Ariana Brown with Raina J. León

After asking Ariana Brown to read the three poems, “Yanga”, “A Quick Story” and “Field Notes” aloud, so as to be fully immersed in some of the work from We Are Owed, we began the interview.  

Raina J. León:

I love these poems. I love this book. I wanted you to read those poems, especially in that order because of that last stanza of “Field Notes” in particular, this intentionality of looking everywhere. 

“I learned about Yanga during my final week in México, alone finally with my kin. I can't help, but weep. I can't find an image of Yanga online. Instead, I try harder to love my own face, nose, lips, hair. I press my palm to the screen then to my heart, promise to look for him everywhere, even in the quiet.”

And I think that that extends throughout the whole book of being so intentional in your gaze through personal narrative, through archives, through the relationship and unpacking relationship, unpacking language and that as well as the criticality in connection with Anzaldúa's work.  

I wonder what, in those three poems in particular, thinking about their relationship to one another, but also their relationship to your artistic frameworks that you're working with within this text, what emerges as you're thinking about why these three poems? Why now? What does this have to offer us as an umbrella for our conversation?

Ariana Brown:

I think it's funny to me that you picked those three poems, too. Because one of the things that became clear to me when I was writing this was that Yanga shows up in the manuscript and in my life, almost as a surrogate father figure. And this isn't clear in the book, but I do not support the US military. And obviously my father's participation, both of my parents' participation in the US military through the Air Force, is very, they're relationship to the nation state is very different than Yanga who was an enslaved person leading a slave rebellion. At the same time I think of both, I think of Yanga in particular as someone who was also not from Mexico, like me. His blackness was from elsewhere. And so his relationship with Mexico was tense to say the least.

There was a tension there. That's what I feel when I'm in Mexican American spaces. When I'm in Mexico, that is what I feel is the place that I have a relationship to, but that I am not from and that doesn't always want me or treat me well or all of those sorts of things. In these poems in particular, the tension in one's relationship with the nation state that one is assumed to belong to or be a part of becomes really clear. 

“A quick story” is the second poem in the manuscript. So it comes really early, that first rupture in my relationship with the nation state. There's also very quickly in that poem, the mention that my father and my mother were planning to be married. And because my father died at the hands of the US Empire, that also becomes a rupture. And so there's also this question of origin stories. My personal origins, who were my parents, how did they come to meet? But also how the story of Yanga interrupts these accepted origin stories of Mexican identity. 

Raina J. León:

I love that you brought up this connection with nation state and empire and also having the forward from Dre. Alan Pelaez Lopez and where there's an interview where they talk about, I think it's The Root interview where they say “to celebrate blackness means to know that empire failed”. I love that Alan also writes this forward for your book. And there's such celebration of blackness all throughout the text. I'm curious about what it means for you to celebrate your blackness.

Ariana Brown:

I mean everything. It's something that I wasn't really taught how to do, partly because of that rupture of my father dying while my mother was pregnant. So I was the only Black person in my house, just my mother and I. But then also the kind of crisis of geography of being in Southside San Antonio, where I was quite literally the only Black person around for miles. So learning to appreciate and celebrate blackness was something I had to be very intentional about, because it wasn't something that anyone else around me needed to do. So they didn't know how to do it, and they definitely didn't know how to teach me how to do it.

It wasn't until actually my father's side of the family lives between Cady and Galveston. So all the Houston area. I actually lived with my dad's oldest brother, my Uncle Derrick, for a short period of time in middle school. Being around them was the first time that I was able to have examples of what it looked like to celebrate blackness, to understand it, to not question it, to just get to be around other Black people. I wanted that feeling ... Not necessarily that feeling, but I think the longing for that feeling is present in the book. I think this is a book that is also profoundly about loneliness and that is the impetus for the looking that you were talking about.

Raina J. León:

The book being so profoundly about loneliness and that connection stands out for me with “There are Güeros and then there’s me”.  That line: “let's play a game called my school so Mexican”, and then we close out with “my school so Mexican, I'm the only one who look like me”. And then even throughout the text, these moments as even in “Field Notes” of saying like, oh, there are no black people here and we know that's false. Although only recently acknowledged within the Mexican census. This exploration of erasure and it's pushing back against erasure that makes me come to the... I'm going to come back to a lot, but that piece too around Anzaldúa's work as erasure and you pushing back against that, troubling the icons.

Ariana Brown:

Yeah, I will say the only book of Anzaldúa as I've read is Borderland, because that's the one that I was taught in Mexican American studies. I read Borderlands cover to cover while I was writing this book, because I thought I was going to do erasure poems out of it. And the more I tried to do it, the more the poems just refused to be written. Part of it was that I was trying to talk about blackness and Anzaldúa doesn’t really talk about blackness. She mentions it maybe about five times in the book, but it's always in very roundabout distant ways.

Sometimes it's just by saying morena or dark skinned or something, or it'll just be one little sentence in passing. And I was like, I can't actually say the things I want to say if I'm using her language. Even if I'm trying to violently insert myself in it in some ways, it feels like a futile exercise. So I stopped, and I decided I don't actually want Anzaldúa to be a huge part of this book, because I'm not really talking about her when I'm talking against her legacy as it exists in Mexican American Studies or Chicano Studies I should say.

That feels really important and because of the area that I grew up being from central Texas, people love Anzaldúa and it's almost like you can't critique her, not even in a scholarly way because people are like, that's my homegirl, she speaks to me 100%. It's like you're attacking them. But it's like, did we not read La Raza Cósmica as well in Chicano Studies, which is THE foundational text for Borderlands? Did we all not agree that La Raza Cósmica was actually eugenicist, written by eugenicist, was anti-Black, was anti-indigenous? And how could those things not also translate to our critiques of Borderland? I'm also not the first person or the first Black person to say these things about Anzaldúa. I do appreciate that it seems like people are listening. It's funny when I talk about this manuscript, because I think a lot of folks are anticipating that it's about Anzaldúa 's work in some way and it's really not. It's just really in the titles of some of the poems where I'm like, this is not that. That's really all I need people to know. 

Raina J. León:

Well I appreciate too that what you're also speaking to is that your work is your work and it's in conversation with a larger landscape as well as even pointing people to some of the texts that you're in conversation with at the very end of the book, like “here's your work cited. Your reference page. Read more deeply in these areas.” I think that's an innovation within or an extension of the text as lecture. I really appreciated that within the text as well of the academic framing of the work, but not to the point of total divorce from personal narrative or intuitive understanding and knowledge. More an integration. 

I would love to hear you also talk about how you maneuver between these, if you will, the framework of left brain, right brain, but also just the work of spirit and connection with ancestor and the curandera that comes through in some text, but this academic and spiritual, ancestral understanding, how you navigate between the two.

Ariana Brown:

I don't know if it's something that I think about as I'm doing it, because I had some really, really great women of color professors in undergrad who kind of did a similar thing. I just kind of got to watch them do that and then see them allow me to do the same thing in the kinds of work that I turned in for their courses. Even for example, the curandera that I saw that I speak about in the manuscript, she worked at a university and was also clinically trained as a Western therapist, but was also trained a curandera in a particular style of curanderismo. She did both at the same time. She was also a researcher; she was also a practitioner.

I also had one of the title at the end of the Borderlands from the first poem in the manuscript comes from a lecture that I saw with one of my professors, Dr. Rachel Gonzalez, where she said that indigenous peoples in New Spain, Nueva España, were colonized at the end of the sword. At the end of the sword. That image stuck in my mind, and Dr. Gonzalez, she taught a class on Latinx spirituality where that was the whole [center] – she actually brought in my to give a presentation in that class – for my final project for that course, she let me turn in poems that were also research projects.

Me getting to see this is what's possible when you can bring your full self to the work that you do. When you have people, women of color in particular who are nurturing you and kind of guiding you, here are the ethics that you should be adhering to as well, and also make sure that you can let people know how you found out, what you found out right by your work cited, making things very clear in that way, but still sort being yourself.

Raina J. León:

And holding space too for what's possible. That being in connection with folks who say that it's not just this way; there are other imaginings here and I really appreciate in reading your work, We Are Owed, the exploration of form and the creation of form. We've got that concrete “Aguacate” poem with the avocado right in there, the center. We've got poems that are prose poems, we have epistolaries, so those letter poems, we have persona poems, we have field notes, we have lecture notes. We also have forms that are expanding across the page. I'm really curious about how your leaping into form has pushed you into thinking what's possible on the page and how you identify what is the best conduit for your work.

Ariana Brown:

Yeah, thank you for taking all of that, by the way. I really appreciate that. I worked really hard on this.

Raina J. León:

It’s clear. It's abundantly clear! And as someone who's really deep into poetic form, and I love talking about it. I just delighted going from page to page and just seeing such experimentation across the book.

Ariana Brown:

I think part of it was coming from slam. I've been doing slam since 2010. I feel like I'm very familiar with forms that are ideal for performance, because there's so many different forms of slam and spoken word. There's something about when you are writing for performance; you have to write for clarity as well, because you have to make sure that people are going to understand what you say the first time you say it. They can't go back and rewind if it's live. After being in that for such a long time, I wanted to try something different where I could explore one major concept in a bunch of tiny little different ways and really just open up each moment and expand it as far as I could and take it as far as I wanted to go, which I didn't really feel like I could do that in slamming or in performance in the way that I had been.

So I was like, okay, what is now possible on the page that you can't do in a live performance where people are only hearing the words and not also seeing them? Visuals became really important, but I think less than form, I was trying to figure out what is each poem trying to communicate and how, do you know what I mean? 

One of the professors I had in my MFA, Yona Harvey, she was one of my thesis advisors for this, she was saying that the form follows the content, right? Because I was like, am I thinking about form too much? I don't understand the way some of my peers are talking about it. And she was like, “No, you're right. The form follows the content. What is the poem trying to say?  Where is the poem trying to take you? How can form help you get there?”I'm not someone who rigorously studies like literary forms. I just kind of play around with a poem on the page until it feels right and when it feels right that I know it's done.

Raina J. León:

I know that anyone who is reading down the line this will say, so what does it feel like when it feels right for you?

Ariana Brown:

That's funny. Well, I'm a Taurus, so I'm very grounded, you know what I mean? I'm just a very intuitive person. I've always been that way. I'm very sure just about all the time how I feel about a thing. I know other folks are not like that, but for me, my body just knows. 

Also, sometimes I'm done. I'm done changing things. You know what I mean? It's like that this is just what it's going to be.

Raina J. León:

I always love phrases “this is what it’s gon be”,  that adoption of time and presence and that verb “to be”. Such power in that. But it's something that a lot of people will ask: how do you know the manuscript is done? How do you know the poem is done? And I'm always curious about what people will say, because we have our different things. But I totally understand the “you know in your body” and that attunement of trying to learn and be in relationship to one's own body and feeling the done-ness of something.

Going back to Alan and their words at the very beginning, they write, talking about the poem for your father, “in many ways she answers her own question: how do you mourn the loss of life, both born and domestic? How does this work exist as archive, as architecting a body?” That question is such a brilliant question. How does this work exist as archive, as architecting a body? 

Obviously, you have read the forward. Anytime there's a forward, there are these wonderful questions and opportunities within it, but rarely does the author have an opportunity themselves to respond to what the critic has offered, the person guiding us into a deeper understanding of the text has offered us. So this is your chance. How does this work exist as archive, as architecting a body?

Ariana Brown:

In some very real ways: when I'm speaking about Yanga, when I was speaking about Esteban, my father. These are people who not many records of their existence remain, at least not that I know of. Even for my father in particular, I don't know what his voice sounded like. I have, I think less than ten photographs of him. This sweater that I have is one of the only belongings of his that I have. Writing about him is one of the only ways to make tangible his presence for me. The farther you go back into archives of Black people, particularly enslaved persons, there's so little documentation, if there's any photographs or drawings or illustrations of them at all, which of Yanga and Esteban, there's not any that I know of not being allowed to read and write. Every account of them is written by someone else, usually someone who owned them. Even little things like being curious how they saw themselves, there's so much.

Coming from slam, I've seen a lot of folks write poems in conversation with historical figures. And I think there were moments where I tried to do that in this manuscript, tried to write poems about Esteban or about Yanga or even persona poems from their perspective and running into the same issue where I was like, I don't have enough information to do this. So then the question had to become, how can I write about my relationship to them? How can I tie some of the personal experiences I have had to this legacy of anti-blackness in which Esteban's life and Yanga’s life also exist in? Right? It becomes more about relationality as opposed to me trying to tell their stories, because quite frankly, I don't have the authority to do that. Particularly in the poems about Yanga, it’s an opening for me to ask questions for me to wonder. I also have similar poems about my father in other projects where it's just a lot of questions, because that's really what I have, just kind of imagining moments together. It opens up the possibility for imagination by focusing on relationality.

Raina J. León:

That's one of the things I love about your work is in the space of asking questions. When we are in the space of asking questions of ourselves, we're also opening it up for other people to encounter the work, to encounter the question and allow it to bloom for them. So even in that practice of asking the question, we are in deep relationship with those who will come after and who have come before, of holding a moment, holding a meditation in the question.

I loved being able to witness that in your work. I also really appreciate what you said around relationality and the reaching, the impossible reaching, and yet still brilliant and magical towards figures towards the past that does not have the record because of power and slavery and all sorts of structural inequities and death and massacre and destruction. That's what it is. And power, all of that. And the spac,e too, of drawing on element, drawing on the dust, drawing on “ask the dust” about all the beings that have existed that the dust has witnessed, that the dust is a part of, right? There's a power in that. And-

Ariana Brown:

Spirituality, too.

Raina J. León:

A spirituality and a trust can be attuned to and find knowledge within, which is also going back to this space of maneuvering between the academic, which says, this is the logic, this is the science. You cannot know, because it's not written by that person, by their hand.

Ariana Brown:

And because it's not measurable.

Raina J. León:

It's not measurable. Where is the paper that is the paper in their hand? Where's the blood? Where's the hair? Where are the bones? And even from the very beginning with the poem to your father conjuring in a song, conjuring in by the water. 

I am curious about a different shift from here is what was and the troubling foundations of the past, the colonization, the conquistadors, the blood soaked earth from which you bring, and then the challenge of going to Mexico City and also having the loneliness and the longing and the connection and trying to be in this space. And then I wonder, this question actually comes from Natasha Marin, the Black Imagination Project. And her question is “describe or imagine a world where you are safe, valued, and loved.” 

Ariana Brown:

That question is very similar to some of the prompts that Alan has given and some of the writing workshops that we done]. I've been answering that with some of the newer things that I'm writing. After you finish a project, there's all of these other things around the project that it made you think of or all of that. I'm kind of in that space now. Because I think that this manuscript is so profoundly about the conditions I inherited, and so what are the conditions I'm trying to build or to make or to find dream of. So I feel like that's the space that I'm moving into, so that what I'm working on now is a lot about what I think the world owes Black girls and women in particular, thinking about the other Black girls and women in my family, and also what we provide each other to sustain each other's lives. I feel like that's kind of where I'm looking.

Raina J. León:

Coming back to the title of your book We Are Owed. punto-

Ariana Brown:

Period.

Raina J. León:

I love it. Okay, tell me about that. Tell me about that.

Ariana Brown:

I didn't know what this book was going to be titled for the longest time. It's looked so different over the last six years. For a while I just didn't have a title for it. I was like, it'll come to me. Right? Titles are usually very easy for me. So the fact that it was elusive for so long, I was like, there's something happening here. I need to just wait it out. And so there's a poem in, I think the first section of the book, “Negrita”, where I'm playing Lotería with one of my cousins, one of my younger cousins. She's very competitive, but she doesn't speak any Spanish, so she always wants me there to play with her or playing at our aunt's house. I must have revised this poem, probably 20 times. It looked so different, and I just could not figure it out.

Finally, I settled on this version, and the last two couplets to survive “Here, m’ija. I work on the words, making a list of everything we are owed.” As soon as I wrote it, I was like, “oh, that's it. That's it.” Because I tried really hard, including asking Alan to write the forward, I tried really hard to let folks know that this is not a book that I'm writing about all Mexican Americans, that I'm speaking to my cousin, who is one of the only other Black girls on our side of the family, one of the only other Black girls that I grew up with in South San Antonio. I'm talking to other Black people like me who are in the same spaces, because I'm looking for them all the time. So when I say we are owed, I mean me and my cousins are owed from the communities we grew up in, and there are a lot of things that we should have gotten that we did not get.

When I mentally think about places outside of the US, the “we” also extends to African indigenous folks, African Caribbean folks who are also in tension with Mexican nationalism, with the Mexican state, with the US state. And so I'm also thinking about this, we as other folks, other oppressed Black folks who are not part of the ruling class, because I think we also are in relation with one another, even if we don't always know to call it that or to look for that.

Raina J. León:

There's this diasporic kind of connection that you're exploring. And I'm also very interested in, so going from the title, and then one of the last poems is “Introductions”, which is also in this space of definition for “who am I?” I am. I am. I am. I was drawn into that poem, because I am also connecting to some of the other poems where there are these constant questions of narrator of you or are this, are you that, are you this, are you... And this is the poem where you get to speak. Really in the space of defining for a significant piece of time in relationship to naming, but also history and lineage and ancestry. I'm curious where the poem ultimately arose from and what work you hope it to do with the reader. 

Ariana Brown:

That's so funny, because I feel like this is actually one of the first poems I wrote for this manuscript. It changed a little bit, but for the most part, it's the same poem that I wrote a few years ago. And it's funny, because you see me moving out of this voice with most of the rest of the poems in the manuscript. But I think that this is a holdover from slam. When you're performing, there's such a tendency to be, “I'm certain of the things that I'm saying; let me tell you all the ways that I am certain.” The more that I studied, the less certain I became, with the more questions I had. And so I think there's also a coolness to the poem that I also wanted to move away from. So I was like, well, what happens if I don't know the answer? What happens if I'm vulnerable? What happens if I'm confused or just trying to figure it out?

But I think some of these things in “Introductions” was just kind of me thinking about my life and my family's lives and being, these are things that I am.  Some of these are things that I know for sure. 

In terms of what do I want this poem to do for the reader? One, I think it's really interesting. This is a small note in the poem, and there used to be another poem in here that had a longer epigraph from Frederick Douglass that it's not in here anymore, but in one of my Chicano studies courses, we read this 1848 article that Frederick Douglass wrote about the US conquest of México. It was a scathing article; it was about a page and a half. He did not mince words. He was not in support of it.

I just thought that language was interesting. Something that I have been very interested and that I always had questions about in my ethnic studies courses was just this idea that Black people and Mexican people are always taught as two separate groups of people who didn't exist in the same spaces at the same times. When you look at the history of Texas in particular, it's kind of just goofy to think that, or to teach in that way, because there's been so much intimacy. Putting that in there was kind of me trying to insert that and be like, hey, let's also, let's think about time periods, who was alive at the same time, who would be thinking about and having political opinions about all these different things that were going on as well.

Raina J. León:

You spoke just now around emerging through slam and the certainty of that voice and that in the increasing study that you've done opening up more and more to questions. So this question just came to me, is the freedom in certainty or in the question?

Ariana Brown:

I mean, I think that sometimes there's more possibility in the questions. It's more vulnerable to ask questions and to be sure, which I want more people to practice: not being sure. It destabilizes this idea that you can know. I mean; certain things I'm sure that people know about themselves, but when I was revising this book, I wanted to get rid of some of that cool distance posturing. So I was like, this is not actually helpful. This is ego and that that's getting in the way of what I'm actually trying to do in this book: which is to study and to present.

Raina J. León:

It's so interesting to me because especially thinking about the slam space there's such bravery and vulnerability in so many people's stories. And what I'm also hearing is, and I can see that is by the time you get to the point where you can be that vulnerable and have such certainty in your story and the particular poetic frame of it in connection with performance, there is also this disconnect a little bit and a control and a little bit more power in that at the same time as it being daring and important work.

And the opening to the question is also relinquishing the control of what the answer can be. Right? I was thinking about these how different poetic worlds and conversations can be informing one another. Yeah. I'm so interested too, in how you are in conversation with the work of folks like Aracelis Girmay and Yona Harvey or I have loved seeing, and not only your acknowledgements, but all throughout the text is kind of, I see an influence there. So what have you learned from even just one of these folks and how are you in conversation with them?

Ariana Brown:

I feel like just a few months ago, I read Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand. And when I was reading it, I was like, this is what I've been looking for this book, this is the book I've been looking for. And I was also like, this is what people should read instead of Borderlands. So I wanted to, and it's funny, the quote from Map to the Door of No Return that shows up in the book. That was one of the quotes that I was looking for. I had a placeholder for a long time. I was like, something needs to go here, and I can't find it. And then I read Dionne Brand and I was like, this is it.

I was interested in the way that she talks about talk, talks about the door of no return specifically as this place that's not only physical, but is also spiritual as a place of transformation. The way that she talks about you can walk into a room and then turn around the door is there that it's also a haunting and that it's a continual presence that you don't have to know the door is there to feel that the door is there and that some of us know how to look for it and some of us choose not to. All of that encapsulates or trying to run from the door and still being in it, still being in the doorway, for me, feels like the feeling that I wanted in the manuscript. 

When you see the cover it... I could talk about, there's this artist, Dallas based artist, a Black named Desiree Vaniecia, I think is how you pronounce her last name. But she does these fantastic images of mostly Black women. And the painting that I chose for the cover is a Black woman kind of standing this way in a doorway. And when I saw that, I was like that's the one. That's the one. Because yeah. So I think that kind of stayed with me from Dionne Brand's work in particular. And I can say really quickly about Aracelis Girmay that I think her reverence for spirit and ancestors is something that I've studied for a long time. And actually I think influences a lot more of my slam and performed work, but definitely shows up in this manuscript too.

Raina J. León:

How are you in a doorway?

Ariana Brown:

Right now? I'm getting ready to leave this life that I had here, and I'm going back to my ancestral home of Houston to be closer to my dad's family, returning to the geography that produced this manuscript and the questions behind this manuscript. And so definitely feels like I'm in... Soon I would be in the doorway to my new apartment. I'm also in a place of transformation right now and a way of homecoming, too.

Raina J. León:

Are there any questions that I haven't asked you that are burning to answer about this work?

Ariana Brown:

I really love talking about the Mexico City scenes. I feel like not a lot of folks have asked me about it or wanted to talk to me about it.

Raina J. León:

Tell me about it then.

Ariana Brown:

It's so long. Yeah. I was in Mexico City for six weeks in the summer of 2016. It's clear all the places that are named in the poem are very touristy areas. I was trying to capture both the feeling of being there, for the first time. It's funny when Alan read this manuscript, they were like, “this is a manuscript about gender and let me tell you how.” I think that shows up most clearly in this poem, this very long poem, because it's also right my exploration of, and then kind of tentative rejection of cis-heterosexuality that's embodied in this character of the güero who's a real person who I do not name in the poem. That's also a rupture in my relationship with the nation state. And so it's like, it's complicated.

There's also me trying to find a place for myself: can this be a place for myself? Some of these words and situations and places feel familiar, but are they mine? Are they comfortable? Is this a place where I want to be? And me kind of realizing that the answer is no, but only after all of this exploration, only after all of this. I'm also interested in the very, was it the last section where we're in Teotihuacan this line about, I very clearly remember güeras in my class, asking everybody for sunscreen and kind of laughing and being like, “oh, I don't need that. I don't have that.” And then definitely got sunburned the next day.  I'm also interested in the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and how those come back to bite us or sometimes they don't. Right? But that place, because I'm interested in the questions and the humility. What are the things that I have been taught about blackness or about race or about culture or about belonging that are actually not informed by anything that are not serving me? And how can I continually learn to recognize those things so that I can reject them and figure out something else instead.

Raina J. León:

That space of the lies we tell ourselves and when we are burned and when we are not. Are there other places in the book that you could point to that answer that as well? The lies we tell ourselves and when we are burned and when we're not.  I ask only because sometimes we as writers realize that we were haunted by a particular idea, and we didn't realize it until three books later. It's like, “Oh wait, I've been dealing with this question and yeah, it's in this book, this first book five times, and I just never recognized it.”

Ariana Brown:

Right? Everyone else saw it, but you didn't.

Raina J. León:

Everybody else saw it, and I'm five books later, three books, five, whatever, and oh yeah, that's what I was trying to talk about.

Ariana Brown:

Yeah, I think that shows up for me in the poem Volver Volver; its first iteration was in slam format in 2014, and I don't perform that poem anymore because my politics have changed. This poem shows up in the manuscript was published in a much earlier version that had different politics than this version does. Because I think I have for a long time, like many other people who are generations after the immigration experience, several generations after, I'm not even first or second, I'm like third and fourth continually trying to talk about my relationship with the Spanish language and continually trying to figure out the, what are my actual politics and how can I talk about my relationship with the Spanish language in ways that make my politics clear.

The constant revising of this poem has been a way of trying, and again, to make my politics clear. Because I think for a long time in my life and in my writing, I was trying to find a space for myself within mexicanidad. And in doing that, I was losing my relationship with other Black people who are not interested in mexicanidad, who are oppressed by mexicanidad or latinidad as a whole. And I didn't realize that until after some studying, after learning, after being in community with folks. And so it took all of that, it took those years of doing that to be able to say “quiero salir, salir, salir, to love no nation.” 

To be able to accept my sometimes fluency not as a personal failure, but as an experience of continued neocolonialism. And to kind of say, I have always been in community with black folks, and that's why the poems about the Black women and girls in my family as like loteria cards, right? And none of them are the Black women and girls that I name in that section are Latina. But that doesn't mean that they're not part of the we.

Raina J. León:

There's so much within this book around, again, that framing of history and then the counter narratives, the narratives, metanarratives, the personal. There's so much in this book around poetic form and the power of identifying the correct vessel for the meaning of the poem, and rather being in right relationship with the poem and figuring that out with that. There's so much here with language and identity and race and challenge. There's so much in this book that I think it could be a conversation for years. I'm so grateful to have been able to be in conversation with you now.