Traficantes de Sueños

Traficantes de Sueños (Dream Dealers) is a political production and communication project that aims to provide content and encourage useful debates for transformative collective action. It is also a social economy project, that is, a non-profit entity without bosses, involved in the social market and in the development of another economy.

Traficantes de Sueños began its activity in 1995 with the objective of generating a stable space where to find materials for reflection; the tool it uses for this purpose is the book, understanding it as a means of individual and collective transformation. From then on, it began to organize the associative bookstore and the distributor; in the 2000s, the publishing house, the design workshop, and the space for self-training and production of Nociones Comunes arrived.

The space is not only the headquarters of the bookstore, but it is also a collective space, open to the city, which hosts many presentations, screenings, meetings, workshops, and debates.

The associative bookstore TdS specializes in critical essays for social movements and narratives of other worlds; it is “associative” because it has members who commit to a monthly fee in exchange for a discount. TdS publishes background and current affairs texts under Creative Commons licenses that allow free copying and downloading; it also develops thanks to subscribers, who for an annual fee receive all new releases and other services. The TdS distributor brings books from other parts of the world and moves texts from small alternative publishers. The TdS workshop generates designs and materials, especially for other social economy projects. The Common Notions project has opened a space for self-education and discussion on various topics, which is essential nowadays. TdS on the Net dynamizes all this production of the project and the people who use it, in the form of information and audios.