlaco
Amate Books
Checking the shelves at Amate, just up the street from El Burrito — Oaxaca’s bookstores seem to stick close together — one thought was blaring in my mind: Whoever owns this place knows what they’re doing.
In Mexico, English-language book sections and bookstores broadly follow one of two patterns — the books are either good and used or new and terrible. Across Mexico City, you’ll be choosing between a book of classic poetry that’s falling apart or a brand-spanking-new, plastic-wrapped airport paperback. But the sweeping English-language selection at Amate Books is both good and new, and it’s obvious that the people stocking it are up to date on literature about Mexico. I spotted landmarks in history and sociology written abroad, like Charles Mann’s “1491” and Hilary Klein’s “Compañeras,” as well as English editions of Mexican classics like Carlos Fuentes’ “Old Gringo.” There were also cookbooks and tomes about the world of Mexican mushrooms.
The store on Calle Aldama is the second iteration of Amate, revived in 2023 after the COVID-19 pandemic obliged owners Henry Wangemann and Rosa Blum to close the store’s original downtown location. Besides reading material, Amate also sells Oaxacan folk art, a reflection of Blum’s many years as a gallery owner here. The masks closest to the door, I noticed, were priced differently from the ones on the next shelf over. Why the variance?
“These are danced,” a staff member told me, “and those ones haven’t been danced yet.”
Aldama 318, Jalatlaco
Two historic Educals
Location 1
Educal is the name of a state-owned business that functions as the federal Ministry of Education (SEP)’s book distributor, promoting readership and selling books out of its many locations across the country. The selection at these stores tends to be largely uniform, and that’s true at Educal’s two Oaxaca city locations as well. But even if you’re not interested in, say, the newest history book out from the Fondo de Cultura Económica, these stores are worth visiting on the strength of location alone.
Despite the ticket machine at the entrance, you don’t need a ticket to enter the famous Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán. That’s only necessary if you’re going upstairs to the Museum of the Cultures of Oaxaca. The lower level of the complex and its galleries are free, so walk yourself in and to the left, and you’ll find our first Educal.
With its tall ceilings and windows, books elegantly laid out on hardwood tables and reproductions of ancient Zapotec ceramics available for sale, there’s no better place in this church-convent to feel like the scholar-monks who once called it home.
Macedonio Alcalá s/n, Centro
Location 2
Our second Oaxaca city Educal store is found in a decidedly less spiritual place. Walking south from Santo Domingo down Calle Cinco de Mayo, you’ll find the Teatro-Casino Macedonio Alcalá.
Inaugurated in 1909, this gorgeous Art Nouveau building was constructed at the urging of Oaxaca’s elite, who wanted not only a place to socialize but also to put their city on the level of other state capitals. Their opera house couldn’t lack a casino, so the building came with dedicated rooms for billiards, dominoes, cards and chess, as well as a bar.
Educal, which you’ll find by turning onto Calle Independencia, occupies part of this recreational space. It’s not often you find a bookstore selling postcards of the same building it’s located in, but that’s par for the course when you’re selling books out of one of your state’s architectural landmarks.
Independencia 900, Centro
Diego Levin is a historian and researcher.
