By AJ Baginski, Ivylove Cudjoe, Alexa Hurtado-Montaño, Alain Lawo-Sukam, Regina Mills and George Villanueva
“Post-1492, what the uninhabitable tells us… is that populations who occupy the ‘nonexistent’ are living in what has been previously conceptualized as unlivable and unimaginable.”
– Katherine McKittrick
“How would Google Maps direct someone you love to your home? How would it direct your nemesis to your home?” Raina J. León asked participants to meditate on these questions in a workshop she gave at Texas A&M University on September 21st, 2023. We often assume there’s something objectively real about geographical space, and the way that people move through it. But emotions shape the paths that we take, and the paths on which we lead friends, enemies, or those who just don’t understand. Social relations shape what counts as space, and the ways that people move through it. When we assume that there is one way to arrive, to turn back or to cross, we limit the possibilities of what it means to be human.
Many of the poems published in this Special Issue of Latin@ Literatures reject norms of movement. From South Texas to South Central Los Angeles and Puerto Rico, from Nigeria to Ghana and Colombia, the paths to and from the places cited by the poets and their biographies do not simply travel from or toward any stable sense of belonging. They involve fragmentation, recursivity, forgetting, and recreation. The poems explore how blackness, latinidad, gender, and sometimes all of these, shape the way that their speakers approach or avoid others, and are themselves approached or avoided. In the process, languages are taken apart and remade. For instance, trying to locate herself as a writer, the speaker of Magda V. Rodríguez’s first poem gives birth to an “español estadounidense.” The next poem, “How to Return,” directs the reader south, but, “Not the south of San Antonio./ Past that./ Al sur de verdad.” This poem directs someone to “return” to somewhere they’ve been before, but seem to have forgotten. And, in forgetting, perhaps they have forgotten “la verdad” as well, or what is real.
Moving across landscapes requires an orientation to what is true, or real, but processes of migration change the sense of where reality is anchored. And sometimes the body, the voice, and an understanding of “home” don’t overlap in time, in space, or in language. The speaker of Kamila Buitrago-Arias’ poem finds herself split. The eyes which see her as a “migrante” oscillate between “lástima o placer.” They seem to speak to her, saying both “You here, tan sola, tan mujer” and “You here, tan bonita, tan mujer.” Between these two projected women, the pitied and the desired, how and where will the speaker anchor herself?
Instead of splitting, the gazes from outside sometimes seek to locate their own realities by anchoring an idea of race to the appearance of a person’s skin or hair and the language that they speak. The speaker of Alexa Hurtado-Montaño’s poem “Negra ¿A quién le perteneces más?” protests this conflation saying, “My tongue doesn’t connect you with your ideas of black skin” even though “El cabello azabache no pasa desapercibido.” Struggling to find a translation for herself, she wonders, “¿Negra?, ¿Brown?, ¿Afrolatina?” and answers with a name: “No, Melencó.” Replacing a category with a name might require the voyeur and the listener indicted by the poem to rethink their own sense of reality.
The process of breaking and its aftermaths suffuse these poems: from José Rivers Alfaro’s “shattered blood” to Michael Zendejas’ “‘Uvalde’/ is shattered Spanish” to Faith Ebiere Eguolo Odele’s image of a chopped heart of which the speaker’s loved ones are taking pieces. And while education might seem to be a way to cohere a subject-citizen through a process of migration, Vianney A. Gavilanes viscerally describes the way that learning can fragment oneself: “La educación me descuartizó / no me quebró,/ me arrancó pedacitos/ que aún no han vuelto a mí.” These pieces “andan vagando,” the speaker tells us and, “los debo recolectar.” There’s a sense that one should strive to make oneself whole but perhaps, as Ivylove Cudjoe’s poem “El principio end” suggests, there is an “I” to be allowed for in the in-between space: “Con todo aquí,/ pero sin todo ahí,/ sabiendo vivir entre aquí y ahí/…yo.”
This special issue was curated by faculty and students who organized a series of events at Texas A&M University in 2023 and 2024 called “AfroLatinx Life & Writing.” In this series, launched during the elimination of DEI programming and initiatives in public universities in Texas, we aimed to consider how AfroLatinx writers have long engaged in the practices of life writing. These forms of writing work between biography, memoir, poetry, movement observation, dreams, and theory – to incorporate embodied and collective experience into modes of published writing that reflect and define AfroLatinx identit(ies). In formulating the call, we asked for submissions of writing that pushes the limits between the publishable and the personal to push the boundaries of where and how we imagine living to take place. As Omaris Zamora has argued, “transnational and migratory spaces are intermediary and unrecognizable spaces where AfroLatina bodies are located.” These intermediary spaces transited by AfroLatina bodies and many other diasporas moving between languages, places, and selves, remain unrecognizable if they go unarticulated. We hope that the poems collected here offer readers something to recognize.
These poems push the boundaries of where and how we imagine living to take place, of where and how we imagine movement, migration, or self-narration to begin and end. They meditate on the ways that ancestral landscapes generate a sense of belonging, even when these exist only in memories, feelings, and images. They present us with geographies, imagined and real, which are conjured by a desire for return, even if this desire can never be realized.
Works cited:
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 130.
Zamora, Omaris Z. “Before Bodak Yellow and Beyond the Post-Soul: Cardi B Performs AfroLatina Feminisms in the Trance.” The Black Scholar, vol. 52, no. 1, 2022, pp. 53-63.