Gabriela V. Everett

Hear me out: I am no poet. Despite this, I still found myself with a copy of Latinx Poetics, a collection of essays compiled and edited by Ruben Quesada—with a foreword from Juan Felipe Herrera—published by the University of New Mexico Press in November 2022. How did I wind up here? Well, I was surreptitiously perusing literary magazines to submit to while on the clock, stumbling across an interview Quesada did with Chicago’s Hypertext Magazine, “Expanding Latinidad”. 

That word alone—Latinidad—was new to me. I admit, with some degree of shame, that as a young, mixed-race, Mexican-American woman, I had never encountered it before. I clicked, I read, I obsessed over the riddle he mentioned in his interview: an 18th-century adivinanza about two sisters. It was in Spanish—I couldn’t puzzle it out, thought maybe it was due to a gap in my translation abilities. I sent it to my father, who’d grown up in Cuidad de Mexico, “DF”. He couldn’t riddle it either. He responded to my text: Abuela is here. I told her about it. She wants to know the answer. She won’t stop talking about it.

This is where I thank Quesada and all the contributors to this collection; that interview—this book—did something magic for me. In a desperate search for the answer to that riddle, I combed my way through various, Spanish-only websites until I found the answer. Proudly, one Sunday, I visited my parents and abuela to tell them it was solved. 

By then I'd already ordered a copy of Latinx Poetics, and when it arrived, I started in the middle of an essay by Adela Najarro, "How I Came to Identify as a Latina Writer". I had never read an essay dealing with the complexity of being between cultures, of the broad, semi-nebulous identity of what it means to be Latina/o. It hit home: the simple phrase manados brought the memory of my grandmother’s trips to the grocery store, the dainty coin bags she would store in her purse while she quietly paid the typically-English-speaking cashier.  For the first time, I felt seen, really seen, almost to the point of nakedness, when Najarro lays bare the decision of how we communicate about life to non-Latinx peers: "I could relate the details in an Anglo suburban discourse by replacing each tias and tios with aunt and uncle, by replacing Managua, Nicaragua, with Springfield, Illinois, and replacing carne asada with burgers on the barbecue…”

Even as I type, I can see the red squiggle of misspelling chastising the terms as  "incorrect", "unfamiliar", and "unknown", underscoring everyday terms for a vast collection of people who, by seeming American standards, are simply not worthy of record, not a part of this country's place or its culture.

I’m not one to crave validation, but this vindication was different; to be told “yes, you are” about something you have no say over—blood, heritage, culture, birthplace, parentage—allowed a sense of agency and choice in that yes: I can be, am, have been, will always be: Latina. The freedom to claim myself, to acknowledge I can make the decision, as Najarro keenly ends her thoughts on erasing details “…I can choose not to.”

"A Graffiti Artist in Academia" by Michael Torres stood out to me with its narrative and voice—the mantra of his rebel youth: Get up. Stay up. Torres paints his 00s adolescent in Pomona, CA: skaters, sneaking out, and a slew of suburban, ex-friends converting to Abercrombie and Fitch, abandoning any connection with non-Americana (read: non-white) friends. The beauty arrives when Torres’s experience of being "othered" leads him to unexpected friendships with young, Mexican graffiti artists—a homecoming. As someone who used to spray paint Las Vegas arroyos with friends (a far cry from the organized, communal dedication of Torres's graffiti projects), this one evoked bittersweet nostalgia for me.

Another stand-out essay in this collection is the inflamed, synthesizing "What the Neoliberal Policy Labs Eat and Shit", which considers not only Latinx American struggles, but the totality of "other"-American, from Korean to African, Chilean to colored Chicagoan. Daniel Borzutzky delivers a heart-stabbing analysis of cultural traumas, (with more variety than I can list here) stating, "All the brutal neoliberal policy labs are murder zones. And someone tortured or killed by the Chicago police is someone just as dead or tortured as someone tortured or killed by the Pinochet regime." He follows this with a mention of poems specific to Latinx pain: Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Señorita X: Song for the Yellow-Robed Girl from Juárez”, Valerie Martínez’s “Each and Her”, closing his essay to the tone of María Rivera’s “Los Muertos”, a list poem remembering women who have died at the hands of men and state policy along the Mexico-United State border, “What can be said? 

What impresses me most about this collection is not only the diversity of writers (Afro-Latina/os, Mexican-Americans, Portuguese-Americans, mixed-children who have delivered themselves from cultural Limbo) who span the wide breadth of Latinx identities but the way their work has changed me as a person. Perhaps Quesada's interview is the real catalyst, but this book is the burn after the spark: during my reading of this book, I was compelled not only to begin speaking Spanish again (I was fluent as a child, then fell rusty after disuse from not seeing my relatives), but to spend time with my abuela, who travels between the US and Mexico, part of her year there, part there. I spent hours with her, speaking my broken Spanish, listening to her tell me about her life, my father, the universities in Mexico, and the recent death of my abuelo. She helped me ponder phrasing and tenses, and when we brushed against words we could not fully translate, we built bridges with the best descriptions we could—the poetry of translation, and connector from her life in Mexico to mine in America.

She showed me how to make enchiladas, and as we stood around the kitchen island in my childhood home, I found myself planning a phone call to a doctor's office in my head—entirely in Spanish—something I haven't done since childhood: think in Spanish. It was equally shocking and cathartic to fall into something that felt so distant, to be able to touch it again. I'm not sure I would've had the strength to brave my broken grammar and accent had I not found this book.

This and Laurie Ann Guerrero's "Stealing the Crown" are like opening a scab: a cathartic sting that makes you question things. Guerrero opens the fruit of grief, processing the death of her grandfather, Gumecindo, through studying sonnet—an emblem of institution, European-ness, and structure—along with how these things may preserve people. Her essay delves into the liminal space of border towns like El Paso and those who may traverse the unforgiving terrain in search of a better life and better work, acknowledging the deaths of those who line the way home. While Latinx Poetics is ultimately a celebration of culture, pieces like “Stealing the Crown” offer vital, interrogative looks into the complex pride of being Latina coupled with shame that from the same culture sprang the femicides of Ciudad Juárez. When plugged into search engines, one is confronted by an array of pink crosses and signs proclaiming, NI UNA MAS. Guerrero, in her raw phrasing, recounts her time in El Paso: ". . . this land was pulsating . . . I could hear, faintly and in the distance, the screams of women.”

As I said at the start, I am no poet. Still, Brenda Cárdenas’s essay, “Poetry in the Context with the Visual Arts: Latinx Ekphrasis and Other Inter-Arts Fusions” was perhaps the most intellectually stimulating and challenging essay I found in the collection. While many essays are on the side of brevity, Cárdenas’s piece takes its time to explain, analyze, and present the beauty and struggles that come with not only hybrid identities but hybrid artistry. Most memorably, Cárdenas mentions Ana Mendieta and her ekphrastic performance art, which explores what it means to be Latina, and how one moves through the world in such a body. I confess: ekphrasis was a new term for me, too, one that I could use to describe my own work of merging text and visual art. I’d never known the term and thank Cárdenas for the introduction and name. Her essay is just as much about heritage as it is about art, and I recommend it as a read for any analytical-leaning artist—especially those of Latinx backgrounds who eat, breathe, and build bridges by writing.