Central Americans in Movement: a Diasporic Revival of Poesia

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Central Americans in Movement: A Diasporic Revival of Poesía Comprometida

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages and Literatures

of the College of Arts and Sciences

Tiffanie Clark

M.A./B.A. University of Miami

April 2011

Committee Chair: Jorge Mauricio Espinoza, Ph.D

Abstract

Central Americans in Movement: A Diasporic Revival of Poesía Comprometida is an interdisciplinary investigation that analyzes the sociopolitically engaged poetry of Cynthia Guardado (1985),

Alexandra Lytton Regalado (1972), Ilka Oliva Corado (1979), and Javier Zamora (1990), four emerging authors of Central American descent of the U.S. diaspora. Considering their diverse diasporic conditions, this investigation employs theories of diaspora and hybridity to better understand how their differing diasporic conditions impact their sociopolitically engaged poetry.

On a similar front, this investigation also compares the themes and styles of their poetry with a sampling of poesía comprometida authored by Central American poets, spanning between the 1940s and 1980s. My hypothesis is that the collective of contemporary writers of the Central American diaspora to the United States are reviving poesía comprometida in a manner that is affected by notions, concepts, and theories of diaspora and hybridity in relation to each author’s diasporic conditions and experiences. The representative authors used for the literary comparison made in this investigation are Claribel Alegría (1924-2018), Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020), Roque Dalton

(1935-1975 ), Jorge Debravo (1938-1975), Pompeyo del Valle (1928-2018), and Otto Raúl González

(1921-2007), six widely published and researched poetas comprometidos.

©Tiffanie Clark 2020

بسم الل

DEDICATION

To all the people who helped along the way.

You know who you are.

Acknowledgements

To the Creator of me and this world for his grace. Without him I would not have had the strength to embark on a project like this. He has blessed me with my mind, my strength, and my passion. He has given me this life. All thanks to Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Gracious, The One who Delays. Thank you.

To the chair of this dissertation, Dr. Jorge Mauricio Espinoza. Thank you for taking a chance on this lost soul. Thank you for introducing me to these dynamic poets. Thank you for editing my writing and encouraging me every step of the way. Thank you for making the most complicated moments seem so simple. You have taught me more than I can imagine with all the patience and kindness that the University surely needs more of. To the members of this dissertation committee,

Dr. Nicasio Urbina and Dr. María Paz-Moreno for joining me in this journey and teaching me all that you could about poetry and literature.

To the Taft Research Center. Thank you for the funds to undertake this dissertation without teaching responsibilities. To the Taft Research Committee at the Department of Romance and

Arabic Languages and Literatures. Thanks for taking a chance on this project! To the Yates Graduate

Fellowship. Thanks for your four years of financial support that has allowed me to focus on my research. Thanks for the community and fellowship, the workshops, and the outings

To Cynthia Guardado, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Ilka Oliva Corado, and Javier Zamora for gifting me and the world with their dynamic poetry. It is a poetry that will leave me forever impacted. Thanks for your interviews, your manuscripts, and your conversations. Thanks for your vulnerability and bravery. Without you, this dissertation could not breathe. Mil gracias. To the poets who have passed on, Claribel Alegría, Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Jorge Debravo, Pompeyo del

Valle, and Otto Raúl González. Thanks for showing me this complex facet of what poesía

iii

comprometida is. Without you, this dissertation wouldn’t have a foundation. May you all rest in peace, perhaps, with a pencil in hand.

To the woman who fought for my life every step of the way, my mother, Twila Clark. You are my light. You are every word that I write. Thank you for your advice, your humor, and your heart.

Thank you for showing me the art of reading and supporting my decisions. Thank you for loving me forever, for now, and for always. You are my she-roe. To my father for always believing in me. While

I was writing the last part of this dissertation, I could only think of you running beside me when I was going to give up on the last mile of a cross country race in high school. You were there then.

You are here now. Thank you for teaching me about the game of chess. It is fundamental to how I approach life and writing. I can’t wait to play some more.

To my husband Ebraima Sisay for being my rock throughout these past four years of study.

Without you, none of this would be possible. Thanks for being an incredible father to our children.

Thanks for standing by me in the sun and under the moon.

To our three beautiful boys, Ebrahim, Shareef, and Yousef. Thank you for teaching me about the joy of play and stopping to smell all the roses and even the dandelions. You all have been the driving force behind this dissertation, keeping me laughing all the time. I love you so very much and

I can’t wait to see the wonderful men that you become.

To my big brothers Day-Day and Josh for always protecting me and loving me so dearly. To all my family members on the Clark and Desmond side for filling me with your strength and enthusiasm for life. Thank you, Aunt Mona, for reading me your poetry. Thank you, grandma Editor and grandma Cola for your love that continues to inspire.

To my best friend and intellectual companion, Rufia Dehmani. From the first day I met you, I knew that you would always be a star in my sky. Thank you for those many conversations that taught me how to be a wife and mother while being a scholar. Thank you for the peace you have tattooed upon my soul. It will NEVER go away

To my first Spanish Professor, Dr. José Domínguez Búrdalo for leading me down this mysterious path of literature and the phrase that marks my endeavor, Literatura o literatura, todo es literatura. Thank you for showing me that when absolutely nothing seems to be happening in a text, that is when everything is happening.

To Homi Bhabha, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and James Clifford. Thanks for your shaping this work with your amazing intellect. To every name that appears on my bibliography. Thanks for your intellectual thought.

To the people who love their homeland but can’t stay, I stand with you in solidarity.

To anyone who dares to really love, bless you.

To all those who face the merciless canon of this world in shambles, I pray for you.

To Amado Nervo and his fight to love God and Modernity.

Table of Contents ABSTRACT ...... II COPYRIGHT ...... I DEDICATION ...... II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... III CENTRAL AMERICANS IN MOVEMENT, AN INTRODUCTION ...... 1 METHODS FOR ANALYZING DIASPORIC POETRY ...... 26

HYBRID PROCESSES OF CREATION, SURVIVAL, AND SUBVERSION ...... 32 DIASPORA CRITERION ...... 44 FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENTS OF POESÍA COMPROMETIDA ...... 58

POESÍA COMPROMETIDA FLOURISHES DURING A CENTURY OF CRISIS ...... 64 POETIC APPROACHES TO IMPERIALISM...... 78 POETIC APPROACHES TO CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS ...... 87 POETIC APPROACHES TO INDIGENISM ...... 97 POETIC APPROACHES TO FEMINISM ...... 106 POETIC APPROACHES TO LIBERATION THEOLOGY ...... 113 POETIC APPROACHES TO EXILE, DIASPORA, AND TRAVEL ...... 121 MANIFESTATIONS OF DIASPORIC HYBRIDITY WITHIN A REVIVAL ...... 130

U.S. TIME-LAPSE, SALVADORAN TIME LAPSE…BOTH? ...... 130 DIASPORIC THIRD SPACES OF WITNESS AND DIASPORA SPACE ...... 144 THE NEW MESTIZA CONSCIOUSNESS AND MULTI-TEMPORAL HETEROGENEITY ...... 168 EXPRESSIONS OF METAPHORICITY ...... 177 THE CENTRALITY OF WOMEN WITHIN DIASPORIC POETRY ...... 198 CONCLUSIONS ...... 225 APPENDIX ...... 250 WORKS CITED ...... 263

Chapter I Introduction

The premise of this dissertation is that diaspora is a condition, as opposed to a mere characterization of a group (Vasu 81). This condition implies that diasporic identities formed as a result of voluntary, forced, or semi-forced diaspora are in constant movement, as they develop through time and space.1 This approach emphasizes that diasporic identities are anchored together by the idea of an original homeland, and the collective histories, myths, and contemporary state of that homeland. Theorized in this manner, the existence of diverse diasporic conditions points to the need for agile definitions and theories apt to handle the hybrid literary expressions, identities, cultures, languages, and notions of time and history that arise from them. Most importantly, these theories and concepts must help scholars better understand how diasporic condition stimulates the production and maintenance of social and political relationships between diaspora, home, host, and individual. Based on this theoretical understanding of diaspora, the purpose of this dissertation is two-fold. Its first aim is to understand the effects of diasporic condition on the content, language, and style of contemporary sociopolitically engaged poetry by writers of Central American descent of the diaspora to the United States of America. They are Cynthia Guardado 1985, a professor at

Fullerton College who has published one collection of poetry Endeavor and several individual poems from the unpublished manuscript Cenizas; Alexandra Lytton Regalado (1972), a publisher at the English/Spanish Kalina Press and a director at the Museum of Art in El Salvador, who has published one collection of poetry Matria; Ilka Oliva-Corado (1979), a childcare provider,

1 It is important to note that there is a fine line between forced and semi-forced migration, Sascha O.Becker and Andreas Ferrara offer a good explanation when they write that “forced migration can have consequences different from voluntary migration, both for populations at destination and origin, but also for the migrants themselves. While voluntary migration is likely to follow economic cost-benefit considerations of the migrants, involuntary migration is the result of forces outside the control of the migrants. (“Consequences of Forced Migration”).

independent editorial press owner, and blogger who has published nine collections of poetry, including Destierrro Desarraigo, and Invierno 2; and Javier Zamora (1990), an activist, creative- writing instructor, and speaker who has produced one collection of poetry Unaccompanied. In an effort to contextualize this collective of diasporic Central American sociopolitically engaged poetry in literary history, this investigation equally explores the continuities and discontinuities between their poetry and poesía comprometida centroamericana (sociopolitically engaged poetry of Central

America) written between the 1940s and 1980s, with an understanding of this poetic movement as one that concerned itself with the social and political realities of Central America and beyond. The sampling of poesía comprometida used in this study is drawn from 6 Central American poets whose literary production has been the subject of numerous literary, historical, and sociopolitical critique and analysis.3 They are Claribel Alegría (1924-2018), a novelist, essayist and activist born in

Nicaragua but raised in El Salvador; Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020), a priest, ex-minister of culture, and activist born in Nicaragua; Roque Dalton (1935-1975), a revolutionary, a novelist, and an essayist born in El Salvador; Jorge Debravo (1938-1967), a journalist and social-security inspector born in Costa Rica; Pompeyo del Valle, an activist, editor, and journalist born in Honduras (1928-

2018); and Otto Raúl González, an essayist and historian from Guatemala (1921-2007). With this collective at hand who have a significant influence on what poesía comprometida signifies to scholars and Central Americans, this investigation identifies recurrent thematic and stylistic links between their poetry and this studies’ contemporary “diasporic revival” of their politicized literary movement, as heavily influenced by theories, concepts, and notions of diaspora and hybridity.

My interest in this topic arose after I read Unaccompanied, the first full-length collection by

Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora. His work left me uneasy and curious because I did not

2 Her other collections of poetry are Agosto (2016) En la melodía de un fonema (2016), Luz de Faro (2015), Ocre (2015), Niña de arrabal (2016), and Nostalgia (2018). 3 It should be noted that Pompeyo deo Valle and Otto Raúl González have received considerably less scholarly attention outside of the literary and scholarly circles of their respective countries of origin in comparison to Alegría, Cardenal, and Dalton.

know how to categorize it. His poems were both collective and historical; personal, and imaginative.

Above all, Zamora’s poetry was centered on sociopolitical issues due to its dealings with diasporic experiences, such as the pains of displacement and the difficulties involved in moving to and settling in a foreign country. Zamora’s diaspora began at the age of nine when he migrated from El

Salvador to the United States, as an unaccompanied minor. He came to reunite with his mother and father who had migrated years before. After arriving in the United States, Zamora passed his adolescence and teenage years without migratory documentation. He finished a BA at the

University of California Berkley and an MFA at New York University, while he has used his experiences in the diaspora as prime material for his poetry that frequently expresses James

Clifford’s notion of diasporic experience. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth

Century Clifford defines “diasporic experience” as an inhabitance within a space of separations and entanglements—of living “here” yet desiring another place (254). This tension is expressed in the first two lines of the opening poem of Unaccompanied: This is my 14th time pressing roses in fake passports / for each year I haven’t climbed marañon trees” (“to abuelita Neli” 3). In this case, the diasporic tension is embodied in nostalgic desire for his homeland from the U.S. diaspora, a precarious space where the poetic speaker feels imprisoned and ostracized because of his migrant status. Through this brief representation of diasporic tension, I began to take notice of other moments of Zamora’s work that evoked the “transitory and restless” space of diasporic life, such as his portrayal of irregular migration through the eyes of a child (Kitaj 38). As a result of these preliminary representations of diasporic tension, I asked myself the question that set this study in motion: In what ways did Zamora’s diasporic condition and migratory experiences affect the style, sociopolitical preoccupations, and expressions of hybridity in his poetry? After revisiting

Unaccompanied with the relationship between diaspora and hybridity in mind, I began to ponder the themes and poetic styles that other U.S. diasporic poets of Central American descent of differing

diasporic condition used to approach sociopolitical issues related to diaspora.4 I also wanted to know if there was a specific literary tradition that bound them together. If so, what was it, and in what ways did the poets adhere to or diverge from it in relation to their diasporic conditions? These questions transformed my interest in a single poet into a need to understand a collective of contemporary U.S. diasporic poets of Central American descent, who place the political within the poetic and express themselves politically via poetry.

My first task in studying this collective comprehensively was to construct the corpus in a manner that didn’t ignore the diversity within the Central American diasporic community. Since subjects of diaspora cultures from the isthmus are highly diverse in terms of class, gender, sexuality, and nationality despite their shared Central American collective histories, it was vital to choose a corpus of poets who embodied this variety in order to improve my understanding of their sociopolitical concerns and aesthetics (Clifford). As a result, each poet chosen has distinct diasporic conditions despite fitting this investigation’s demarcations: 1) Of Central American descent, and 2)

Having a poetic output that considers numerous sociopolitical issues and histories in the United

States and Central America, and, in some cases, outside of these boundaries. To maintain a temporal continuity between the authors, I selected those born after 1970. Following more reflection and research, I added Guardado, Oliva Corado, and Lytton Regalado to this investigation’s contemporary corpus. Guardado is a second-generation Salvadoran American. Oliva Corado migrated from

Guatemala as an adult without documentation. Whereas Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran national

4 The diasporic conditions I refer to in this study includes refugees, asylum seekers, irregular labor migrants, children of refugees, first, second or third generation Central Americans born and raised in the United States, and subjects who have spent more than ten years in the diaspora in the U.S. who may have returned to Central America to live. A simplified way to think about it is that migration eventually ends. As such, a person or group travels from one place, leaves the other behind, and eventually assimilates to a new life. Diasporic subjects, on the other hand, may move to and dwell in a new place but their political, psychological, economic, or social connections to the homeland are never fully left behind. Therefore, their identity waivers between “here” “there” and “in-between” in relation to the different material and cultural resources available to them depending on their diasporic condition. This, however, is a complex subject that I will discuss in Chapter I and again in Chapter’s III and IV.

who moved to the United States at the age of four, when her parents decided that it was too dangerous to live in the homeland. After marrying, Lytton Regalado returned to El Salvador to live at the age of 27. This selection has permitted me to gain a panoramic understanding of the distinct manners in which they write about social, cultural, political, and personal events that occur in and affect the Central American-U.S. diaspora space. This is a space defined by Avtar Brah in

Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1997), as the intersectionality of diaspora, border, and politics of location that come together to offer a conceptual grid of contemporary transnational movements of people, information, cultures, commodities, and capital (181). This concept has allowed me to analyze the configurations of power which “differentiate diasporas internally as well as situate them in relation to one another,” whereby diaspora is not simply about who travels to and dwells outside of the ancestral homeland in question, but who travels, when, how, and under what circumstances? (Brah 183).

Despite the fact that this corpus has a dynamic representation of diasporic condition, this study’s corpus of poets may seem quite limited in terms of national representation because Central

America is comprised of seven countries, including Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,

Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panamá. However, studies indicate that the bulk of migration from

Central America to the United States has been from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, a transregional collective of nations known as the Northern Triangle. These countries are marked by conditions of violence in their societies that correspond to twentieth century war, ethnic genocide, and sociopolitical repressions by dictatorial governments. These conditions have played a role in the increase of migration from the Northern Triangle to the United States and other countries from the 1960s to the present time , in which this migratory wave has been connected to a sense that the violence of twentieth century politics has spilled into the region’s twenty-first century sociopolitical realities, Today, however, continual dispersions from Central America’s Northern triangle has been linked to failed neoliberal developmentalist projects; foreign expropriation of each country’s

national resources; an increase of gang-violence propagated by maras such as MS13 in El Salvador; an increase in national militarization to combat crime; and a continued imbalance of national wealth and power that keeps the large majority in conditions of poverty (Cárdenas; Espinoza;

Rodríguez; Rosales). This continuance of violence under new guises often creates more migration from the Northern Triangle than other isthmian countries like Belize or Costa Rica. This is the main reason why all the poets from the collective chosen for this investigation are descendants of this region and tend to write about violence and migration in their writing.5 Three out of four of them are Salvadorans since Salvadorans lead migratory rates to the United States from Central America.

According to a report by the Inter-American Dialogue, the number of Central American migrants grew from 2.6 million in 2000 to 4.2 million in 2015. With their numbers growing, they are found to be the third-largest Latino demographic in the United States after Mexicans and Puerto Ricans

(Brown and Patten). These two fronts explain the lack of national-diversity in the contemporary corpus selected for investigations, in particular the number of Salvadoran poets, as opposed to writers from other parts of Central America. However, the most important issue as it pertains to this corpus is not their diversity in national terms, but the diversity of their diasporic conditions.

This is because these conditions dictate the different cultural and material resources available to them that affect “the manner in which their experience of being in-between places is lived” (Vasu

85). This is certainly essential when trying to understand the nature of their social and political views of Central America, The United States, and those liminal spaces between them, that unite and divide them.

5 Though Nicaragua faced a similar civil war during this time, many dissident Nicaraguans did not choose to migrate to the United States. Rather many exiles, refugees, and dissidents migrates to Costa Rica, other Latin American countries, or Europe.

There are not many full critical texts about the contemporary writers of this contemporary corpus because they are still too new. Despite this fact, there are many non-scholarly materials that point to their reception of their work the United States, in their homeland, and abroad. Of Oliva

Corado—an author who has been honored in 2019 in her hometown of Jutiapas’ annual Juegos

Florales for her poetic trajectory and literary production—one can find blogs, interviews, newspaper articles, and book reviews in Guatemala, in the United States, in Europe, and in Africa.

These materials indicate important facets of Oliva-Corado’s representation in the media and literary world. Her recent recognition in Jutiapa, as expressed in two articles and two interviews written about her in La Hora by Mariela Castañon in Guatemala, demonstrates that Oliva Corado’s work is seen as a bridge between Guatemala and its diaspora. Nonetheless, this and other acknowledgements of her literary trajectory produced tends to gloss over its sociopolitical content.

For instance, these articles do not reference her critique of the Guatemalan social structure, nor the difficulties involved in Central American irregular diaspora. Instead, they lean towards a triumphalist narrative, whereby the interviews and articles that appear in “La voz migrante” are more about what the author has done as a migrant, rather than what the contents of her books are, or her continued hardships as an irregular migrant woman. In these interviews and articles, such as

“Ilka Oliva: Busco solamente acercarle al lector mis libros” it is the author who brings up sociopolitical issues and not the journalist. For instance, she discusses the difficulty she faces in the publishing arena, and the responsibility that she feels to use her literature to voice the struggles of the “undocumented” migrant community , due to her gender and class. The tendency of painting

Oliva Corado as 'the migrant who is “making it” as a poet and entrepreneur, often blurs these sociopolitical underpinnings, which is not surprising because it is normal that the homeland would like to have an overall positive image of their diasporic voices.

This homeland discourse that surrounds Oliva Corado as a literary figure is quite different than what has been written about her work in other countries. In the book reviews about her

produced in Africa, France, and the United States, there is a focus on her testimonial book, the first book she published, Historia de una indocumentada travesía en el desierto de Sonora-Arizona (2014).

This dissemination of her text can be attributed to its translation in Italian by Edizioni Arcoiris,

French by Éditions Nzoi, and English by her editorial Ilka Publishing House. One might also recall its publishing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Cote d’Ivoire by Éditions Nzoi, and its publication in Venezuela in La Perra y la Rama. These literary reflections consider the content of Historia, rather than focus on the author’s accomplishments. Some of the main topics these works consider are the reasons for her semi-forced diaspora from Guatemala and the violence she faced along the way(Lasalle); her survival tactics in México when she migrated; and the contribution this testimonial makes to social sciences (Perraudin). In Oliva Corado’s self-written review found in the archives of Jacksonville University, she reflects how the book served to overcome her “post-border depression” by testifying about what she had witnessed and experienced. Another example that contextualize the meaning and purpose of Ilka Oliva Corado’s sociopolitical writings is her blog Crónicas de una inquilina. With over 2,000 followers, this blog shows that via internet readers are introduced to Oliva Corado’s memories of Guatemala from the diaspora, her life experiences as an irregular immigrant in the United States, her poetry, and any other writing that has been produced about her or her work. This site reiterates her assumed responsibility as an activist poet with a goal to raise awareness about the life and experiences of

“undocumented” Central American migrants in the United States; the sociopolitical struggles of indigenous peoples, farmers, and urban laborers in Guatemala; and the corruption within current and past Guatemalan political regimes and in other Latin American countries. In sum, this blog marks her as an activist poet, whose focus is that people have free access to her “real time” ideals and testimony about several transnational sociopolitical issues.

Holding an MFA in poetry from Florida International University and an MFA in fiction from

Pacific University, Lytton Regalado is included in the list of Best American Poets, whereby most of

the written materials that feature her poetry and specific facets of her biography are interviews and book reviews. Lytton Regalado’s essay “I see Myself in Her: Three Women Poets Through the

Lenses of Time, Sexuality, and Nationhood” presents her opinion about the poetic production of other diasporic writers that she admires, such as Pakistani-American Tarifia Faizullah. At the end of the essay, she writes about the influence her indefinite return to El Salvador as mother-to-be had on her writings: “When I moved back to El Salvador my writing took a turn. I was forced to look outside myself, to go beyond my border.” This affirmation parallels to her belief that writing in El

Salvador (the murder capital of the world) meant turning her gaze outward (Black, “Lyrical

Essentials”). These authorial reflections demonstrates that Lytton Regalado’s diaspora as a woman and mother is a motivating factor in the political perspective of her poetry, specifically in the collection Matria (2017). This is a clear indication that the nature of her diasporic condition must be understood to engage with this author’s poetry. Of the few reviews in existence regarding her debut collection, there is a focus on several thematic and dialectic intersections it proposes. Aimee

Nezhukumatathil notices the play between violence and desire. Campbell McGrath notes that the topics of the book occur in the United States and El Salvador, while issues like identity, class, and motherhood merge. Another interesting review discusses how the collection moves between womanhood and country-hood through a hybrid poetic voice who assumes the role of the native and foreigner and speaks in both English and Spanish (Blanco). These reactions to Matria indicate some of this collection’s themes in relation to the poetic voice(s) who is (are) hybrid, diasporic, transnational, testimonial, and female. This points to the possibility that Lytton Regalado’s diasporic condition produces a plurality of vision that wavers between being both “inside” and

“outside” of the homeland or hostland society or culture (Hall; Gilroy; Vasu). Lytton Regalado calls it “being a double-agent” (Villatoro “Life Seen”).

About Cynthia Guardado, of interests here are the many interviews that center on her work as an activist poet primarily concerned with how the relationship between the United States and El

Salvador affects and has affected the Salvadoran peoples in the homeland and in the diaspora. In her podcast interview with Ever Velasquez and Todd Taylor, she discusses several sociopolitical ties between El Salvador and the United States that have influenced her activism in the Los Angeles community. Some of these issues are the U.S. government’s funding of El Salvador’s right-winged military during the Civil-War (1980-1992), the possible elimination of the temporary protection status (TPS) that was granted to many Salvadorans who fled to the United States because of the

Civil War, and the economic effects of the conversion, in 2001, of the Salvadoran colón to the U.S. dollar. These historical references demonstrate that Guardado is conscious of Cohen’s notion that

“diasporas do not revolve around the motherland but both motherlands and diaspora revolve around each other” (Vasus 21). This heightened notion of diaspora-homeland relationships exposes

Guardado’s transnational and transtemporal poetic motifs that tend to delineate the relationships between Salvadoran and U.S. sociopolitical crisis, realities, and histories. A writing about Guardado that relates to this study’s focus on transnational and transtemporal themes is a blog entitled

“Theatre of Pain: Cynthia Guardado’s Reading of Endeavor Rocks the 5th Annual Poetry Day.” The author of the blog, Frank Turrisi primarily considers how the sociopolitical history and current events of her “ancestral country” are integrated into her poems, noting how she balances this awareness about the homeland with her critique of current events and painful histories of the

United States, including gentrification, disregard for the lower-class, racialized violence, and exploitation of the environment for capitalistic purposes. Aesthetically, he notices the hybridity in her language and her hybrid appearances: She has “Inglewood” tattooed on her head and strong

“indigenous Salvadorena [sic]” features that suggests simultaneous allegiance to Los Angeles, El

Salvador, and El Salvador’s indigenous heritage. This reflection about Guardado suggests that her diasporic condition affects her hybrid poetic aesthetic, as one that confirms the diasporic subject’s inhabitance in the “in between,” or what Homi Bhabha would call the “liminal spaces.” This blog and similar writings about the author indicate that critics notice that her poems transit between the

sociopolitical conditions of her ancestral homeland and her land of birth, in a manner that is hybrid, and “fiercely activist” (Turris). About this fierce writer, an interview with Guardado published in

Letras Latinas suggests that her poetry is just as concerned with gender. The author of the interview sees many poems in Endeavor as representations of the “sorrow of women caused by the many injustices perpetuated upon them; including domestic violence, sexual assault, classism, as well as racism”(Marie-Konopelski, “Endeavor: An Interview with Cynthia Guardado”). Unlike this dissertation, the interview does not connect this focus on gender in Guardado’s poems to diaspora, even though many of them specifically illuminate the experiences of the diasporic Central American woman with a special emphasis on precarious situations that stem from sociopolitical tensions with the U.S. hostland.

Reviews of Zamora’s poetry in the United States recognize its political focus. For example,

Raul Nino draws attention to the text’s focus on the inaccuracies of the U.S. media’s coverage of irregular and unaccompanied border crossing,(“Unaccompanied”). He also writes about how his poetry shines light on U.S. imperialism, racism, and oppression. Though critical reflections and reviews that follow the same pattern as this are interesting, they follow a similar pattern to what reviewers in Guatemala are writing about Oliva Corado, offering minimal consideration of Zamora’s poetry with literary movements in the isthmus. This tendency is beginning to change. An interview featured in El Faro by Javier Córdava highlights the ways that the homeland imaginary, history, and identity survive in Zamora’s poetic language: “aunque [Zamora] escribe en inglés y se mueve en la escena de la poesía estadounidense, representa un imaginario salvadoreño cargado de nostalgia, violencia, migración y una cansada búsqueda de identidad (Córdava). Segueing this affirmation, the interviewer suggests that the tradition of poesía comprometida is a possible source of Zamora’s literary hybridity, by linking his poems to a very Central American way of writing inspired by

Roque Dalton, one of the first poets, along with Pablo Neruda, that motivated Zamora to write about the trauma that he had experienced. Zamora states that he sees this line of poetry, as different from

that of U.S. poets who he describes as “bien alejados de la población, de la gente.” (Córdava). This contrasts to Zamora’s belief—quite like Dalton’s found in his essay Poetry and Militancy in Latin

America— that “el poeta debería estar en la vanguardia, ser político, hacer algo para la sociedad”

(Córdava cites Zamora). Nevertheless, in contrast to Dalton’s revolutionary auspices, his interview clearly illustrates that the main issue that concerns Zamora is being an immigrant in the United

States. This interview also demonstrates the notion that diasporic writers themselves are not only reviving Central American poesia comprometida but are calling attention to the style and themes of poetas comprometidos in the hostland. For example, below a muralist draws a picture about Roque

Dalton based on a poem by Zamora (see Figure 3).

Figure 3 Leny Rivera, Latin American muralist raised in New York, paints “Roque Dalton,” a mural based on a poem by Javier Zamora. Found in Alejandro Córdava’s interview with Javier Zamora titled “Poeta Javier Zamora: “A la poesía estadounidense se le ha olvidado sufrir por otros países” in El Faro, 30 May, 2016, elfaro.net/es/206005/el_agora/18500/Poeta-Javier-Zamora-A-la-poesía- estadounidense-se-le-ha-olvidado-sufrir-por-otros-países,” Accessed 2 Feb. 2020. The New Yorker’s piece on Zamora’s book by Jonathon Blitzer recognizes the importance of his U.S.-

Salvadoran hybridity, as reflected by the Dalton epigraph from the poem “El Gran Despecho that proceeds section III of Zamora’s Unaccompanied. In translation, it reads: “My country you don’t

exist/you’re only a bad silhouette of mine/a word I believed from the enemy.”6 From this quote,

Blitzer observes that Zamora underscores that the poetic speaker’s interior battle with the lost of his Salvadoran roots that occurs simultaneously with his problematic adoption of a U.S. linguistic and social identity. Like Dalton’s poetic speaker laments, a country that he can truly call his own seems a mere figment of his imagination because of his precarious diasporic condition. Blitzer asks,

“If you are both profoundly American and inescapably Salvadoran, can you ever feel like you fully belong to either country?” (“Unaccompanied”). To begin dealing with this question that affects how

Zamora and the other writers of this study’s corpus approach the social and the political, this dissertation considers not solely hybridity itself, but the historical, cultural, anthropological, and individual processes of hybridization, as well as its subversive potentialities.7

Two chapters from Arturo Aria’s theoretical text Taking their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America (2007) explore the subjectivity and cultural expression of Central Americans living in the United States. Chapter 9 “Central American-Americans: Latino and Latin American

Subjectivities” traces the lack of recognition and representation of U.S. Central Americans within

U.S. and Latino/a discourse and scholarship. Arias theorizes that the marginalization of Central

American cultural and historical differentiations in Latino/a studies make it difficult for peoples of

Central American descent in the United States to forge and sustain their own identity politics, because “a Latino identity is often constructed through the abjection and erasure of the Central

American-American” (126). Historically, this reluctance to construct unique identity politics within the trope of U.S. Latinidad connects to the fact that from the 1970s to the 1980s, Central

Americans in the United States who migrated during the Cold War period have tended to conceal

6 Unlike the first epigraph from Unaccompanied, “Poema de amor,” also authored by Dalton, this poem fragment lacks the original Spanish version and the poem title. This is due, I think, to many theoretical issues, mainly with deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This is, however, a complex subject that will be revisited in Chapter III and IV. 7 Nestor García Canclini affirms that scholars must implement this method of studying hybridity if they are to properly study expressions of hybrid cultures.

their origins in the diaspora because their migration has been a direct influence of having to flee wars supported by the United States; resulting in their being painted as “illegals,” communists, and subjects of lesser value to dominant Latino populations (187-88). In chapter 10 “American Central

Americans: Invisibility and Representation,” Arias concludes that identity politics in Central

America, heterogenous identities historically inherited from the isthmus, and exclusions from constructions of “Latinidad” have caused an overall erasure of the Central Americans of the U.S. diaspora (221). His prescription for the political and social solidification of the Central American-

American, is for members of its diasporic community to assume a sense of self and celebrate their differences from other Latino groups. Considering this, Arias asserts in “American Central

Americans” that diasporic consciousness is “the complex area that we will have to problematize in order to understand the particularities of the Central American-American in the United States” (218 emphasis is mine).

Despite the existence of many theoretical perspectives, concepts, and notions of diasporic consciousness (Brah; Clifford; Hall et. al), they all stress its capacity to stimulate the diasporic subject’s creation of alternate public spheres and forms of community that help them maintain identification outside the national time and space of the hostland. As Stewart Hall claims in the book chapter “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” diasporic subjects tend to express the ways in which they live “inside” the national time and space of the hostland while conscious of their differing cultural origins and histories that continue existing “outside” of that space (233).8 Likewise, diasporic consciousness tends to be quite sociopolitical because diasporic communities (especially proletarian diasporas) often face socioeconomic disparities and anti-immigrant backlash in the

8 Edward Said deems this simultaneous consciousness contrapuntal modernity, a term he uses to describe exiled or diasporic person’s plurality of vision that gives rise to an awareness in which ways of life, expressions, or activity in the new environment occur against the memory of those in the old. This plurality of vision can present the positive side of displacement or exile since the subject becomes aware of at least two cultures, homes, and settings. It is also important to highlight that James Clifford and Néstor García Canclini have used this term as a springboard to foreground their distinct stances regarding hybridity that I will be discussing this concept in depth in Chapter I.

hostland despite their economic, cultural, and social contributions (Vasu, 394-97). Karina Oliva-

Alvarado further explains the notion of diasporic consciousness in terms of “in-between” identities in her dissertation Transnational lives and texts: Writing and Theorizing United States/Central

American Subjectivity, whereby she explains how and why U.S. Central American peoples and writers mediate different national identities. She goes on to highlight the manners in which their cultural production tends to represent their positionalities within a site of negotiation that lies somewhere between the familial, personal, geographical, and historical realities that pertain to two or more national sites (7). Likewise, this thesis underscores that U.S. Central American diasporic consciousness lies within the varied experiences that result from their transnational movement.9

Even though Arias was still doubtful of the full bloom of this new subjectivity, that evolves from

Central American transnational movement, as Alvarado suggests, a lot has changed since he wrote

Taking their Word. Scholarly studies written in the last fifteen years about U.S. Central American cultural production evidence that this community is beginning to abandon their non-identity and assimilatory positionalities in the U.S. political scene, and instead, have begun to talk about their traumatic histories and cultural differences with dominate Latino groups , whose diasporic experience has been canonized within imaginaries of Latinidad (Cárdenas; Rodríguez).

In the “Art of Witness in U.S. Central American Cultural Production: An Analysis of William

Archila’s the Art of Exile and Alma Leiva’s Celdas,” Marisel Moreno affirms that U.S. Central

Americans are destabilizing and renewing the U.S. Latino/a canon through their critical denunciation and remembrance of the historical and contemporary violence characteristic of certain regions of the Northern Triangle (287). Moreno affirms that these writers emphasize

9 Alvarado’s notion of transnational is based on a central referent through the U.S. Central American imaginary that shapes a multifaceted cultural identification and memory. Furthermore, her concept of transnational travel includes internet use, membership in Central American organizations, as well as a linguistic travel between Spanish, Central American Spanish, and English with all its corresponding ethnic lingual localities.

themes like war, displacement, and violence, a thematic centering that distinguishes their productions from other U.S. Latino/a communities (289). Theatre Under My Skin/Teatro Bajo Mi

Piel (2014) is a recent anthology that suggests an increase of sociopolitically engaged U.S. Central

American literature in the United States. Edited by Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Lucía Sola, and

Tania Pleitez Vela, it bridges the literary production of Salvadorans in the isthmus with those who live in diasporic locations such as Canada and the United States, with an emphasis on the sociopolitical circumstances that permeate their livelihoods at “home” and abroad. Another recent text that treats U.S. Central American cultural production, is U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing

Memories, Struggles, and Cultures of Resistance. Published in 2019 and edited by scholars Karina O.

Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernández, this theoretical text of eleven essays focuses solely on the lived experiences, struggles, and cultural production of Central Americans in the United States. However, this focus does not stop the isthmus from being a vital point of reference when analyzing U.S. Central American subjectivity, sociopolitical experience, and cultural production— hence the “reconstructing memories” element of the title. Steven Osuna’s contribution discusses how second-generation U.S. Central American and Latin American youth subjectivity is shaped by the memories of the homeland and migrant struggles passed down to them by their parents. He calls these “obstinate transnational memories” (77). As I demonstrate in chapter III, the reconstructing of their parent’s memories of war and migration is a substantial thematical element in the poetry of Guardado and Zamora.

Concerning U.S. Central American cultural production in the United States, The Wandering

Song: Central American Writing in the United States (2017) is the first anthology to solely feature the literary output of 68 Central Americans in the U.S. diaspora from Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala,

Nicaragua, and Panamá. It also includes the work of those Central Americans who identify as Mayan or Garifuna. This transnational diversity of U.S. Central American literary voices suggests the rise of

Pan-Centralamericanism (Cárdenas) and transisthmian representations and imaginaries

(Rodríguez)—valuable theoretical approaches to contextualize and analyze literary outputs of the isthmus and in its diaspora. Regarding the former, the historical and discursive development of

Pan-Central Americanism among U.S. Central Americans is proposed in Maritza Cárdenas’ dissertation Third Word Subjects: The Politics and Production of Central American-American Culture.

Published in 2009, Cárdenas has developed her original findings into the book Constituting Central

American-Americans: Transnational Identities and the Politics of Dislocation in 2018. In “Third Word

Subjects” Cárdenas argues that Central Americans in the United States are cultivating a pan-Central

American cultural identity in which U.S. Central Americans tend to identify with the isthmus instead of with a specific Central America nation. She claims that this identificatory process happens because of their shared experiences in the diaspora, such as invisibility within discourses of

Latinidad and anti-immigrant racism. She also reiterates that the cultivations of Pan-

Centralamericanism are marked by war trauma and the consequences of U.S. Cold War politics, imperialistic, and neoliberal intervention in the isthmus. In terms of shared historical experiences on the isthmus, she theorizes that this form of identarian politics has been inherited by diasporic

U.S. Central Americans through the rewriting or reimagining of the idea of La Patria Grande, a cultural nationalism forged in the early nineteenth century through discourses and sociopolitical measures that emphasized shared culture, history, and language between several isthmian nations.

Most importantly, the idea of Patria Grande was literal in that it legally bonded Guatemala,

Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua under one national umbrella. Cárdenas stresses that an understanding of discourses and performativity (s) adopted from the isthmus through the notion of Patria Grande by diasporic Central Americans will provide a better understanding of the ways that their diasporic communities in the United States, specifically in Los Angeles, utilize a deterritorialized notion of pan-Central Americanism to mobilize and strengthen their ethnic

community and collective identity.10 Via an intersectional analysis of racialized, classed, and gendered expressions of CentralAméricanismo, Cárdenas demonstrates the ways in which the

“mobilizing of the signs of ‘Central America (n)’ in the U.S. diaspora” causes affirmations and alterations of the Central American imaginary (82). Her analysis offers valuable evidence as to how

Central America and its diaspora mutually affect and dialogue with one another, a central aspect of this investigation.

In “Towards a transisthmian Central American studies,” Ana Patricia Rodríguez affirms that the transisthmus is a “cultural studies field, critical framework, and methodology for understanding

Central American cultural production, as shaped by constant discursive shifts, reconfigurations, and assemblages in historical context and extending beyond the geographical region into the Central

American diasporas” (104). Another complex aspect of Rodríguez’s notion of the transisthmian imaginary that treats diasporic art of Central Americans in the United States, in a similar manner to what I am doing here, can be located in her 2009 seminal book, Dividing the Isthmus. For example, in this text she demonstrates the ways in which the transisthmian imaginary disarticulates certain developmentalist and utopic narratives about Central America and Central American experience in the diaspora such as the successful neoliberal development supposedly caused by the Central

American Free Trade Agreement and the triumphalist migrant narrative of “El Departamento 15.”

El Departamento 15 refers to the illustration of a triumphalist migrant narrative of diaspora in El

Salvador that encourages migration but conceals the precarious sociopolitical realities of it because of the economic contribution of migrants, many of whom are “undocumented.” In relation to these

10 For another interesting dissertation related to Central Americans in the diaspora, see Oriel María Siu’s Novelas de la diáspora centroamericana y la colonialidad del poder: Hacia una aproximación decolonial al estudio de las literaturas centroamericanas (2007) in which she studies the novels written after the eighties by diasporic Central American novelists under the theoretical framework of colonial power. In this regard, she analyzes the representations of the postwar in the social imagination of the diasporic Central American novelists. Curiously, she describes the diasporic characters in these novels as focused on the interior aspects of their exiles in which they dissociate from political and social projects (29). This is the opposite of what the corpus of poets I am studying are doing.

narratives, the transisthmian methodological approach developed by Rodríguez urges scholars to read Central American literature produced in the diaspora, in the isthmus, and across isthmian nations and regional borders as connected, in dialogue, and in constant movement.

Building off of this methodology, Mauricio Espinoza and Miroslava Rosales suggest that investigations of “Contemporary Central American literature [should be] anchored in the growing reality of a region in motion that needs to be understood as existing both inside and beyond its territorial frontiers” (1 emphasis is mine). They term this type of literature trans-Central American literature. In a similar manner to Rodriguez’s claims about the transisthmus, their method of study considers the constant dialogues and crossings between literature produced in the isthmus and its diasporic communities; a demonstration of their similar sociopolitical conditions and experiences that, through literature, evidence a transnational exchange and dialogue that mirrors the hypothesis proposed in this investigation. Both of these theoretical approaches have influenced this investigations’ emphasis on movement, dialogue, and crossing between different Central

American nationalities, diasporic conditions, and genders; between the twentieth century sociopolitical realities of the isthmus and the current ones of the diaspora and Central America; and between the literary movement of twentieth century poesía comprometida and twenty-first century diasporic sociopolitically engaged poetry.

Though these studies touch on many of the same aspects of the contemporary poetry I’m analyzing, very few propose a specific connection between these authors and the literary tradition of sociopolitical poetry expressed in Central America between the 1940s and the 1980s. When speaking of poesía comprometida in this investigation, I refer to those works that exemplify a clear relationship between the individual creator and his/her society, whereby “el escritor se reconoce como individuo en un mundo en crisis. A la vez, el autor comprometido no se vuelve su mirada hacia su yo, sino que el yo se relaciona con los demás y el conflicto social” (Vasicek 116). In another perspective of poesía comprometida that connects to this investigation’s stance on what it is, what it

means. and what it does, I also prefer Rosina Cazali’s notion that poets of this literary generation decided to “declarar para comprometerse frente a la sociedad, los colectivos, la familia, los amigos,” an exercise that was amplified in several Latin American countries during the late twentieth century

a través de expresiones como la nueva canción latinoamericano, o la nueva trova cubana. La canción de carácter testimonial y revolucionaria, con alta dosis de poesía, desde sus múltiples referencias y antecedentes, proveyó un entramado musical para transmitir las utopías (45). In more specific terms, Cazali notes that the work of many poetas comprometidos, specifically in contexts of 1960s and 1970s in Guatemala, were impacted by sociopolitical images the writers discovered in the media, related to the consequences of the Cold War and in the Vietnam War. In this sense, she argues that poetas comprometidos were subjects to “la sensibilización de aquellas décadas, [que] fueron generacionales y planetarios” (42). Considering violence in Central America, she finds that poesía comprometida searches for ways to represent, comprehend, and diagnose it, especially the violence that stems from counterinsurgency which in Guatemala “la poesía fue uno de los canales más claros y comprometidos para expresarla” (42). Another perspective of the character of poesía comprometida is found in an interview with Jorge Debravo in the introduction of Antología

Mayor.

Sólo existe una clase de artista: el artista…. El artista ha de proclamarse libre, libre sobre todas las cosas, y enajenar su arte solamente en beneficio del hombre. Creo que es la única enajenación artística permisible. No han de caber en el artista prejuicios, credos, ni formas preconizadas de mirar la vida. Debe tener los ojos abiertos siempre, abiertos hasta sacarse sangre, abiertos hasta vaciarse por ellos.” (27) The editor of this prologue Joaquín Gutierrez writes that in Debravo’s poetic manifestos and poetry like these, the “eye” is important because it illuminates the true artistic path “como forma de concocimiento” that “Nos sintetizan el proceso de la creación, la fusión de la realidad y fantasía, de objetividad y subjetividad, de realismo y romanticismo, formula esta última subyacente en toda gran obra literaria (28).

This interpretation of Debravo’s ideology about poetry mirrors what first drew me to Zamora’s work, because he writes a poetry that produces knowledge about Salvadoran history, diaspora, and other current events. But he does it in a hybrid manner that mixes reality and fantasy, objectivity and subjectivity, a mixing that permits his (and other diasporic poets of this investigation’s contemporary corpus) expressions of poesía comprometida to be categorized as works of art and not just political pamphlets. As Debravo expresses in the last quote in the interview, the sociopolitical poet must open his outer eye to the realities of the world while, using his inner poetic eye to create an art that is beautiful, “que guste al hombre” (Debravo 23).

Attempts to completely define the doings of this literary movement, however, can be quite daunting because any definition that scholars come up with can be easily called into question, depending on which poeta comprometida is under analysis. Vasiceks’ notion that the poeta comprometida turns his/her gaze outside instead of to himself or herself can be questioned when one analyzes Alegría because it is in her expression of interior femenine thought that the sociopolitical arises. Moreover, Debravo’s ideas might also be questioned when one examines the work of Dalton that is highly structured around Marxist and Leninist ideologies. Because of similar contradictions that result from any attempt to define this extensive and dynamic literary movement, my stance is that poesía comprometida can be likened to a tree whose roots are represented by the poet’s sensibilities to and consciousness of sociopolitical change and crisis of any era. The branches that emit from these roots are many: revolution, violence diagnostics, feminism, indigeneity, class consciousness, etc. I see this poetic movement in its twentieth century and present-day manifestations as a writing that concerns itself with the social and political realities, issues, and dilemmas of the self and the exterior world in which the self exists. These themes can bring the poet “to sing” of sociopolitical realities of the past or present; or to the regional, national, global, or spiritual. It can even cause the poeta comprometido/a to politicize hope by imagining a future devoid of present injustices. Though it need not have a goal to change the

world in any way or move the reader towards a specific social or political consciousness or action, this aim is more common than not. My outlook on poesía comprometida includes those texts that propose a better life for humankind and need not only be tied to specific revolutionary conditions in specific countries or regions but prophesies new futures or adopts a transnational or humanist poetic vision. I also believe the poems that are comprometidos are direct and indirect. By this, I mean that they can either explicitly propose a sociopolitical issue, or they can take a more implicit route by using common poetic topos to indirectly point to the sociopolitical. I find those implicit poems of interest because many of the isthmian writers of this investigation’s twentieth century corpus were producing literature under the auspices of censorship or personal danger because of their writings. Regarding this, I consider the influence of specific historical time in this fluid definition of poesia comprometida, because some poems which would not raise an eyebrow today were quite political in the time that they were written. The works that I have chosen to reflect this definition and others in both corpus’s are those works that analyze, document, contemplate, criticize, denounce, historize, and present specific and generalized sociopolitical conditions of self, other, nation, and humanity through the medium of poetry.

The theoretical framework that I have constructed to tackle the questions raised in this investigation can be characterized as interdisciplinary as it touches on psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, contemporary visual art studies, literary studies, border studies, and diaspora studies. This approach finds its focus on how these disciplines theorize and conceptualize hybridity and relate hybridity to diaspora. I call this approach diasporic hybridity.

Since I principally analyze the manners in which diasporic condition affects how the writers of this corpus express hybridity in their poetry, one use for this theoretical approach is to comprehensively analyze each contemporary poet’s portrayal of their journeys to and their settlings in the diaspora space. Diaspora space, then, doesn’t merely consider the experience of the diasporic subject, but the subject who considers himself a native to the hostland, and even their

homeland compatriots who didn’t migrate but have a profound emotional effect on the diasporic subject. Because these portrayals of journeys and settlings tend to lead to this corpus’s poetic negotiations of two or more national or cultural spaces, I also rely on other hybridity-based mediating concepts, such as the new mestiza consciousness (Gloria Anzaldúa) and several notions of third space (Homi Bhabha). Considering diaspora, I analyze their poetry through contemporary theories of diasporic consciousness, diasporic identity, diasporic aesthetic, diasporic languages, and gendered diasporic experiences that relate to hybridity, whereby diaspora in itself refers to the world and societies created by migration (Kenny, “An Introduction”). In this light, the second part of this investigation’s title comes into play. About hybridity, I don’t only look at what hybridity is, but what it has been shown to do and create in terms of sociopolitical subversions that arise from syncopated time (Gilroy); metaphoricity and time lapse (Bhabha); and multi-temporal heterogeneity (García Canclini), concepts that are fully explicated in Chapter I.

Since deterritorialization is one driving force of hybrid expression, I employ the concept of deterritorialization, first developed by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and further developed in the context of cultural studies by Néstor García Canclini. Deterritorialization implies the movement of a social, cultural, or political practice from its old environment to a new environment.

Reterritorialization, then, comes into play when those culturally displaced elements undergo hybrid adaptations once they are shifted to the new environment (García Canclini 229). Understanding and applying these concepts helps this investigation analyze what happens when prominent aesthetics and themes of poesía comprometida is shifted from the confines of Central America to the United

States; and what happens when it is moved from the twentieth century to the twenty first century, from Spanish to English or Spanglish, and from a literary sphere dominated by men to a literary sphere dominated by women. Despite the fact that there are other terms and theories that I also consider such as J Sieglinde Lemke’s notion of diasporic aesthetic and R.B. Kitaj’s conceptualization of diasporist arts (all of which are treated in chapters I, III, and IV), I will limit myself to the

affirmation that this project’s fundamental theoretical axis are the concepts that see diaspora (and its family of concepts) as inherently linked to hybridity (and its family of concepts). This linkage serves as a portal by which I test how each poet’s diasporic condition, consciousness, and experience impacts the social and political content they include in their work. Apart from hybridity and diaspora, I use the archive and repertoire,” a theory by Diana Taylor that consider the ways that collective memory is expressed in contemporary Latin American art. Found in her book The

Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, I use this concept to delineate and analyze how the poets of this investigation’s main corpus use the Central American and U.S. archives to denounce, remember, and bring to light those tragic and unjust sociopolitical moments of history that continue to be felt in the present, whereby they employ the repertoire to enliven the movements, language, and voices that are silenced by the static character of the archive

(Taylor 208). Regarding this concept, this investigation reveals how the use of the archive and the repertoire function in poetry “blur[s] the lines between the thinking subjects and the subjects thought,” in such a way that the “‘I’ and the ‘you’ become products of each other’s experiences and memories of historical trauma, of enacted space, and of sociopolitical crisis” (Taylor 191).

Chapter I “Theories and Methods for Analyzing Diasporic Poetry” includes this dissertation’s research design. It explains and historicizes the concepts and theories surrounding hybridity and diaspora used to analyze primary literary texts. Since hybridity also relates to deterritorialization and reterritorialization, I cover theories regarding them. My main goal is to clearly explain the theories and concepts I will be using and provide brief examples of how I intend to apply them to the poetry analysis found in chapter’s III and IV. Chapter II, “Foundational

Elements of Poesía comprometida” functions as a review of the literary history and aesthetic trends related to Central American sociopolitical poetry. It puts emphasis on the writers I have chosen to establish a comparison with the contemporary diasporic poets. The goal of this chapter is to provide a panoramic and historical view of the leading groups, aesthetics, themes, and ideologies

that are part of this literary tradition. Chapter III, “A Revival, Part A” principally applies time lapse, metaphoricity, the new mestiza consciousness, third space, diaspora space and other concepts and theories of diasporic studies, to examine the ways in which diaspora and hybridity affects this corpus’s sociopolitically engaged poetry. Its aim is to understand and exemplify the impact of diaspora and hybridity on the continuities and discontinuities that their poetry presents with the textual corpus of poesía comprometida demonstrated in the previous chapter. Chapter IV “A Revival,

Part B” continues this analysis, but principally considers gendered diasporic experience, and the sociopolitical scope of diasporic language, with the same purposes of the previous chapter.

Together, these chapters are constructed to collectively provide the first comprehensive study of diasporic poetic production by writers of Central American descent in the United States, in an attempt to discover the nature of what I argue to be a poetic revival of twentieth century Central

American poesía comprometida, in a manner that is deeply affected by hybridity and diaspora, as galvanized be each writer’s diasporic condition.

Chapter II Methods for Analyzing Diasporic Poetry

Perhaps the most important foundation we can provide to uses of hybridity is the political and economic contexts that shape the variety of hybridities manifest in different cultural practices, heeding Said’s call that ‘cultural forms are hybrid, mixed, impure, and the time has come to reconnect their analysis with their actuality. —Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, Marwan M. Kraidy, 70

The corpus for this study that correlates to the literary movement of poesía comprometida is comprised of a collective sampling written between the 1940s and 1980s. Combined, they have published over 90 books of poetry, while they all have written novels, short stories, essays, and testimonials, whereby their non-fictional works present insights into each poets’ ideologies, biographies, and the historical events that have influenced their poetry. Regarding the analogous sociopolitical environments that drove their poetic production, these poets were selected because they all shared the view, at some point in their literary trajectory, that the writer has a responsibility to improve society through a creation of texts that denounce inequality and injustices, rather in the past, present, or even the future (Aparicio 28). Some of the most immediate issues that triggered their works were: the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-92), the guerrilla uprisings in Nicaragua that led to the Sandinista Revolution’s triumph in 1979, and the Guatemalan Civil War

(1960-96). This literary production was also fed by pressing social issues outside of Central

America, including, the worldwide fear of the atomic bomb due to Cold War and the woman’s suffrage and feminist movements. In response to these social and political issues and movements in the isthmus and beyond, these poets were selected because they fused experimental and traditional poetic styles with sociopolitical protest.

For Claribel Alegría, I have sampled poems from the following collections: Acuario (1955),

Aprendizaje (1970), Luisa en el país de la realidad (1978 ), Pasaré a cobrar y otros poems (1973),

Raíces (1974), Sobrevivo (1978), and Vía única (1965) .11 The poems sampled from Ernesto

Cardenal come from Epigramas (1961), Hora 0 (1957), Salmos (1971), and Homenaje a los indios americanos (1973). I have also chosen his poem “Coplas.” The poems sampled from Roque Dalton proceed from the poem “El Mar” and the collections, El turno del ofendido (1962 ), La ventana al rostro (1962), Las historias prohibidas del pulgarcito (1974), Poemas clandestinos (1987), Taberna y otros lugares (1969), and Un libro rojo para Lenin (1970). As for supplementary materials, I employ the essays, El intelectual y la sociedad (1969) and Poetry and Militancy in Latin America:

(1963).12 The poem samples for analysis of Jorge Debravo are taken from Antologia mayor (1974),

Consejos para Cristo al comenzar el año (1960), Digo (1965), El devocionario del amor sexual (1963),

Milagro abierto (1969), and Nosotros los hombres (1966). In supplementation, I use his prologue to

Consejos para Cristo and an interview found in Antología mayor.13 The poems sampled from del

Valle proceed from the collections Antología mínima (1956) and Nostalgia y belleza del amor

(1970).14 The poems samples of Otto Raúl González’s work come from Cementerio clandestino

(1973), Elegia mayor (1955), Tun y Chimiria (1978), Voz y voto del geranio (1943), A fuego lento

(1946), Sombras era (1948), Oratorio al maíz (1970). I also include his articles “Miguel Ángel

Asturias, El gran lengua” (1974) and “Poesía contemporánea de Guatemala: Los poetas del ‘’Nuevo

Signo’” (1978).15

The sampling of U.S. diasporic poets of Central American descent was also chosen from a population whose exact number is difficult to pinpoint. However, the decisive criteria outlined in

11The collections Acuario, Pasaré a cobrar y otros poemas, Raíces, and Sobrevivo have been extracted from the anthology edited by Eva Guerrero-Guerrero entitled Aunque dure un instante (2017). 12 El turno del ofendido, La ventana al rostro, and Taberna y otros lugares procede from the anthology Poesía Roque Dalton edited by La honda casa de las Américas Cuba in 1980. Whereas Las historias is taken from the ninth edition divulgated by UCA Editores in 1988. “El Mar” is found in the anthology Roque Dalton Antología edited by Juan Carlos Berrio in 1995 on page 42. It is said to have been written in La Habana, Cuba. 13 Milagro Abierto (original publication date unknown) and Consejos para Cristo al comenzar el año are housed in the anthology, Milagro abierto edited by Editorial Costa Rica in 1969. 14 From the anthology, I sample the collection, La ruta fulgurante (1956). 15 Aside from Voz y voto de geranio, all these collections are found in the anthology, Huitzil uan tuxtli (colibrí y conejo: Medio siglo de poesía edited by the Fondo de cultura economía in Mexico in 1998.

chapter I was implemented in their selection. Their collections of poetry implement sociopolitical issues and histories that connect and differentiate the United States and Central America, whereby their poems often express diasporic tensions that summon complex processes of adaptation to the hostland; and remembrances and nostalgia for the homeland, whereby their approach to these issues are influenced by their positionalities in the diaspora. Consequently, this sampling represents a collective of poets with different spatial, national, ethnic, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds, that give way to literary expressions and cultural mixtures and social aspects of diasporic life (Clifford 253). This diversity permits this study to portray the fluid nature of the Central American U.S. diasporic experience, that emerges from the dynamic relationships between individual, diaspora, host, and home. (Clifford 251-6; Vasu 85). With three female poets, this corpus was also designed to better analyze the rise of women’s diasporic writing that tends to highlight the social and political struggles, and experiences of women and girls of color in the

United States and Central America. This sampling, then, responds to Clifford’s call that scholars engaging in diaspora studies should pay more attention to women’s diasporic experience, because from them, one can delineate the ways in which some diasporic women struggle with “the material and spiritual insecurities of exile, with the demands of family and work, and with the old and new patriarchies,” whereby their gendered experiences in the diaspora also highlight how they “remain selectively attached to and empowered by a ‘home’ culture and a tradition” (Clifford 259 emphasis is mine). I have emphasized “selectively” because some of these diasporic poets put forth poetic voices who reject certain notions of Central American cultural norms that they see as patriarchal, whereas they are empowered by other cultural traditions of the homeland. In the work of this corpus, the centering on gender in diaspora is equally crucial because Central American female migratory rates have increased since the twentieth century. According to Laurie Cook Heffron, the migration rates of Central American women have tripled since the early 1990s. Moreover, rape continues to be an unfortunate reality of many of their diasporic journeys. This data is reiterated in

Oliva Corado’s testimonial-based collection Destierro. Considering the many differentiating aspects of women’s experiences that stem from diasporic “roots” and “routes,” this selection of predominantly female voices allows this investigation to effectively explore the many ways that gender plays a role in the continuities and discontinuities in the poetic sampling of poesía comprometida. This type of theoretical focus on gendered diaspora allows this study to better approach the ways in which contemporary diasporic females disconnect and remember the ancestral homeland in strategic ways, that support their emotional, psychological, and physical survival and adaptation in the hostland.

The texts that I chose to analyze them are rather brief because they are emerging authors.

Supplementary information about them and their work comes from essays, autobiographical, and testimonial pieces that they have written. I have also selected interviews and other discursive materials about them such as blogs or informal essays usually located online. For Cynthia Guardado

(1985), overall analysis focuses on her one published collection, Endeavor (2017) and individual published poems from her as of yet unpublished collection, Cenizas (2020). I have included published texts from Cenizas because it presents her visions of El Salvador as a second -generation

Salvadoran-American. Whereas, her first book focuses on several aspects of the United States with a focus on ancestry, race relations, violence against women, and everyday life in the economically marginalized neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In this collection, very few poems are set in El

Salvador. For analysis of Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s approach to sociopolitical poetry, I employ her one published collection Matria (2017). I also use her article entitled “I See Myself in Her: Three

Women Poets Through the Lenses of Time, Sexuality, and Nationhood” (2019). These works were selected to better understand the ways the poet’s feminist approach to poesía comprometida. I also am very interested in her expression of linguistic and sociocultural hybridity that causes her poems to waver between experiences in the United States and Central America. I will also be pulling from images in her photo-essay project “Through_the_bulletproof_glass,”as evidence of the development

of her diasporic consciousness because these images (taken over a period of ten years) were prime material she used to write Matria. The photos also portray the ways she uses the documental style in her poetry, an issue I will return to in chapter’s III and IV of this investigation. For Ilka Oliva

Corado, I use five of her eight published poetry collections for analysis. They are: Invierno (2019),

Destierro (2016), Desarraigar (2017), Niña de arrabal (2016), and Nostalgia (2018).16 I chose these collections because they relate to Guatemalan society and politics, the experiences of irregular migration, and life in the hostland without migratory documentation. Whereas, other collections from this sampling have a more lyrical inclination and tend towards themes like nostalgia. In terms of supplementary materials, I have selected her testimonials/chronicles, Historia de una indocumentada travesía en el desierto Sonora-Arizona (2014) and Post-Frontera (2014) because they are critical to understand the effects that her journey from Guatemala to the United States and her subsequent life in the diaspora have had on her poetry. The main analytical focus for this author is her testimonial poetic voice, her gendering of the diasporic space, and her diasporic aesthetic that travels between life in Guatemala as an economically underprivileged adolescent, traumatic experiences during border crossing, and experiences in the United States as working a migrant woman. For Javier Zamora, I have selected his first full collection Unaccompanied (2017); a text that embodies his surrealistic, irreverent, and nostalgic approach to the sociopolitical. In terms of supplementary materials, I use an opinion piece that he has written for the New York Times “I

Have a Green Card Now, But Am I Welcome?” (2018). I have chosen this piece because it adds to the biographical data that is already known about him. More importantly, it shows Zamora’s critical perspective toward present U.S. migratory policies. I also consider one of his most recently

16 I have added the publication dates, as shown according to when they were officially published for sale on Amazon.com. However, as the poet mentioned to me in a personal interview conducted in 2018, the dates they were published are not a true indication of when she wrote them. Since all her poems are self-published, I think that the most important thing we should remember is that Corado emerged as a writer in and through her diaspora. Thus, the fact that all her works were written and published after her migration to Chicago in 2005, is the most vital aspect of her biography when it comes to critical analysis of her work, as opposed to the date they were published in Amazon.

published poems “Vivíamos en el pulgarcito,” a title similar to Dalton’s collage poem Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito (1974). I chose this piece because it indicates the pains related to deterritorialization that incites feelings of being increasingly distanced from the ancestral homeland linguistically, culturally, and socially as years in the hostland accumulate. The analytical focus of these texts is to understand the sociopolitical evolution in his poetry from an unaccompanied child minor nine years old to a successful U.S.-based poet. Each text selected form the foundations to critically evaluate the transformations in his hybrid expression that result from his adaptations to, and resistances of U.S. cultural assimilation.

As a unit, both the female and male voices of this main corpus of diasporic poets were systematically chosen because their writing is influenced by specific sociohistorical events. They address topics that relate to the Central American in the United States today, such as irregular migration, exploitation of Central American labor migrants, and the treatment of child and adult migrants by U.S and Mexican Border Patrol and the many violent groups they encounter during their journeys to the United States. Regarding the U.S. social and political terrain, they tend to denounce and shed light on racism, terrorism, police violence, gentrification, and poverty. This is specifically prominent in the poetry of U.S. born Salvadoran poet Cynthia Guardado. Considering this corpus’ interpretations of the homeland, their poetry touches on Central American collective memory of wars, displacement, and genocide in the colonial period and in the twentieth century. Of the present states of their homeland, their writing tends to portray the positive aspects of the homes they know, remember, and love, such as its rich histories, landscapes, and cultures. All of these topics together culminate in their collective diasporic poetic vision that led me to select them in this study. Characterized by its transtemporal, transhistorical, transnational, and heavily gendered nature, a theoretical framework compromised of concepts, notions, and theories of hybridity and diaspora can and must be used to properly analyze this collectives’ sociopolitically poetry.

Hybrid Processes of Creation, Survival, and Subversion

In Renato Rosaldo’s forward to Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, he defines hybridity as the process of mixing and the results. As Marwan M. Kraidy recalls in in Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization(2005), in the eighteenth century, early definitions of the term can be traced to biological and botanical studies. Due to early European colonization and colonization, the linkages between early hybrid theories carried out by scientists such as George Buffon and Joseph Enrest Rovard were “indeed concerned with the prospects of fertility between races (Young 158; Kraidy 49). Nonetheless, hybridity wasn’t the only term used during this period to analyze mixtures between people of different ethnicities. As Kraidy indicates, hybridity has a wide range of sister terms whose definitions are vital to grasping the full scope of what hybridity has meant historically. Syncretism is one of them. This term indicates the simultaneous adherence to distinct religious beliefs (García- Canclini “Introduction Culturas híbridas xxxii). Transculturation is another mixture term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando

Ortiz. It refers to the transformative process that a society undergoes when it undertakes foreign cultural materials, whereby the fusion of the indigenous and the foreign create a new and original cultures (Taylor 104). Creolization indicates racial and linguistic mixtures between two different cultures or races dependent on what race is being considered as creole. For whites, it meant purity and elite status, whereas for black it denotes racial mixture and a subordinate position (Kraidy 56).

In Latin America, mestizaje has been most favored term to refer to racial mixing, whereby mestizo/a, indicates the offspring of the European settler and the Latin American native (Taylor

94). Because the first “mestizo” recorded historically was born to the Spanish conquistador Hernán

Cortéz and his Mayan interpreter known as Malintzin or La Malinche, the term mestizaje carries a history of unequal power relations, racial, and sexual domination. This was one cause of the inseparability of mestizo/mestiza from the history of conquest and colonization (Taylor 95). Still, mestizaje took an important ideological turn in the early twentieth century in Latin America,

becoming a fundamental piece of Latin American nation building and identarian politics. In the context of Mexican history, it began to celebrate the centrality of race and racial intermingling in the construction of post-independence Mexican national identity. This turn of attitudes towards the consequences of mestizaje is underscored by many of the affirmations found in the essay La raza cósmica by Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. In this essay, he predicts that a fifth race or a

“cosmic race” will arise from hybrid cultural mixtures in the Américas. This new race, he writes, will take on the best qualities of each race inherited and create a superior civilization, unlike many

European racial theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who used science in their attempts to prove the superiority of the white races and warn against further mixing:

Las mezclas de razas consumada de acuerdo con las leyes de la comodidad social, la simpatía y la belleza, conducirá a la formación de un tipo infinitamente superior a todos los que han existido. El cruce de contrarios conforme a la ley mendeliana de herencia producirá variaciones discontinuas y sumamente complejas, como son múltiples y diversos los elementos de la raza humana…Las épocas más ilustres de la Humanidad han sido, precisamente, aquellos en que varios pueblos disimiles se pone en contacto y se mezclan (125).17 I have used this conceptualization on racial and cultural mixtures by Vasconcelos to segue toward what hybridity has come to indicate in the twentieth and twenty first centuries in the realm of cultural and postcolonial studies.18

W.E.B. Dubois (1868) came up with one of the first notions of cultural hybridity in The Souls of Black Folk, when he theorized that recently freed slaves were endowed with a double consciousness of African and North American culture and identities, in which both were inextricable to their ways of being. Following this theory, it is the Indian-English scholar and critical

17 This affirmation is like Gloria Anzaldúa’s prediction in her theoretical text, Borderlands/La Frontera, in which she asserts, “En unas pocas centurias, the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms, it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos—that is a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the way we behave, la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner” (102)

theorist Homi K. Bhabha (1949) who is renowned for applying hybridity to describe and analyze several processes of interethnic contact, decolonization, and the subversive ways the postcolonial subject questions and shatters the homogenous notions of national time, space, history, and language, as a result of hybrid cultural identities and the construction of hybrid times. A scholar who represents this shift of hybridity from science to culture is Argentine Néstor García-Canclini

(1939), an anthropologist who uses hybridity and notions of hybrid processes to analyze the mixing of ethnic and religious elements and advanced technologies and modern/postmodern social processes (Rosaldo, ”Forward,” Culturas hibridas xxxiv). Through this approach to hybridity, García

Canclini highlights how borders between countries and large cities condition the specific formats, styles, and contradictions of hybridization. A crucial concept of his intellectual thought is that hybridity also occurs under specific social and historical conditions; and among systems of production and consumption that operate coercively and can be appreciated in the lives of many migrants. Comparing these two scholars’ work, John Krasinski’s text “Hybridity in a Transnational

Frame: Latin Americanist and Post-colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies“ points out that García

Canclini takes hybridity beyond Bhabha’s notion of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, by providing a historical account which illuminates the “oblique powers that are involved in the mixing of liberal institutions and authoritarian habits” (9).

Turning again to Bhabha, one notion of hybridity used to study diasporic poetry in this investigation is time lapse. Found in diasporic or postcolonial discourses of resistance, time lapse produces disruptions and subversions of master narratives put into place by hegemonic, colonial, and postcolonial national authorities. These discursive acts founded in time lapse, create discursive spaces in which acts of colonialism repeat and haunt the homogenous national time, as they revive the presence of events that happened in other countries, in other worlds, and in other eras, previously through to be obliterated. Through these discourses that express time lapse, events,

attitudes, and ideas that shatter homogenous master narratives, cultures of resistance accompany modernity through their supplementary force that makes its presence in contemporary society

It is the belated postcolonial19 who marginalizes and singularizes the totality of national culture. He is the history that happened elsewhere or overseas; his postcolonial, migrant presence does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of culture, but articulates the narrative of cultural difference which can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye (“Our Neighbors” 7). By applying and looking for examples of time lapse in the work of diasporic poets, this investigation gains the capacity to analyze which enunciative acts in their poetry are used to disrupt and subvert master narratives propagated in the United States and in Central America, whereby an understanding of time lapse functions as a tool to analyze which ways and under what circumstances they allow their poetic voices to travel in time and space, so that they might gain the capacity to narrate historical and collective moments from the past.

García Canclini also discusses a class of hybrid time. He calls this multi-temporal heterogeneity, defined as a historical predicament caused by the failure of the modern and modernizing projects in Latin America to completely substitute the traditional. This concept is vital when attempting to understand how the sociopolitical message of each poet functions, because the traditional ideologies that still exist in Central America and Central American culture are present in

19 In Bhabha’s “Our Neighbors, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections of Survival, he expands the postcolonial subject he speaks about here to include the diasporic/migrant subject for many reasons. Clifford concludes that like “hybridity” and “mestizaje,” “the postcolonial and diasporic subject are not identical subjects, but they overlap and together denounce a domain of complex cultural formations produced by and partially subverting colonial dichotomies and hierarchies” (366). Because the term postcolonial subject has been under sharp critique because of its restriction to colonial experiences that ignore the pre-colonial past, scholars might increasingly consider a shift from the “postcolonial” to the “diasporic” not only because of the sociopolitical issues that stem from controversial diasporas but the diasporic subjects’ resistance to colonial structures and discourses and to anti-immigrant and neoliberal development discourse show that they are very similar to postcolonial discourse (see Guardado’s poem’ “White Savior” (53-4) and “To the Man who Murdered my Cousin” (25-6). See also Zamora’s’ poem “June 10, 1999” (79-91). See also, Oliva-Corado’s “Tu color les repugna” from Destierro, pp. 95-6). In short, the connections between twenty-first century diasporic experience and sociopolitical issues that relate to (neo)colonial attitudes and structures of domination, racism, and classism resurface as anti-immigrant backlash and new nationalisms that reinvigorate fear of the other, much like what Donald Trump is subversively promoting, should help us understand why scholarly critique is moving towards the equalization of the “postcolonial subject” with the “diasporic subject.”

their poetry, alongside contemporary elements, and notions of social change. The recognition of time lapse and multi-temporal heterogeneity in their work will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of how the diasporic poems in question disrupt and subvert master narratives. It also helps this investigation delineate which elements of Central American and U.S. past traditions they positively accept into the heterogenous time of their poetry and which ones they denounce as obstacles to their visions of a more equitable future.

In a similar hybridity theory, García Canclini’s theories of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as driving forces of the creation of hybrid cultures guides this study in several critical directions. 20 Deterritorialization and reterritorialization considers the ways in which multidirectional migrations and trans-nationalization of symbolic markets relativize binary paradigms between the “national” and the “foreign” (García Canclini 290). Deterritorialization displaces sociocultural expressions, practices, and traditions from their original context to new ones; and reterritorialization signifies the “partial territorial re-localizations of old and new symbolic productions” (García Canclini 229). Together, these processes question the stagnant association of the national with the popular. The “positive” effects of these movements are that the inequalities between the “first” and “third” world become more uneven because of the

planetary simultaneity of information, the adaptation of certain international knowledge and images to the habits of each community, and the use of satellite and computers in cultural diffusion… that impede our continuing to see the confrontations of peripheral countries as frontal combats with geographically defined nations. (229) What he is getting at is that the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of symbolic markets have the ability to decrease to economic and cultural power that the “first world” has over the

“third world.” This is due to the fact that this movement often puts mores agency in the hands of

20 It must be remembered that García-Canclini borrows and reworks these terms from Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s landmark book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A piece they describe that as a book “that has neither object nor subject… where there are lines and territories, where there are lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and stratification” (Introduction).

subjects who move cultural products, traditions or information from the national space to the transnational space, and adapt them to new markets, places, audiences, or consumers through more accessible technologies. For instance, he discusses how indigenous artisans in Mexico can easily gain access to international knowledge and markets that can help them produce more or have more control over their product. This is certainly important to literature because these markets that

García Canclini discusses and the migrations of peoples who bring their culture with them to new places and reterritorialize them, means that an author like Ilka Oliva Corado can publish her books in Spanish in the United States, and diffuse them worldwide in translation or on their original language. Or, in the case of Zamora, his ongoing task of translating Unaccompanied to Spanish demonstrates that he is preparing his work for reterritorialization in Central and Latin America so that people there can gain awareness of what tends to occur during irregular migration to the

United States and the aftermath (Córdava). In both cases, the author’s access to internet deterritorialization from one national context to another reckon with the inequality in the book business in which publishers can continually silence those others who they rather not hear speak

(Nguyen, “MELUS Conference 2019”).21 Though these are some of the positive effects of these displacements of cultural productions and traditions, there are negative consequences that must be considered with any cultural analysis of how hybridity arises from the movement of one cultural practice or tradition from its natural location to another (deterritorialization) and the adaptations that it undergoes once it begins to further develop in that new (international/transnational) space or market (reterritorialization).

The “dark side” of deterritorialization is exemplified by the discrimination and displacement of many Central American migrants, themes that are emphasized by each of the authors in this study’s corpus of contemporary diasporic poets. In general, this aspect of García

21 Underground Histories keynote speaker and author of The Refugees (2017) and Nothing Ever Dies (2016). He also was also the recipient of the Pulitzer prize in fiction in 2016

Canclini’s theory helps this investigation analyze which cultural aspects of Central America and U.S. cultures are being deterritorialized from Central America to the United States and vice-versa. I think it also important to consider deterritorialization-reterritorialization both ways because all these poets aside from Oliva Corado consistently engage in physical transnational travel.

Nevertheless, for the diasporic subject travel isn’t only physical but emotional and psychological.

For example, Oliva Corado speaks about traveling to and being in Guatemala in her subconscious and in her dreams from the diaspora (“El abuelo” Nostalgia 23-5). In this sense, processes related to deterritorialization and reterritorialization helps this investigation better understand the continuities and discontinuities between contemporary diasporic poetry and poesía comprometida, as a result of its displacement from its isthmian origin to its various diasporic locations. The analysis of these nuances also leads us to new questions regarding the way the diasporic poets

“reterritorialize” elements of this sociopolitical literary tradition based on their diasporic condition.

In relation to deterritorialization, another concept related to hybridity in the work of

Bhabha is translation. Translation is how one culture translates another through a different cultural lens. To explain this act, Bhabha relies on German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s (1892-

1940) example of translation, which likens the task of the translator to the piecing together of different sized fragments of a broken vessel, in such a way that they follow one another in the smallest details. Following this logic, Bhabha asserts that the translation of one culture via another will never be a perfect replica of the original. Rather, it must form itself according to the manner of the meaning of the original, whereby the translated culture turns out to be something quite, but not exactly like the original. It forms, as Benjamin would put it “a greater language” that accounts for the details of the original but is hybrid. Through this notion, this investigation questions how

Central American diasporic poets piece together different sized elements of their Central American and U.S. identities and sociopolitical realities in order to translate them into the “greater language” of diaspora. An example of this is Lytton Reglado’s poem “La Mano,” a text that grapples with the

translation of a myriad of broken pieces; Central American children on a perilous journey, the beauty of the Salvadoran landscape, and the safety the poetic speaker’s child enjoys because of the privileged socioeconomic status she has in El Salvador. Written in English with a Spanish title, the poem describes the joys and pains of her ancestral homeland while using her North American literary vision to translate the different sizes fragments into the “greater language” of what El

Salvador looks like to her; a mother who was raised with privilege in Miami yet is ever conscious that the majority of the women and children who are currently migrating from El Salvador do not share the same socioeconomic stability. Though this is merely one example, it is clear that an understanding the ways in which each diasporic poet translates culture and society indicates the ways that their complex sociopolitical consciousnesses is founded in hybridity itself. In further chapters, I demonstrate how authors translate sociopolitical contemporary realities and histories of

The United States from a Central American perspective and vice-versa. Through the implementation of translation, as it relates to their processes of hybridity, this investigation thoroughly analyzes the “greater language” of sociopolitical nature that they are creating from the fragments of Central American and U.S. cultures, identities, languages, societies, memories, and histories, in which their way of “seeing” doesn’t have a permanent space of enunciation. Rather, is wavers between “here” and “there” depending on what they are protesting or presenting.

Another vital act of subversion related to hybridity is Bhabha’s notion of metaphoricity.

Even though the word itself evokes the poetic “metaphor,” it is a traveling theory that applies to the people of imagined, migrant, or metropolitan communities whose writings truncate the idea that the space of the modern nation is simply horizontal. Bhabha affirms that this metaphoric movement requires a sort of doubleness [sic] in writing, which means a temporality of representations that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centered casual logic, whereby the subjects who use metaphoricity in their writing, articulate the “worn out metaphors of the resplendent nation locate themselves in another narrative of entry permits, passports, and work

permits that at once preserve and proliferate, bind, and breach human rights of the nations” (“From

DissemiNation”). At this point the reader might recall the opening poem of Unaccompanied which juxtaposes the rose, the fake passport. and the marañon trees; images that mark the creation of a doubled writing that subverts the idea of a U.S. resplendent nation. Whereas the passport breaches this unaccompanied minor’s human right to go home; an example metaphoricity’s tendency to proceeds from the people who “speak the discourse of the melancholic and the migrant ”(“To abuelita Neli” 3),Consequently, the metaphor “transfers the meaning of home and belonging across the ‘middle passage, the Central European steppes, or across the distance that spans the imagined community of the nation-people” (“From DissemiNation”). This investigation applies it to how each diasporic poets put into words—in the homeland and diaspora languages— what they feel has been lost from the ancestral homeland via their own, their parent’s, or their kin’s migration from Central

America to the United States.

Also developed by Bhabha, “third space” is not exactly what the postcolonial or diasporic subject speaks of but the contradictory and often ambivalent spaces from which they speak. In The

Location of Culture, Bhabha defines the third space as the interstices between colliding cultures that give rise to something different yet comprised of elements from both. In Bhabha’s recent essay Our

Neighbors, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections of Survival he reveals that his previous “third space” theories centered on the interstitial moment whereby hybrid identities form must also be understood as sites of witness that stirs social justice (6). This notion of the third space as “place of witness” signifies a turn towards the neighbor or stranger; an act that can uncover the “third as graspable, even if unstable site of strategy and decision, be it political or philosophical” (Bhahbha

7). In simpler terms, Bhahbha is (re)constructs the third space as Emmanuel Levinas would; as the beginning of justice where social consciousness of other peoples, times, languages, and texts can emerge (Bhabha 6; Butler 135 ) Bhabha’s first notion of the “third space” orients this investigation towards illuminating analyses that focus on the ways that each poet reveals the hybrid results and

sociopolitical consequences of cultural collisions between the United States and Central America.

Whereas the notion of third space as a site of witness challenges the limits of the self in the act of reaching out and becoming conscious of what is liminal or written off into the margins of time and historicity. I analyze the ways that the contemporary collective’s poetry presents a living testimony of those spaces between the United States and Central America that are in direct relation to diasporic experience. In a sense, these are spaces that the non-Central American reader must encounter in order to commence the turn towards the Central American migrant, who has, since the Cold war been, painted as the stranger. It is here, in these witness spaces, where social justice can and must begin. One common third space scenery that all these diasporic poets present is the desert or the border. This space is political because of how migration is intricately tied to Central

American cultural identity and sociopolitical struggle in the United States. It is a place between two countries, a place of ambivalence, and of loss. Guardado describes it poignantly in her surrealistic piece “Migration,” when the poetic speaker confesses that

I’ve been dreaming of waking in the open desert… the sun rolls across the sky and i’m stuck somewhere between trauma and hope i’m full and heavy like another country sadness is everything i’ve forgotten. (98) As the poet speaker’s self is diminished through the small “i,” the implications of liminality, of being between, forgetting home, and knowing that the middle passage (the border) is a dichotomic space made up of trauma from the past that bleeds into hopes for the future is felt. “Third space” exemplified in this text relates to Gloria Anzaldúa’s Chicana perspective of the concept, as proposed in her influential book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldúa’s third space, however, begins on the Mexican/ North American border, whereby it is described as a “herida abierta where the third world grates against the first and bleeds and before a scab forms it hemorrhages again; the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture

(25, emphasis is mine). The subjects who inhabit her idea of the third space border cultures are “los atravesados…the queer, the mulato, the half-breed…the ones who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (25). These are the people who are more prone to develop la facultad or elements of “the new mestiza consciousness.” In chapter III “Entering the Serpent,”

Anzaldúa defines la facultad as the capacity to see in surface phenomenon the meaning of deeper realities, and that those who develop this sense tend to be people who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world. They are women, homosexuals, dark-skinned, outcasts, marginalized, persecuted, and foreign—identities that are often exhibited and stressed in this studies’ corpus of contemporary poetry. Whereas, la facultad is explained as the ability to perforate visual reality and delve into the underworld or sense the spirit of ones’ ancestors (58). Of this she asserts, how the

Mexican or Indian who lives in the western world is told to ignore these senses:

I remember listening to the voices of the wind as a child and understanding its messages. Los espíritus that ride the back of the south wind. I remember their exhalation blowing in through the slits of the door during those hot Texas afternoons. A gust of wind, buffeting the house, everything trembling. We’re not supposed to remember such otherworldly forces. We’re supposed to ignore, kill those fleeting images of the soul’s presence and the spirit’s presence. We’ve been taught to believe that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God… Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psyche experiences real…I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence of the ‘other world’ was mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality, the ‘official’ reality of the rational… (58) This theoretical notion is vital when thinking of the work of those diasporic poets who find their psyche’s split between ideologies of the “western world” (i.e. the United States) due to the fact that many spiritual and indigenous ideologies continue to operate in the social imaginary of Latin and

Central America despite modernity and modern practices (García Canclini). The maintenance of the spiritual ways of thinking— that allows the felt presence of the unseen worlds, the underworld, and the ancestors — is one strategy that several poets of this investigation’s contemporary corpus use to resist complete assimilation to U.S. identity. For example, I employ la facultad to better

understand how the poetic production of the contemporary diasporic poets under study attests to their acceptance of several indigenous mythologies instead of solely relying on the “official reality of the rational reasoning mode which is prominent in leading western ideologies (Anzaldúa 58-9).

Likewise, I use Anzaldúa’s related concept of the “new mestiza consciousness.” This consciousness accepts the ambiguities involved with being hybrid, that is neither one ethnicity or nationality, but both “

Because I, a mestiza, continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente22 (“Una lucha de fronteras/ A Struggle of Borders:” (99) This poem sums up the author’s visions regarding the new mestiza consciousness. However, the act of walking out of one culture to another doesn’t mean that the other culture is left behind. Rather, it becomes attaches itself to the psyche, presenting itself when the subject deems it most necessary or applicable to their reality; a negotiation that often correlates to the social or political moment at hand. Anzaldúa claims that her new mestiza consciousness appropriates the Indian women’s history of resistance to strengthen her feminism, while she rejects her Mexican culture’s patriarchal ways of crippling women by passing them off as “lowly burras bearing humility with dignity (43). This selection and rejection of cultural tradition doubles back to Anzaldúa’s notion of the liminal as a space where culture altercating negotiations take place, that are dependent on the sociopolitical stance of the subject, whether they be feminist, Marxist, spiritual, or queer. The new mestiza

22 I have left this poem in the original way it appears in the text.

consciousness becomes quite political when it begins to break down the subject-object duality that has kept the subject “prisoner” to the binary spectrum of black-white, male-female, rational- spiritual, Mexican-American, gay-straight. In contrast, the work of the new-mestiza consciousness is revealed through images that transcend dualities because “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could…bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (102). What Anzaldúa is saying here is that those who speak from the interstices located between these dualities and who psychically possess divided (yet simultaneous) histories, languages, cultures, and thoughts can begin the work of healing the splits that divide mankind. I am not saying that hybrid poetry or cultures can heal the divides in the world, but it can indeed subvert them by developing a tolerance for contradiction that doesn’t simply function by bonding the severed pieces of each culture –like Benjamin’s broken vessel—, but by creating a ”greater language” via translation of one culture through the eyes of another that emphasizes each cultures’ strengths and weakness. By searching the diasporic poems for expressions of new mestiza consciousness, this study questions how each poet uses an image or various to transcend those dualities that continue to divide Central Americans from North

Americans, men from women, and Spanish from English, Salvadoran and Mexican. Above all, through the negotiations that they make between their Central American and U.S. ideologies, cultures, and languages, and their sociopolitical implications.

Diaspora Criterion

Kevin Kenny writes that the word diaspora derives from the Greek verb diasperein, a compound of “dia” (over or through) and “sperein” (to scatter or sow). In the original Greek diaspora referred to a destructive process, rather than to a place or to a group of people (Kenny 1).

Since diaspora assumed its most familiar form in Jewish history, definition of it that correlate to the forced movement of peoples emerge from biblical narratives, whereby displacement, exile, and longing are central topics. Most accounts of the Jewish diaspora begin with the Babylonian captivity

in 586 BCE. Centuries later, globally scattered peoples have adopted the Jewish model to explain their own suffering related to displacement. Nonetheless, Kenny warns that one should be cautious about applying such a theologically specific concept to other people in other times and places, because it transmits specific claims about human suffering, salvation and the direction of history, which are by no means universal (6). Broadly defined as the world and peoples created by migration, people who use the term “diaspora,” today often use the notion of diaspora to make claims about nationalism, race, or the politics of identity that are irrelevant to earlier historical periods or bound to the theological boundaries of the original Jewish model. (Kenny 8). In this way, its criterion, or what makes a community “diasporic” has been highly scrutinized, debated, and articulated in both new and traditional ways.

Rogers Brubaker affirms that the use of “diaspora” in the world of academia has been proliferated in the last decade, with a sharp shift in perspective. While the old perspective was assimilationist, nationalist, and teleological because it relied on nation-states as units of analysis and assumed that migrant journeys were unidirectional and led to assimilation; new diasporic perspectives sustain that migratory movements follow diverse trajectories and maintain multifarious networks. Of traumatically dispersed diasporic populations, scholars have begun to analyze these nuances. Notwithstanding the proliferations of diaspora into semantic, conceptual, and disciplinary spaces, Brubaker identifies three core elements that remain widely understood as constitutive of diaspora. They are dispersion, boundary maintenance, and homeland orientation.

Dispersion is the most widely accepted because it indicates that subjects of diaspora must have undergone forced, semi-forced, or traumatic displacements, whereby this dispersion must have crossed inside or outside of state borders.

The next criterion of diasporic identity is boundary maintenance. This involves the preservation by the diasporic subject of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis a host society or societies.

These boundaries can be maintained by deliberate resistance to assimilation through forms of self-

segregation or as an unintended consequence of social exclusion. This criterion of diaspora enables one to speak of diaspora as a distinct community bounded by a unique and active solidarity, as well as by social networks that link members of diaspora in different states to a transnational community. This criterion is heavily disputed. About this, Stuart Hall claims that the diaspora experience is defined by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity that lives with and through difference via hybridity (235). But where is the line drawn between boundary maintenance— staying connected to the homeland through non-assimilation and difference with the hostland culture—; and boundary erosion— letting the homeland culture hybridize with the hostland culture— begin and end? This investigation nuances this tension between “letting go” and “holding on” to home, as it relates to the social and political underpinnings of this heavily debated issues of contemporary theories of diaspora.

Another vital criterion of diaspora that has expanded via linkages with hybridity is that of homeland orientation. This criterion says that subjects of diaspora must orientate themselves to a real or imagined homeland, as an authoritative source of value, identity, and loyalty. Earlier concepts of diaspora defined the elements of homeland orientation, as the maintaining of a collective memory or myth about the homeland; regarding the ancestral homeland as the true-ideal home and final place of return; the collective commitment to the maintenance or restoration of the ancestral homeland; and continual personal or vicarious relationship to the ancestral homeland in a way that shapes one’s identity. Contemporary scholars like Gilroy and Vasu, have deemphasized this criterion because they believe that contemporary migrants are not only oriented to a single homeland nor bound by a teleology of return. Rather, homeland orientation is centered around an ability to recreate a culture in diverse localities, through hybridity and hybrid processes already partially exemplified in this chapter´s section on hybridity. In the article “Revisiting the Diaspora

‘diaspora,’” Roger Brubaker asserts that scholars seeking to explain, analyze, or critique the

experience of migrants can find an analytical framework of broad historical and cultural range within several contemporary theories of diaspora (4).

Playing off of this criterion and debate around contemporary diaspora in academia . Central

Americans in Movement applies contemporary theories of diaspora that parallel notions of hybridity and hybrid processes in order to better explain, understand, and problematize the diasporic poetry of four poets of Central American descent. To do this, I’ve drawn from diaspora theories that were articulated after the 1990s that center on “roots and routes,” a term I have borrowed from Paul

Gilroy’s Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1973) and The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double

Consciousness (1993). Taken from these critical texts, the concept of “roots” and “routes” has become a useful tool for critical engagement with artistic expressions of contemporary diasporic populations. “Roots” is understood as the objects and relationships that connect diasporic populations to a common homeland or sociopolitical experience. For the Black Atlantic, several elements of their diasporic roots are the “Middle Passage, old and new racist systems of dominance, and economic constraints on labor migration” (Clifford, 263). “Routes” signifies the diasporic communities’ paths of integration in the hostland society and culture that depend on social class and gender. These “routes” tend to produce interpretive communities of traditional and emergent critical alternatives, especially in the arts. In this sense, to better understand the ways that diasporic subjects create alternate public spheres (in this case, poetry) and properly contextualize what is contained in them, “roots” and “routes” are critical.

With Gilroy’s understanding of “roots” and “routes,” at the foundation of his critical thought, Clifford argues that diaspora cultures are, to varying degrees, “produced by regimes of political dominance and economic equality” (265). But the violence related to their displacement does not “strip them of their ability to sustain distinctive political communities and cultures of resistance” (265). Diasporic expressions or experiences , therefore, thrive on a mixture of

“destruction, adaptation, preservation, and creation” (Clifford 265). As Clifford indicates well,

“roots” is crucial to better contextualize diasporic subjectivities because they prevent the diasporic subject from completely losing the homeland identity, as the existence of diaspora depends on the maintenance of a collective of diasporic peoples who ¨maintain, revive, or invent a connection with a prior home that must be strong enough to resist erasure through complete assimilation¨ (Clifford,

“Roots and Routes” 255) Simply put, historical roots outside of the time and space of the hostland nation keeps diasporas not only strong but in existence and with the right to be called so (Clifford

255). Because of the dual considerations of “roots” (persistence-history) and “routes” (hybridity- journeys), the diasporic element of this investigation’s theoretical framework is “quite powerful, especially when studying literature and other forms of cultural representation” (Brubaker 7).

Considering this investigation´s emphasis on the “roots” and “routes” I often use the term’s adjectival form “diasporic” because it describes the range of different activities, from the trauma of exile to political mobilization to cultural creativity (Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora” 9).

Throughout this study, I analyze each poet’s diasporic aesthetic, diasporic identity, and diasporic consciousness, as they are central to better understanding of how their diasporic condition affects their sociopolitical revival of poesía comprometida. Understood in this sense, diasporic hybridity orients this investigation towards a more complete understanding of how theories of diaspora and hybridity complement each other to illuminate the innerworkings of diasporic poetry 23 As mentioned in chapter I, Clifford links diasporic consciousness to social consciousness, since flows of capital and labor become dependent on and produce diasporic

23 Though I focus on diaspora in a hybrid sense, I have also tried to make it congruent with the everyday experiences each poet relates in their poetry, since “Any scholarly conception of diaspora needs to be congruent with the everyday experiences of these people. This point may seem too obvious to be worth making, but some claims about the hybridity and fragmentation of migrant identities raise doubts about whether real people think about their world in quite so tortured a fashion” (Brubaker 8). As such, I recognize the scholarly power in using hybridity to describe the work of the diasporic poets, but I also recognize that they might not see themselves or their worlds in such a manner. Though the theoretical focus is diasporic hybridity or those concepts of diaspora that related to hybridity, the thematic focus is the “everyday narratives” related to the Central American diasporic social and political experience that they express in their poetry.

populations, a population marked by a spike in female constituents. (Clifford, “Routes” 256). This is a crucial aspect of diasporic consciousness, especially when it comes to analyzing those texts that refer to labor done by Central Americans and other irregular migrants in the United States and beyond, like Corado does below:

Amanece el Desarraigo van los migrantes al trabajo los pueden deportar …………………………….. Las redadas son precisas la angustia indiferente es gente decente que no tiene libertad esclavos de la diáspora lloran en soledad

(72). 24 Despite poems of this tone, diasporic consciousness is not only negative because diasporic subjects also gain strength in their struggle to survive and maintain cultural distinctness. In this light

“diasporic consciousness is found in a third space between loss and hope” (Clifford 257). In relation to the claims Clifford makes regarding the connections between diasporic consciousness and sociopolitical actions, he is careful to affirm that degrees of diasporic alienation are highly relative because diasporic communities are uneven in terms of gender, race, and class (257). So, the political and critical valence of diasporic subversions are never guaranteed. With this intersectional approach to diasporic consciousness in mind, my investigation considers how each poet’s different diasporic profiles relates to how they decide to express their diasporic consciousness. For instance,

24 These verses translate as “The uprooting dawns/ the migrants go to work/ They can deport them/ The raids are precise- The anguish indifferent/ They are decent people/ who don’t have freedom/slaves of the diaspora/ they cry in solitude/ The nostalgia for the homeland/mom’s embrace/ the children who stayed behind/ the dreams have gone” (my translation).

sometimes it leads to the call for new solidarities with other marginalized groups in the United

States or diasporic population around the world. In other instances, it underscores the exploitation of Central American diasporic laborers. I will be using Clifford’s theory of diasporic consciousness to analyze each contemporary poet’s expressions of diasporic alienation in the hostland; the pains related to the specific diasporic routes presented in their work, and the strength their poetic voice(s) gain from struggling to maintain cultural distinction.

Another theoretical focus found in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth

Century (1997) is that of how utopic/dystopic tension presents itself in many diasporic cultures and subjectivities—an idea related to the hybrid-like tension of loss and hope. This idea calls to mind a recent passage written in a Salvadoran literary magazine entitled Distópico

Vivimos en una sociedad donde el horizonte utópico no existe, ha sido diezmado, conjurarlo se vuelve sinónimo de ridiculez, de ensoñación absurda. Somos una generación que ha naturalizado todo: la muerte, la pobreza, el individualismo, la deshumanización del otro. Frente al mundo actual, nosotros imaginamos. Pero con una imaginación que no es contemplativa, sino más bien incisiva y cuestionadora sobre los procesos históricos, las acciones y las actitudes que como sociedad nos han llevado a esta aparente desesperanza (De sola, Lytton-Regalado, Portillo et. al)25 In a similar manner to some entries of this magazine’s first edition such as Zamora’s poem

“Vivíamos en el Pulgarcito,” Clifford links this sense of the dystopic with the repeated violence that occurs in the policed U.S. Mexican border where people who cross have utopic visions about diasporic life that are met with a dystopic reality. In keeping the notion of dystopic/utopic tension in mind, this investigation observes and analyzes how each poet’s sociopolitical vision wavers between dystopia and utopia, as it protests and denounces this generation´s comfortableness with

25 The translation is the following, “We live in a society where the utopic horizon doesn’t not exist, it has been destroyed, and to conjure it seems ridiculous as is from a daydream. We are a generation that has naturized everything, death, poverty, individualism. The dehumanization of the other. Faced with the world how it is, we imagine, but with an imagination that isn’t contemplative. Rather is it share and critical about the historical processes, the actions, and the attitudes that has taken us as a society towards a clear hopelessness”

poverty, death, individualism, and the dehumanization of the other, while simultaneously presented images and narrations of hope.

Regarding these contemporary theories of diaspora that parallel hybridity theories explained earlier, I employ several of Paul Gilroy’s theories and notions from the Black Atlantic to analyze how these diasporic poets express the sense of (non)being and (un) belonging. As the

British black diasporic subjects of Gilroy’s studies, my goal with their application is to try and understand the poets’ need to recover and validate certain elements of Central American culture, to resist their cultural marginality in the United States. One notion I find important for this study is syncopated temporality. In a similar manner to time lapse and multi-temporal heterogeneity, he describes it as a different rhythm of living and being. Founded on Walter Benjamin’s counter memory and Dubois’ double consciousness, Gilroy defines it as a politics of interrupting historical continuities to “grasp the nomads or fissures in which time stops and prophetically restarts, causing the recovery of effaced stories and the reimagining of them¨ (264). This notion relates to diaspora experience because its subjects come to terms with the co-presence of “here” and “there,” as articulated with an “antiteleological” temporality, in which “linear history is shattered, the present is constantly shadowed by a desired past, and often renewed by painful yearnings “(Gilroy 264).

For Gilroy, the recurring breaks in the Black Atlantic diasporic consciousness is the middle passage because it was a time of great trauma, loss, and cultural dispossession. From my studies on this diasporic poetry, the recurring break in time in their diasporic consciousness is the civil war period in El Salvador and the era of la violencia in Guatemala, because these are the historical moments that often interrupt their poems present with a past that repeats, whereby new futures are sometimes imagined; and linear history is shattered and divided into the (co)presence of here and there.

Diasporic language is defined by Kobena Mercer and William Safran as the mechanisms by which homeland orientation and cultural reproduction survives in and through the hostland

language. From this perspective, the loss or the partial loss of the homeland language does not necessarily weaken the diasporic subject’s sentiments and cultural connections towards the ancestral homeland. For instance, this collective of diasporic poetry evidence the diverse ways that elements of the homeland language, that has the capacity to reference both a mythical as well as a real homeland, continue within their poetic subjectivities (Safran 41). I use this term as an analytical tool to understand which homeland orientations and cultural reproductions survive in and through it, as connected to each poet’s sociopolitical concerns. Diasporic writers must also choose the language that they will write in while in the diaspora, whereby the choice to express themselves with the hostland language can serve as a mechanism to resist colonization, control, and hegemony (Ty Lin, “Diaspora” 127). Zamora has affirmed in an interview that he writes his poetry in the language of imperialism so that second generation Central American migrants (especially those who have crossed the border without documentation) can read his work and gain awareness about the Salvadoran Civil War (Córdava). The phrase, “language of imperialism” implies that the

United States continues to be an imperialistic force. Writing in the language of the hostland is also a form of mimicry. In The Location of Cultures, Bhabha defines mimicry as a hybridizing process that arises as the representation of a difference, that is itself a process of disavowal (86). Guardado,

Lytton Regalado, and Zamora may write in the language of the hostland (The United States), but the content of this writing reveals their difference as Central Americans. It reveals their simultaneous belonging and unbelonging to U.S. national identity. Most importantly, in its most sociopolitically oriented moments, it represents a disavowal of how Central Americans are represented in the U.S. media, in textbooks, or the very invisibility in U.S./Latinidad politics and history. In Bhabha’s words, linguistic mimicry of the like “undermines” (neo)colonial representations of the postcolonial subject (91). Because of this, Guardado has said that the strong cultural ties that she maintains with El Salvador has influenced her writing in such a way that she is not surprised that she constantly critiques the United States because the “U.S. media and education have done all their

work in keeping the masses ignorant about what really happens and about what the U.S. really does!” (2019 see Appendix).

Despite these texts that offer powerful argument as to the ways in which they use language to enact cultural difference to the hostland and maintain ties with home, they don’t solely write in

English. Some code-switch from English to Spanish, separate Spanish stanzas from English stanzas, or, as in the case with Oliva Corado, choose to exclusively write in the homeland language while in the diaspora. Considering this, my investigation also asks what forms of resistance arise from this facet of diasporic languages in in U.S. Central American poetry? In “Estar alerta: Escribir en español en los Estado Unidos hoy,” Cristina Rivera Garza proposes that the use of Spanish in literature written in the United States today is a political act because of the repeated attempts by the Donald

Trump administration to erase the work, production, and livelihoods of peoples from Spanish speaking countries from the official pages of U.S. history. Writing in Spanish in this sociopolitical context is political because in makes visible the livelihood and lived experiences of Latin American and Latino/a and Latinx voices in the United States. Likewise, it puts their traditions of resistance, their plurality, and their continual political vociferation on the literary forefront. From another perspective, Garza emphasizes that the presence of Spanish in the North American literary scene represents an act of subversion because it challenges the idea that Spanish in the United States is simply a work language of migrants, but not language of thought, creation, and art. The implementation of Spanish within these poetic works of art is an act that demonstrates that Spanish is a language that carries complex thought, rich history, tradition, and modernity; a hybrid mixture that this investigation captures and analyzes. Writing completely in Spanish, with Spanglish or with full Spanish phrases, presence of a people and a history . This use of the language also resists erasure by anti-immigrant national discourse and political acts, such as creating a border wall, banning the temporary protected status of Central American migrants, the proposed termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the inability to pass the DREAM Act, and

workplace and home raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE..

Considering these ideals and theories, this investigation will demonstrate the different grades of sociopolitical critique and “presencing” that is unleashed when U.S. diasporic texts written by writers of Central American descent employ Spanish in hybrid and “pure” forms, with distinct social and political groundings.

Regarding the specific aesthetic of these poets’ diasporic poetry as rooted in hybridity and sociopolitical themes, this investigation implements Sieglinde Lemke’s notion of diasporic aesthetic.

For Lemke, the motherland remains frozen in the diasporic imaginations as a sort of sacred site or symbol. Though the motherland is far from idealized in the work of these diasporic poets, it often appears to be frozen in their diasporic consciousness, namely, in the work of Oliva Corado and

Zamora; two poets who could not go home because of their migratory status as irregular migrants.

She goes on to say that the images that diasporic artists tend to confront the reader with hybrid facets of the migrant experience and different modes of interpretation, whereby diaspora art tends to invite a multiple point of view because it sends the viewer’s or reader’s gaze in route. Next, she asserts that diasporic artists tend to unite artistic and historiographic material. After, diaspora art presents metaphors that tend to be represented using various languages, portrayals of trauma, and

“riotous imagery that calls for a multiple viewpoint reception. Above all, diaspora art emphasizes a function for the community (124). 26 An additional conceptualization about diasporic art aesthetic is found is in the work of Jewish-American painter R.B. Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto. In this groundbreaking essay, he describes diasporist art as an unsettled mode of art-life performed by an

26 We might recall Canclini’s “art vs craft” at this point where he rejects the notion of conceiving art as a disinterested symbolic movement and craft as an object with a practical purpose. Rather, he proposes that creativity can also spring from collective messages in which artists put forth worldviews, and crafts go beyond their practical functions . This means that when binaries are eradicated between arts and crafts and hybridity is embraced, an object, a discourse, or any other cultural material can serve two purposes: that of high art and practicality (173-76 “The Staging of the Popular).

artist who feels out of place most of the time (33). The artists who practices diasporism or diasporist art rely on a mindset which is often “occupied with vagaries of history, kin, homelands, and the scattering of his/her people, describing patterns of ¨diasporist¨ artwork as confounded due to it contemplation of transience and the diasporic subject’s feelings of “restlessness,” “un-at- homeness,” and groundlessness” (34-37). All the while, the diasporist artist has certain voices in his mind that he translates into his art. These voices, or inspirations speak of “ethnicities, of historical memories, of ancestral myths and heroes in a similar manner as Anzaldúa’s notion of la facultad

(39). For Kitaj, diasporist art is contradictory and hybrid at heart, being both internationalist and particularistic because “life in Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense.” In this sense “diasporist art

“refuses to be fixed, to be settled, to be stable.” For this reason it is a formidable theoretical tool of diasporic hybridity (38).

The last diasporic theory employed in this study is diaspora space by Avtar Brah and

Diaspora space is the intersectionality of diaspora, border, and politics of location that come together to offer a conceptual grid of contemporary transnational movements of people, information, cultures, and capital. Moreover, the diaspora space is equally shared by those who are considered native to an area and those who have migrated or been displaced there. As Brah describes her theory as intersectional because it includes gender, race, and class, it is a hybridity theory . I have taken this stance because since so many different elements converge in this space, meaning diverse disciplines can be used and, to a certain extent, are needed to understand it. This is one reason why she might have rejected the idea of any pure or essentialized version of the concept of diaspora. Rather, she sees it as a conceptual mapping which defies the search for an absolute of origin or an authentic manifestation of a stable, pre-given, unchanging identity (197). Diaspora space is different from diaspora because it considers the entanglements and geologies of dispersions with those of staying put (181). This theory is integral to Central Americans in

Movement because it considers transnational and local relationships that are affected by diasporic

movement. This theory orients this investigation towards the linkages each poet makes between those who have gone and those who have stayed; those who are seen as “natives” and those who are seen as “foreign.” I analyze these connections with “staying put” and “migrating,” because these relationships and the power struggles involved in them mark many of the recurrent sociopolitical issues presented in diasporic poetry by writers of Central American descent. They also affect what happens when the migrant and the native come into contact, whether it be positive or negative.

This is exemplified in Zamora´s poem in which the poetic voices resists marrying for papers as a means of “legalization” and is significantly pained that this is one of his “only paths to papers”

(“Cassette Tape” 13). A simplified way to understand how this theory functions, is to consider the ways in which the relationship between an ill-grandmother or grandfather in the ancestral homeland and an “undocumented” diasporic subject who cannot return says something sociopolitical ( Zamora, “To Abuelita Neli”; Oliva-Corado “Abuelo”). These are examples of diasporic entanglements between those who go and those who stay within the diaspora space, which must be understood if their sociopolitical implications are to be accounted for.

Over the course of this methods chapters, I have discussed the importance of history, identity, and agency in hybrid and diasporic theoretical tools and processes such as time lapse, multi-temporal heterogeneity, diaspora space, diasporist art, diasporic language, third space, and metaphoricity, but I have yet to put forth other theories that reveal additional aesthetic approaches that this diasporic collective of poets use to recover and reflect upon collective memories of the ancestral homeland. In response, I think it is crucial to consider one additional theory. It is Diana

Taylor’s (1950) notion of embodied memory found in The Archive and The Repertoire: Performing

Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). Via critical analysis of how collective memory is expressed in Latin American cultural productions, Taylor presents two important ideas. The archive, she writes, are those official documents concerning or containing collective memory. However, the repertoire includes the “ephemeral and invalid forms of knowledge,” such as gestures and

traumatic flashbacks (2003, “Staging Traumatic Memory,” 193). This notion of the archive and the relates to my investigation because it pinpoints one the stylistic tools used to revive Central

American and U.S. archival histories to remind the reader of historical acts that continue to affect the present time, and the psychological state of certain people because of traumas of the past.

This chapter has discussed, exemplified, and justified the theories, concepts, ideas, and notions that this investigation uses to analyze what this investigation proposes as a diasporic revival of poesía comprometida, as evident in the poetic trajectory of Cynthia Guardado, Alexandra

Lytton Regalado, Ilka Oliva Corado, and Javier Zamora . In its totality, what I have proposed is a methodology based on the convergence of renowned hybridity theories and contemporary theories of diaspora, rooted in notions of hybridity. I call this method diasporic hybridity. In this chapter, I have justified the corpus of works and their authors that will be used to exemplify this investigatory hypothesis. In the following chapter entitled “Foundational Elements of Poesía comprometida,” I delineate the historical and literary background of poesía comprometida written between the 1940s and 1980s. After, I present the foundational themes and aesthetics of this investigation’s corpus of poesía comprometida, as uncovered through textual analysis and close-reading. Moreover, in this chapter I tend to elucidate the ways by which their poetry goes beyond Central American borders to also put forth several aspects of the state of the world during the 1940s to the 1980s, before and beyond.

Chapter III Foundational Elements of Poesía comprometida

……………………………………….. Uno tiene en las manos un pequeño país, horribles fechas, muertos como cuchillos exigentes, obispos venenosos, inmensos jóvenes de pie sin más edad de la esperanza, …………………………………………….. Preguntarán qué fuimos Quiénes con llamas puras les antecedieron quiénes maldecir con el recuerdo.

Bien. Eso hacemos Custodiamos para ellos el tiempo que nos toca.

-Roque Dalton, “Por qué escribimos” La ventana al rostro

Following Mark Zimmerman’s idea that twentieth-century poesía comprometida coincides with and surpass national chronologies and borders, this chapter demonstrates that the content of poesía comprometida, written by this dissertations’ corpus, function for and go beyond the exposition of revolutionary ideology, national political projects, and localized historical events. I argue that this is due to each writer’s diverse sensibility to, and awareness of sociopolitical change, crisis, and history. The main themes that mark this sampling of poetry, published between 1940 to

1980, of Claribel Alegría, Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Jorge Debravo, Pompeyo del Valle, and

Otto Raúl González are anti-imperialism, class consciousness, indigeneity, feminism, and liberation

theology. The main poem structures that they employ are conversational, person, testimonial, exteriorist, collage, and psalmic forms. With Zimmerman’s hypothesis at hand, my contention is to demonstrate how style and theme work together to create the most prominent sociopolitically engaged poems of twentieth century Central America written by this corpus, born in different corners of the isthmus. In even simpler terms, this chapter attempts to understand the foundational elements of poesía comprometida to delineate, in coming chapters, the main themes and aesthetics that present themselves in the revival of this literary movement by contemporary diasporic poets.

Born in Estelí, Nicaragua but raised in El Salvador from the age of eight, Claribel Alegría’s expressions of exterior society in poetry begins with an exploration of the changing roles of women during the twentieth century, as reflected in those poems about her personal life as a middle-class woman struggling for feminist liberation. Though principally a poet, she also published essays, novels, and testimonies. The main themes of her work are love, nostalgia, family, and social crisis.

Her work is also heavily influenced by her many years spent living outside of Central America, in the United States, and all over the world. Though her writing touches on the suffering of the Central

American people—notably after the 1960s—, she was rather uncomfortable with being labeled a poeta comprometida because she saw a commitment to the struggles of humanity as a natural vocation of the Central American writer who “cannot and should not remain in an ivory tower”

(Alegría, “The Sword of Poetry”). Of this supposedly natural tendency to write poesía comprometida,

Alegría emphasizes that her main preoccupation as a writer has been the aesthetic quality of her poetry before its content:

Preocupaciones sociales y políticas tienen cierta tendencia a deslizarle en mi poesía, simplemente porque la situación política en Centroamérica es una de mis mayores obsesiones y siempre he escrito bajo la espuela de la obsesión. Sin embargo, mi mayor obsesión es tratar con todas mis fuerzas de que mi próximo poema sea menos imperfecto que el anterior. (Guerrero-Guererro 52)

Roque Dalton, a Salvadoran law-student who became a guerrillero and Marxist poet, is known for his experimental conversational poetry that discusses popular armed struggle in Central

America, Latin America, and beyond. The main themes of his poetry are history, revolution, and the implications of socialism in the twentieth century. His poetry was most influenced by his belief that poems could improve society, by establishing an order by which people could change their social condition and creating works designed to transform the very ideas that Central American and Latin

American people had of themselves. Apart from poetry, he published novels, testimonies, and essays. Politically, he was a member of the armed people’s resistance in El Salvador in the 1950s and the 1960s, an involvement that would lead to his polemic assassination in 1975. He was 39 years old. Of Dalton’s poetic style, many scholars have focused on his experimental poetic techniques that match his effort to forge a new poetic language that could properly express leftist political discourse (Barba XV). They also have studied his use of humor and cynicism (Iffland;

Beverly and Zimmerman). The former scholarly criticisms are exemplified in his essays and poems—such as the one cited in this chapter’s epigraph—that aim to understand how poetry, and writing in general, could most effectively contribute to concrete sociopolitical change and mirror a particular historical era. From his writings, one can deduce that his main idea regarding poetry was that the poeta comprometido/a should seek a balance between aesthetic (the poetic technique) and the content (the sociopolitical themes) in such a way that the beautiful is embodied in cultural realities and is endowed with history and social roots (Dalton, Poetry and Militancy). This balance between history, social roots, and beauty is often exemplified in his poetry of deeply metaphoric imagery that tells the story of a poetic voice who struggles against dictatorial regimes with laughter and arms. His texts also indicate the experience of a poetic voice who sees revolutionary ideologies and movement such as Marxism, Leninism, and communism as lifeboats for societies drowning in the depths of foreign exploitation, social class inequalities, illiteracy, and dictatorship. It is a poetic voice who teeters between the serious social crisis and the everyday wonders of human experience

that reflects his belief that the poet must articulate all of life from the “proletarian struggle” to “the wonder of the sexual act” (Poetry and Militancy, 19).

Costa Rican poet Jorge Debravo (Jorge Delio Bravo) was of humble roots. Born in Santa

Cruz, Turrialba to farming parents, Debravo touches on the spiritual and the social with an emphasis on the common struggles that unite all mankind. According to Manuel Picado, his poetry expresses the solidarity of the poetic voice with his lover, his community, and the suffering of the whole of humanity (“Trayectoria poética” 7). It is also a poetry that highlights the similarities between Christianity and social activism. Professionally, Debravo worked as a social-security inspector in constant contact with the workers and farmers who suffered exploitation in Costa Rica.

Publishing in the arena of poetry and journalism, Debravo’s stance about socio-politically engaged poetics is clear: the poet should be a leader and a guide to his pueblo, through poems that are pleasurable, written with a brevity that captures the moment, intelligible, and simple enough to be understood by the common man and woman (Debravo 73).27 A more scholarly definition of his style exemplifies the rich literary history that has influenced it and the exterior context by which it was nourished. José Alberto de la Fuente writes that Debravo’ s poetic approach is marked by its

reminiscencias de la poesía prerrenacentista del estilo realista-existencial de Jorge Manrique, de la estética del mundo colonial y sofocante soportado por Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, del canto a lo Divino y a lo Humano de la lírica popular que le dio un sello propio al ritmo y a la semántica española de América en el siglo XIX, de místicos como San Juan de la Cruz, pero por sobre todo es una poesía situada y vivida en un país centroamericano, acogedor con el forastero, el vecindario conversador y transparente que no tiene ejército…, atento al destino de América Latina y a sus propias posibilidades de autonomía y redención. (279) Pompeyo del Valle saw himself as a romantic revolutionary whose work links romantic love with revolutionary ideologies, such as Marxism and socialism. Born in Honduras, he was a poet and a journalist. The main themes of his poems are love, memory, and the pressing social realities of

27 This prologue can be found in the section that presents the collection “Consejos para Cristo al comenzar el año” in the anthology Milagro abierto: Colección de poesía (1960).

Central America, particularly Honduras. Of his poetry, he has said that “se trata de una poesía directa, sin buscarle muchas vueltas, clara, y tiene una cosa que desde ese momento persigo yo, y es la conquista de la sencillez” (El heraldo, 2018). Del Valle’s work also proves his mastery of traditional styles, such as the sonnet and the epic with a focus on the sociopolitical movements and crises of the twentieth century that are expressed through his love for women, his love for his nation, and his love for his pueblo. Like Dalton, del Valle was also an activist who suffered exile and political persecution because of the political nature of his literature, and his physical involvement in protests and strikes. His ideas about poesía comprometida are clarified in his poetic oeuvre, especially in his first collection, La ruta fulgurante. Of his poetic style, Juan Ramón Martínez affirms that he followed that of the generation of Honduran writers to whom he belonged, whose work did not assume the dullness of the “panflaterio,” but maintained “la ternura necesaria que le permitía decir cosas duras, sin perder la serenidad coloquial, la coherencia del discurso poético y la comunicación con los amantes de la poesía” (Martínez “Una aproximación”).

A Liberation Theology priest, an ex-minister of culture of Nicaragua, and a revolutionary freedom-fighter, Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal is one of the most widely read poets in Latin

America. Cristina Peri-Rossi writes that “La fuerza de sus poemas ha desbordado las fronteras del continente donde ha nacido” (González-Balado 12). Having published poetry, memoirs, and testimonials, Cardenal’s main themes from the 1940s through the 1980s are spirituality, revolution, history, mythology, and the Nicaraguan revolutionary struggle. He has been known to cultivate an exteriorist poetic vision by which the poetic speaker concerns himself with sociopolitical realities rather than with his own feelings. This obsession with naming the ills or reality spills into his sociopolitical poetry that likens Christ’s definition of love to leftist sociopolitical actions and ideology. When asked about his concept of God in an interview found in González-

Balado’s autobiography Ernesto Cardenal: Poeta-Revolucionario, Cardenal says that he sees God as an atheist Marxist does; as an entity that doesn’t yet exist. In this sense, God will only begin to exist

when men learn to love one another. This love he speaks of is a Christian love that urges the believer to practice it by engaging in those concrete social actions commanded in the new testament, such as attending to the needs of the poor, advocating for justice, and resisting materialism. For this poet, these Christian actions of love found in the gospels mirror the aims of socialism (22-26)

Having spent most of his adult life in government-imposed exile in Mexico, Otto Raúl

González political poetry is catalyzed by the Guatemalan revolution of 1944 that awakened in him a sense of constant engagement with the class disparities, racism, violence, and imperialism in

Guatemala, and those of the twentieth century. Marta Regina de Fahsen has written that his poems represent “el testimonio del escritor de los momentos transcendentales del hombre en particular y de la humanidad en general. A lo largo de toda su obra poética le canta a los pueblos, al hombre desvalido, al obrero, proporcionándole un hálito de esperanza” (12). Though González has been known to doubt the belief that poesía comprometida can pragmatically change injustice, he did believe that the poet’s mission is to “cantar lo bueno que tiene la humanidad y condenar lo que le hace mal”(La Hora “Lo que se dice” ). His poetry does just this by praising Guatemala’s nature and traditions, while criticizing its violent government . His themes revolve around the social realities of the Guatemalan people, the Latin American people, and humanity with a specific emphasis on the natives, and the implications of revolutions and the civil wars, with an emphasis on Guatemala and

Mexico. His style evidences an equal use of lyric and epic verse, with a tendency to implement traditional structures such as the sonnet, and blank verse. Though it’s hard to find a constant in his style, one recurrent theme by which the rest of his poetry is inscribed is his insistence on the telluric; an aesthetics that trails his concern for a structural violence against the indigenous Central

Americans, and the exposition of their ideologies and worldviews.

Poesía Comprometida Flourishes during a Century of Crisis

In the year 1929 the world faced a financial crisis that brought about a serious questioning of the great narratives of modernity and development. For several countries in Central America this economic depression caused significant uprisings against oligarch ruling classes and imperialistic social systems fueled by economic dependence on the United States. One of these uprisings was the anti-imperialist guerrilla armed resistance led by the nationalist oil-field worker Augusto César

Sandino (1895-1934) in Nicaragua. Though Sandino and his supporters’ armed opposition to the regime ultimately caused the withdrawal of U.S. military troops from Nicaragua in 1933, Sandino was assassinated shortly after. Consequently, U.S. dependency politics would continue to mark the country’s political profile for the next 40 years, under the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza García and his descendants. Another critical insurrection was the 1932 peasants’ rebellion against local and state governmental municipalities in El Salvador, during which thousands of people (mostly indigenous peoples and campesinos) were massacred at the hands of the military under the rule of dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (Chink 29). This event is referred to as La Matanza. After this, dictators and democrats would rule in El Salvador for the next 50 years with a dichotomous mix of reform and repression (Chink 30). Though each of these popular rebellions were smothered, their legacy would ignite future revolutions and revolutionary thought in Central America throughout the decade.

During this same time, in Honduras, foreign dependence was at its peak while martial law- like conditions thrived under the dictatorship of the United Fruit Company’ favorite President

Tiburcio Carías.28 According to Donald E. Schulz and Deborah Schulz, the UFCO was at the zenith of its power in 1933. Their profits were estimated at 412 million US dollars (20). While foreign investors and their local counterpoints were swimming in profits from the Honduran banana

28 A Boston-based company from the United States that had great influence in Central America and the Caribbean during the late 1800s and 1900s.

business, violent repression against government dissidents was the order of the day. This caused a growing discontent among the Honduran working groups and farmers that would explode into workers’ strikes and popular protests in the next two decades. such as the dictatorial protests in

San Pedro Sula, the San Pedro Sula Massacre in 1944, and the Great Banana Strike in 1954.

Guatemala, Honduras’ northern neighbor, also faced heavy U.S. foreign penetration via the

United Fruit Company and governmental control via the violent and repressive dictatorship of Jorge

Ubico. Under Ubico, the UFCO was granted monopoly of the railroad and large plantations alongside cheap labor—a situation that mirrored what V.I. Lenin has called imperialism at its highest peak, defined as an economic development of enterprising monopolies that gain unsurmountable amounts of money through their eradication of local capitalistic competition (25-6 Imperialism, The

Highest Stage of Capitalism). A similar situation marked Nicaragua under auspices of foreign businesses like General Electric and Chase Bank. Despite the United States’ economic and military intervention in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, a change occurred with the implementation of the Good-Neighbor Policy in 1933 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was a policy created to decrease military intrusions in Central America and Latin America in general, that signaled “a new era in U.S.-Latin American relations” by which the United States vowed to stay out of Central America politically and economically; a task that was easier said than done because the

U.S. government often remained covertly involved in the Central American political scene. (Brewer

104).

In terms of sociopolitical movements and ideas of Latin America that affected Central

American leftist thought, the 1930s—and even the late 20s— was a period in which several intellectuals began to question the sociopolitical role of the indigenous communities, and the injustices they faced. This intellectual work would culminate in indigenism—a range of intellectual, cultural and political discourses surrounding the problem of the Indian that moved across the

Americas in the early 1940s (Minks). Indigenism was shaped by intellectuals, historians,

anthropologists, and writers who began to study and revalorize their pre-Columbian histories, mythologies, and sociopolitical thought that had been shadowed by the ideological and political power of the Spanish conquistadores. One such thinker was Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-

1930). Considered one of the first Marxist intellectuals of Latin America, some of Mariátegui’ s stances were that the indigenous masses were the authentic proletariat and that Perú and other

Latin American countries were in need of a socialist economy by which land and resources were shared, as they were in many pre-Columbian indigenous communities.29 An important facet of his theoretical method was that he applied Marxist theory to illustrate that class and racial inequality faced by the indigenous populations were related to privatized Latin American land economies formed after independence movements, trumping the idea that the Latin American independence leaders truly had the needs of the pueblo at heart.

The 1930s were also of sociopolitical significance for women. Women’s rights movements continued to swell throughout the globe after women were granted suffrage in the United States in the year 1920. For Latin American women, suffrage movements began in the late nineteenth century and continued until the mid-twentieth century when all Latin American women had obtained the right to vote, whereby Latin American feminists of the early to mid-twentieth century made demands for political and social rights, including more control over their bodies and an expansion of their professional endeavors. This followed a liberal and secular turn in many Latin

American countries, which amplified women’s access to education and allowed many to pursue skilled professional work (Grinnell). Women’s writing in Central and Latin American steadily increased yet was still quite marginal (Beverly and Zimmerman 120). In El Salvador, Margarita del

Carmen Brannon Vega (1899-1974), known by the pseudonym Claudia Lars, is the first modern

29 Because of these ideas, some have called him one of the first intellectuals of Latin American Indigenous movement. However, I have not made this affirmation since I do not ignore the influence of Indigenous novels of Mexico produced before this time nor the effect that the Mexican Revolution of 1917 had on the revalorization of the Indigenous peoples of Latin America. I also do not ignore the influence of the Mexican revolution on the political ideology of Sandino.

Central American woman writer to achieve a substantial body of work, who cultivated a slightly politicized regional literature that became overtly oppositional in her collection Poesía última

(Beverly and Zimmerman 1974). In Costa Rica, another important woman poet to arise during this time was Eunice Odio. According to Keith Ekiss, Odio began by “working within the tradition of prescribed femenine poetics, only to rebel against them with overtly erotic poetry that “turned the tables on the tradition of idealized love poetry” (“Eunice Odio an Introduction” ix). Though these women poet’s work evidences an increase in women’s writing in Central American during the

1930s and 1940s, it remained marginalized, or largely written by elite women who often suppressed their overtly political ideologies since “the notion of the page/nation as a space for masculine inscription had recurred throughout much of the twentieth century” (Barbas-Rhodes

13). Central American women’s writing that stayed out of politics and within traditional and accepted femenine experience would take a turn during the mid to late-twentieth century, with the personal-political writing of poets and writers like Alegría, Gioconda Belli (1972), and Tatiana Lobo

(1939) (Barbas-Rhoden; Beverly and Zimmerman 138). Despite the fact that many of the leading women’s writers continued to emerge from middle- or upper-class backgrounds like Alegria, their literary productions demonstrates their involvement with revolutionary movements, or other projects for social change in Central America (138).

The 1940s brought about dramatic social changes in Central American letters that would increase the number of poets who implemented social and political themes in their writings. In

1944, the Revolution of October in Guatemala dismantled the Ubico regime. At the same time, the policies of Hernández Martínez in El Salvador were eradicated briefly, only to be restored by the

Salvador Castañeda Castro administration in 1945-1948. In Honduras, students, middle-class professionals, and workers protested the government, causing Carías to surrender power in 1948.

In Costa Rica, there was a brief revolutionary uprising in 1948 that defeated the national republican president, Teodoro Picado. Over 2,000 lives were lost in the battle, which ushered in the reforms of

José Figueres Ferrer and its “Second Republic” government. Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, dictatorial rule continued under Somoza, while opposition was beginning to boil. Of the 1944 revolution in

Guatemala, Patricia Alvarenga Venutolo asserts that it “abre las puertas a un amplio proyecto reformista. Las voces contestarias reflexionan profusamente sobre las relaciones de clase, y algunas de ellas logran ampliar los márgenes de prácticas y discursos referentes a las diferencias sexuales”

(14). The Guatemalan revolution and these uprisings in surrounding Central American countries demonstrate that armed and ideological conflict against totalitarian regimes, imperialism, and unequal class divisions were crossing lines of class and ethnicity with hopes to “displace the deeply entrenched structure of oligarchic power and foreign intervention” through cumulative alliances between the national bourgeois, the peasantry, the nascent proletariat, anarchists, syndicalists, and communist organizations. These movements of the people represented a unity among different social agents that, according to Antonio Gramsci, is necessary to shift hegemonic ideology from one way to the other (Beverly and Zimmerman 22).

Meanwhile the growth of collective alliances among previously separated groups because of their common grievances against the existent sociopolitical structures began to progressively manifest itself in Central American cultural production through a literary movement that has been called poesía social or poesía comprometida—a type of poetry that tends to represent and mobilize the struggle of the people (Beverly and Zimmerman 12). Karin Vasicek amplifies this definition when she writes that political poets of this time are characterized by a “clara relación entre el creador individual y la sociedad de su época,” whereby “el escritor se reconoce como individuo en un mundo en crisis…a la vez, el autor comprometido no se vuelve su mirada hacia su yo, sino que el yo se relaciona con los demás y el conflicto social” (Vasicek116). Eva Guerrero-Guerrero mirrors this notion when she affirms that Central American literatures’ connection with political and economic realities instills a confrontational and moral character in its sociologically engaged poetry, noticeable in the work of José Coronel, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, de Ernesto Cardenal, Ernesto

Mejia Sánchez, Carlos Martínez Rivas, and Claribel Alegría (17). One example of a literary group whose writings mirrored these definitions of sociopolitically oriented poetry was Grupo Acento in

Guatemala, led by Otto Raúl González (a sub-group of the country's Generación de los 40). According to González, the writers in this group fostered a nationalist poetics through their endeavor to

“descubrir y cantar la verdadera esencia del pueblo y de su tiempo.” González envisioned this group’s’ literary mission as revolutionary because—unlike the literature of two decades of the twentieth century— their writings were addressed to and spoke about the cultures, history, and sociopolitical struggles of the native peoples, the workers, and the farmers.

In terms of the poetic qualities and techniques of this group, González sustains that they use a language that was “netamente guatemalteco” inspired by Miguel Ángel Asturias to give their poetic songs a valid and authentic nationalism. This mention of Asturias is an indication that this group also desired to illustrate a revalorized portrait of the native, a mission that was influenced by the poetry and prose of Asturias, one that explored the indigenous traditions and language in an effort to transform what González has called the “postcard” image of the native that was disseminated by the writers of the 1920s. In general, this group of new writers placed “una mirada fija a la realidad o al organismo social para reflejar lo más accidental o denunciar males e injusticias de esa entidad en crisis” (Zimmerman, “El papel de la poesía” 283).

As the 1940s ended, the Guatemalan revolution that brought about renewed vigor in terms of national-popular alliances, indigeneity movements, and hopes of the development of a socialist society began to fade away as Cold War politics renewed U.S. intervention in Central America.

Brewer’s view is that the United States’ preoccupation with containing the Soviet Union’s power came at the expense of its good neighbor relationship with several Latin American countries, including Central America. Because of the annulment of the policy, the United States began to provide military training to soldiers in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. They also funded dictatorial governments who made it their mission to exterminate communists, socialists, and

anarchists. This extermination, however, often caused the massacre of innocent people (Chink 28).

In the case of the Central American anti-communist policies, the United States made use of military bases in Nicaragua and Honduras to plan and carry out their counter attack on the Jacobo Arbénz government in Guatemala—a regime that had ruffled the feathers of U.S. foreign penetration because of its land reform decree 900 that took away land-rights and taxed the UFCO (Cullather 22-

3). In 1954, this reform had promised land to over 100,000 rural families. As a result, John Dulles,

U.S. Secretary of State and investor in the UFCO, urged President Eisenhower to squash Arbénz and communism in Guatemala (Badgley Place). Accused of communist policy and influence, democratically elected president Arbénz is overthrown in 1954 by a military coup sponsored by the

CIA. As a result, many revolutionaries and dissidents are exiled or executed, land reforms are reversed, and the dictatorship is restored.

Otto-René Castillo, an exiled Guatemalan sociopolitical poet, would arrive in El Salvador as a result of the coup. There, he joined a group of Salvadoran writers who met under the name of El círculo literario universitario. The founder of this group was Roque Dalton (Beverly and

Zimmerman 123). The group of writers, including Waldo Chávez Velasca, Italo López Vallecillos,

Eugenio Martínez Orantes, Orlando Fresedo, and Álvaro Menéndez Leal had first decided to call this collective el Grupo Octubre, in remembrance of the Guatemalan revolution. However, they decided on La generación comprometida. According to their earliest manifesto, La generación comprometida believed that literature had a social function, whereby their writing would endeavor to improve society by bringing hope and enthusiasm to forces of social change (Beverly Zimmerman 125).

Many writers in this group were also participants in militant struggle and protest. This group’s aim reflects James Iffland’s definition of revolutionary poesía comprometida because they advocated for radical changes with hopes to end the injustices that characterized their countries, with poems that

“constituyen ventanas privilegiadas que dan sobre el mundo interior de aquellos que dieron el gran

salto hacia el compromiso, de aquellos que dieron cuenta que no hay salida del laberinto de miseria de Centroamérica acepto a través de la revolución” (Iffland 44).

During this time, Honduras would also form a generation of sociopolitical poets. They were called La Generación de los 50. Pompeyo del Valle was a constituent of this group. The works of its members, Antonio José Rivas, Óscar Acosta, Roberto Sosa, Nelson Merren, Felipe Elvir Rojas, David

Moya Posas, et al., represent one of the most fecund moments of creation in the history of Honduran letters (”Generación del 50, poetas de realismo social y vanguardia” El Heraldo). Formed by poets, narrators, and essayists, this group aimed to raise consciousness about the struggles of the proletariat. Influenced by the great Banana Strike of 1954, their work is characterized by its thematic social realism focus expressed with vanguard aesthetic. According to Juan Ramón

Martínez, this generation transformed the poetic language of Honduran letters via its thematic orientation toward the socioeconomic issues of the country with a political position that favored the struggles of the most marginalized groups. Furthermore, Leonel Alvarado affirms that their work produced transits between four discourses: “el amoroso el militante, el existencial, y el metapoético” with anti-imperialism, love, and militancy at the forefront. It also links to

Zimmerman’s notion that Central American poesía comprometida of the twentieth century was hybrid in a sense that pure and social poetry could coexist in the work of one author (283).

Central American socialist groups, leftist organizations, guerrilla fighters, and other sociopolitical organizations such as El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional in Nicaragua, Las

Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí (FPL), and el Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo

(ERP) continued to gain strength through the 1970s. Inspired by socialist Christian doctrines, La

Unión Nacional de Campesinos (UNC) takes root by the mid-1960s in Honduras.30 Influenced by

30 Because this group engaged in land seizures President López Arellano vowed to revive the agrarian reform. However, it has been argued that the Soccer War of 1970—caused by the order of the deportation of an estimated 300,00 Salvadoran squatters from over half a million acres of Honduran lands—was used as a

similar ideologies, the numbers of sociopolitical writers belonging to poetic generations and schools established throughout the 1940s through the 1950s increased while new groups were formed. One such group is El Círculo de Poetas Turrialbeños in Costa Rica of which Jorge Debravo was a member. The group was founded in 1959. Like other generations outlined in this chapter, the members felt that their worked marked a change in the national letters of Costa Rica because its writers turned from the interior to the exterior, from a focus on the idleness of the powerful classes to the struggles of the pueblo. Jorge Debravo highlights this perceived change in themes of Costa

Rican literature when he recommends the “suicidio de esos poetas sigloveintescos que escriben poemas garcilasianos.” This idea of aesthetic turn in the work of El Círculo de Poetas Turrialbeños is underscored via José León Sánchez’s poem, “el hermano Jorge.” In this text he typifies its themes as easy to understand and based on a sense of unification with the people’s pain. Using metaphor to capture this new wave of poetry with a sociopolitical function he writes:

Es una poesía teñida de oro como una tarde que nada tiene que esconder. Con las manos siempre llenas de sudor ajeno. Con el dolor callado y sincero de los seres que no pueden y no saben hablar (Nosotros los hombres 12)

Here, Debravo’s work, as a microcosmos of what the Poetas Turrialbeños were doing. is shown to take on a testimonial quality in which the poetic voice speaks for the one who cannot (because of his marginalized place in society or his lack of sociopolitical power) or doesn’t know how to speak

(because the way that he speaks or what he speaks of is rejected in national discourse). The poems of this new wave of Costa Rican letters represented here by a perspective of Debravo’s poetry are not used to celebrate the individual greatness of the powerful or create a discourse that is

diversion to land reform (over 63,120 families were landless in the mid-twentieth century in Honduras). Since this order suggested that Salvadorans were responsible for Honduran economic problems, hate was directed towards them and diverted from the government and the elite. About 2000 Honduran civilian lives were loss and over 130,000 Salvadorans had been deported (Schulz and Schulz 35-40).

inaccessible to the masses. Rather, these poems are applauded for their tendency to denote the collective suffering and livelihood of those from the bottom who are not given the chance to participate in national discourse due to their sociopolitical positionalities.

Turning again to the sociopolitical context of Guatemala during the sixties and seventies and this era’s subsequent generation of poetas comprometidos, the continued clash between opposition groups (including activist writers) and the government would lead to the country’s Civil

War and the era of La violencia in which many indigenous peoples and others would be massacred, causing what many have deemed an all-out genocide. 31 Peter Calvart offers a detailed review of this time that I would like to point out. The first is that the Guatemalan constitution created in 1879 and revised in 1945 and 1956 puts executive power in the hands of the president for four years in which he appoints and dismisses cabinet officers and conducts foreign relations. Though the power he is allotted isn’t starkly different from other Latin American countries or the United States for that matter, the difference comes from how he practices that power, namely via his control and heavy employment of the armed forces, whereby the Guatemalan government of this era might be typified as a “constitutionally centralized state, in which the president legally holds overwhelming power” that is carried out via militant politics of fear and violence and a continual practice of limited democracy.

This state of political violence is expressed by Dr. Francisco Villagrán, the vice president under General Lucas García from July 1, 1978 to March 23, 1982 to declare that “death or exile is the destiny of those who fight for justice in Guatemala” (Calvart 109). By 1983, the Américas Watch reports that over 35,000 persons had disappeared, there had been no curtail of violence against indigenous persons, especially women and children who were murdered, raped, or burned alive by death squads and soldiers, and over 100,000 Guatemalans were living in makeshift camps just over

31 See book by Susan Badgley Place in Works Cited. See also Chapter 6, “Government and Politics Since 1944” in Guatemala: A Nation in Turmoil (1985).

the Mexican border (Calvart 113). 32 In Spaces of Representation, Michael T. Miller writes that “By the end of the 1970s, intimidation, fear, exile, and death had silenced, or at least strongly inhibited, practically all opposition to the government” (5). In terms of Guatemalan sociopolitical literature, the number of poetas comprometidos swelled so much so that it seemed as if everyone was writing about sociopolitical things.33 This written bravery was also influenced by historical protests and movements outside of the isthmus such as the Cuban revolution (1959) and the U.S. Civil Rights

Movement (1960), living proofs that social change could be achieved by the unification of ethnically and economically marginalized classes and intellectuals, middle and upper-classes.

Within dictatorial regimes, the sixties and the seventies also marked an era of combat poetry distributed clandestinely in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala in response to governmental repression of protest and projects for sociopolitical change. Because of the extreme political environment, many of these works could be characterized as exteriorist because of their focus on writing about external realities using proper names, dates, data, and historical documentation. This style of writing has been called exteriorism— a poetic aesthetic that I will detail in the coming pages.

Another important sociopolitical aspect of the 1960s and the 1970s for Central (and Latin)

American history is that it is a moment when the Catholic Church begins to lead projects for sociopolitical change in their aim to follow the Gospels by helping and advocating for the poor.

Defined by Phillip Berryman as the systematic and disciplined reflection on Christian faith and its implications on the present conditions of mankind, Liberation Theology came about as a result

32 In the beginning of the 1980s, just after the 1979 Sandinista triumph, Guatemala’s President by coup Efraín Ríos Montt led a rural counter-insurgency campaign known as the scorched earth campaign. This resulted in the destruction of 440 villages and the deaths of or disappearances of more than 200,000 civilians. Special forces battalions took siege on highland villages. killing inhabitants in hopes to destroy any possible popular support of guerrilleras (Millar 5). This situation is spoken of in the testimonial, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia and in Héctor Tobar’s novel, The Tattooed Soldier. This situation that continued with increased and decreases levels of violence until 1996 and the signing of the peace accords, is said to have forced more than a million Guatemalans into displacement or exile (Millar 1) 33 An observation made by Antonio Bernal, the main character in Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier.

of the ideals circulated in Vatican Council II (1959-1965) that first resulted in the eradication of mass in Latin (5). In the historical context of Latin America and Central America, Liberation

Theology meant that bishops, nuns, parishioners, and believers would begin to apply the social message of “love thy neighbor” to the lived reality of the most oppressed peoples. Because of the renovated mission of the Latin American Catholic church, religious leaders formed initiatives aimed to decrease the economic disparities of the poor. This work, however, began to intersect—in the eyes of the hegemonic governing class—with socialist ideology and action; causing the government to repress any expressions of liberation theology with violence and fear (Berryman 71). This situation would culminate in the massacre of campesinos, agrarian reform leaders, students, and priests in Honduras in 1975; the assassination of activist priest, Monseñor Óscar Romero in El

Salvador in1980; and many other murders of politically active religious peoples and their followers from the 1960s to the 1980s. These blunt acts of violence by the government, the landowners, and the military shows that when Liberation Theology in Central America began to materialize itself in concrete social and political practices that favored the most oppressed peoples, it was labeled as dangerous by the right-winged sector and some members of the oligarchic classes whose livelihood depended on these unequal governmental structures. With many Christian activists working alongside revolutionary groups and a large percentage of the population, whose discontent against Somoza had grown because of his mishandling of funds allotted to Nicaragua for earthquake disaster relief in 1972, the FSLN ousts the Somoza government in 1979 and commences revolutionary rule. (Walker 34).

Inspired by the Nicaraguan revolution, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras continued to politically struggle into the 1980s. About this decade, scholars have suggested that the Salvadoran

Civil War officially begins. One vital and unfortunate facet of this Civil War is that the government battalions who were funded by the United States weren’t particularly effective at finding guerrillas.

Therefore, during the early years of the war they mostly carried out large sweeps that resulted in

the massacre of civilians.34 Some of the massacres occur in the Sumpul river in 1980, La Quesara in

1981, and El Mozote in 1981 (Chink 32). The Guatemalan Civil War also continued with similar massacres, genocides, and disappearance of many indigenous persons and political dissidents. In

Honduras, the populace found itself divided between those who supported and those who rejected their nation’s participation in the Contra War against the Sandinistas, by which their lands would be used as a point of invasion.

Another crucial turn in Central American letters as a result of these sociopolitical struggles—especially in the Northern Triangle—was that the testimonial genre expands. As we learn from Beverly and Zimmerman, this genre has taken many forms. The most traditional is the one that comes about as a result of a direct relationship between the speaking subject of the testimony and the writer or intellectual who transcribes, edits, or even “interprets” his/her oral testimony. This is the case of Menchú’s life story as recorded orally and later written and edited by

Elizabeth Burgos. Nevertheless, the roots of testimonial discourse go back to previous nonfictional narrative texts of Latin America like the colonial crónicas and the diarios de campaña of Bolívar and

Martí (Beverly and Zimmerman 173). Though these testimonial discourses tell different stories

34 An article by Larry Romanoff in the Center for Global Research informs that the US Army School of the Americans located in Fort Benning, Georgia is a place that trains Latin American military officers and soldiers to subvert their governments and kill hope in their own countries. For example, some graduates of the school have been linked to death squad groups or even as key assassinators of Archbishop Oscar Romero (Starr). Because of its graduates and what they have been known to do when they return home, in terms of squashing leftist politics, Romanoff sees this institute as an “integral part of America’s colonization of underdeveloped nations.” In 1984, the school was moved to a U.S. Army base in Georgia from Panamá in 1946 (Starr; González and Shashahani “Por el Cierre”) In novels such as, Manlio Argueta’s’ Un día en la vida, The Tattooed Soldier, and in historical books such as the text by Erik Chink that I have been citing throughout, the School of the Americas is described as a place where Central Americans (mostly poor or indigenous peoples) are trained to fight guerrilleros and other leftist/communist threats during the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, the US congress denies this, saying that Human rights training is integral to the program (Romanoff) or that it is simply an educational training facility (Starr) . Though no one can be sure what happens there, the school stirred controversy during its 54-year run until it was closed on December 15th 2000 (Starr ABC News). Though the school officially closed, it reopened in 2001 under a new name, The Institute of the Western Hemisphere for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC); an organization tied to the militarization of border officers in 2019 via weapons and training (González and Shashahani “Por el Cierre”). Actions like these continues to push protesters like the School of the Americas watch to protest its indefinite closure.

from different perspectives, they also share certain thematic aims and forms. First the testimonio suggests that what is told or written is not fictional. whereby the reader is expected to experience both the speaker and the events recounted as real. However, the testimonio isn’t centered on a

“problematic hero.” Rather, its focus is normally with a problematic collective social situation that the narrator lives along with others (Beverly and Zimmerman 174). The narrator of the testimonio tends to speak in the name of a community or group without assuming a hierarchical or patriarchal status, in which

The presence of the voice, which we are meant to experience as the voice of a real rather than fictional person, is the mark of a desire not to be silenced or defeated, to impose oneself on the institution of power like literature from the position of the excluded or marginal. (Beverly and Zimmerman 175) In this light, the testimonio represents the entry of literature of persons who would normally—be excluded from direct literary expression or who have had to be represented by professional writers

(Beverly and Zimmerman 175). Because of this, testimonio has been paramount in linking rural and urban contexts of struggle within a given country and in “maintaining and developing the practice of international human rights and solidarity movements in relation to particular struggles” (Beverly and Zimmerman 177). This occurs because testimonio signifies the need for a general social change in which the stability of the reader’s world is questioned. For my present purposes, testimonio during the last two decades of twentieth century in the Northern triangle told real stories about sociopolitical, economic, and ethnic struggles and sufferings. Because of its portrayal of real-time historical situations, this genre gains the interest of literary scholars in the United States (Barbas-

Rhoden). Thus, the genre represented the collective situations of certain social and political sectors in the isthmus as stories that urgently needed to be told, an implication of “the importance and power of literature as a form of social action,” but also the insufficiency of other literary genres to adequately express the crude realities of social struggles” (Beverly and Zimmerman 178). The need to testify about real experiences of the pueblo would have a great impact on the themes and

aesthetic of poesía comprometida and the activism of sociopolitically engaged female poets like

Claribel Alegría.

In Nancy Saporta Sternbach’s article “Re-membering the Dead: Latin American Women’s

‘Testimonial’ Discourse,” she defends her hypothesis that “the same condition of marginality of women and the oppressed in Latin American which gave so much impetus to the testimonial genre was also instrumental in feminist theory in retrieving, reconstructing, and recovering women’s history” (92). This argument ultimately indicates the ways that both testimonial discourse and feminist theory are grounded in the reality of people who break silences, who envision a future distinct from their past oppressions, and are influenced by people who, with their new consciousness, as political subjects who make ties between the personal and the political” (92). If testimonial is looked upon this way, it is easy to understand why feminist women’s poetry of the

1980s flourished together with this genre that brought Central American literature to the scholarly forefront abroad. As the 1980s end and the Sandinistas lose the free elections of 1990, an overall disillusionment within the revolutionary sectors causes the decline in sociopolitically engaged poetry (Arias; Zimmerman). In light of these histories and transformations Central American society and politics from the 1930s to the 1980s that led to the creation of literary groups and poets culminating in the movement known as Central American poesía comprometida, I will now analyze how each this dissertation’s corpus of poetas comprometido’s sensibilities to and consciousness of national and global social change and crises function for and go beyond the exposition of revolutionary ideology, national political projects, and localized historical events.

Poetic Approaches to Imperialism

Anti-imperialism is one of the most treated topics in Central American sociopolitical poetry, whereby the particularities of this treatment represents what many of these writers saw as the foundations of Central American socioeconomic problems. One approach that the poets use to address imperialism is exteriorism. Cardenal describes this style as an “objective poetry, narrative

and anecdotal, made with elements of real life and with concrete things, with proper names, details, statistics, facts and quotations and tends to be an impure poetry that for some is closer to prose...”

(Beverly and Zimmerman 70). Cardenal took exteriorism to such a limit that scholars like Eduardo

Urdanavia-Beratelli have affirmed that Cardenal doesn’t write what he feels, but what he sees, in which many of his collections that openly denounce anti-imperialism, such as Gethsemani, Kentucky,

Hora 0, Salmos name the imperialistic companies that operated in Nicaragua and quotes from historical books. For instance, he makes use of the text El imperio del banana (1954) to describe the political repressions of Honduran farmer protests of the United Fruit Company in Hora 0. In

Dalton’s case, his use of exteriorism is extended into the subjective realm to not only name and denounce the culprits of imperialistic actions in Central America, but to make its consequences on the lived Salvadoran reality known to his readers, in an effort to convince them of the need for armed revolution. In “Discurso 53” in Un libro rojo para Lenin, Dalton cites Lenin when he writes of the need for “la propaganda en favor de la lucha de las clases entre las tropas” that is “también un deber de cada socialista; en la época del choque armado imperialista de la burguesía de todas las naciones…” (132). In “Patria,” the poem that immediately follows, Dalton simplifies what Lenin was trying to say it by applying it to a transnational Central American context:

Los trabajadores, los pobres salvadoreños; los trabajadores, los pobres hondureños; los trabajadores, los pobres guatemaltecos; no tienen patria.

Aunque la riqueza nacional Fue labrada con la sangre y el sudor de los pueblos ………………………………………………………

Los explotadores son tan dueños de esas patrias que cuando sus contradicciones se hacen críticas

echan a pelear entre sí a sus respectivos pobres …………………………………………………………

Los trabajadores y los pobres35 Solo tienen un medio para tener patria: Hacer la Revolución. (Stanzas 5, 6, 7, 8). The style used in this text and throughout the collection is collage, a mix of essays, poetry, fictional, and non-fictional texts that work together to create a unified message. The message in this text is how to apply Marxist/Leninist thought to the sociopolitical realities of Central America and Latin

America in order to combat the imperialist powers and stop the cycle of in-fighting of the most marginalized national subjects that maintain these powers. Through this collage style, Dalton demonstrates the difference between theory and practice in a parallel manner (poetry on one end/ theoretical discourse on the other). Via this parallel structure, the poetic voice highlights that theory can be difficult to understand while practice can be surprisingly simple via the simplified version expressed in the poem. In short, the collage structure of the poem addresses the consequences of imperialistic rule, policies, and economic structures in the isthmian nations and the theory that can be applied to combat them.

Another way that this collective of poets have approached imperialism is via the legacy of

Augústo César Sandino. All the poets of this collective have at least one poem in adoration of what

Sandino stood for and how he acted on it. In Nicasio Urbina’s’ recent article “Cardenal en la cultura popular nicaragüense,” he rightly points out that the image of Sandino emerges in twentieth century Central America as a hero of the anti-imperialistic fight, attracting the attention of writers

35 Here, I would like to point out two things. The first is that the poet speaks about these people not from the standpoint of being a part of them, but from lamenting their situation from a distance. I will address in the next section of the analysis. And with the reference to countries that maintain class divisions by making the poor fight against each other, he could be referring to ORDEN, a paramilitary group (sponsored by the United States) in 1961 who, by the 70’s had over 100,000 constituents. Most members of the group were rural peoples and indigenous—a clear illustration of Dalton’s point.

and intellectuals who supported his cause and “cantaron su gesto,” mystifying him in the process.

Urbina goes on to affirm that Carlos Fonseca and the poetic talent of Ernesto Cardenal aided in renewal of the image of Sandino that had been shadowed by the Somoza dictatorship. Cardenal, uses the gloss poem to achieve his mythical vision of Sandino in Hora 0, by distancing him from his military identity, a distancing that allows the poetic voice to portray him as a man of a dual character, both “severo y tierno, joven y sabio” (“Cardenal en la cultura”), whereby the narrated history of Sandino in Hora 0 plays out in the context of dictatorship, U.S. multinational exploitation, and the corruption caused by the North American dollar. Continuing his critique of imperialism, the second part of this long poem then narrates the torture of Sandinist martyrs such as Adolfo Baéz

Bone, Pablo Leal, and Luis Gabuardi to establish “una genealogía heroica, una linealidad en la lucha contra el imperialismo norteamericano y a la dictadura somocista” (Urbina “Cardenal en la cultura”). Through this linearity, Cardenal, like del Valle and González, affirm that from Sandino’s legacy new Central American struggles against imperialistic rule and the poverty and injustices that surround it will arise. From this viewpoint, poems that (re)illuminates Sandino’s social fight and his revolutionary character, tend to determine a mysticism that borders religion because it functions to create “una metonimia donde el héroe sacrificado, su cuerpo, sus restos, se convierten en territorio nacional, en la tierra que trabajan los campesinos, en la tierra que da frutos a los hombres.”This narrative strategy makes way for Sandino as a spiritual hero in Hora 0, who, like Christ, dies, but is risen anew within those figures who lose their life in the struggles against imperialism and dictatorship in Central America, mystifying them as legends that are reborn whenever National freedom projects for Central American autonomy arise (Urbina “Cardenal en la cultura”).

Likewise, in “Sandino,” Debravo’s poetic voice addresses Sandino as a brother who inspires him to reject indifference towards those who suffer from hunger or injustice, that is reverberated by the metaphor of Sandino’s very bones that speak to the poetic voice, Debravo writes in a conversational poem: “Tú para todos, muerto, / menos para mi voz que habla con tus huesos/ a

través de las tierras y el cemento…me hablas duramente con tu voz del soldado/y me dueles en todo como un remordimiento./Cuando me encuentro solo” (“Otros poemas” Jorge Debravo: Milagro

Abierto : Colección de Poesía Editorial Costa Rica 204). This memory catalyzes the speaker’s lamentation that as a Central American he is not engaging in concrete actions for the betterment of his country. From his complacency arises regret when he stands in the shadows of Sandino’s sociopolitical legacy and patriotism.

A similar remorse is illustrated in Alegria’s portrayal of Sandino, as a crucial figure of her sociopolitical awakening during childhood:

y yo no sabia quien era Sandino hasta que mi padre me explicó mientras saltábamos sobre las olas y yo nacía. Fue entonces que nací ……………………………………………… hice un pacto solemne con Sandino que no he cumplido aún y por eso me acosa su fantasma (Pagaré a cobrar y otros poemas 174) In the past imperfect, the verb “nacía” in the first stanza quotes denotes the ways that her first awakenings to imperialism and dictatorship continue to affect her present state of sociopolitical consciousness. The poetess, like Debravo, writes that Sandino’s legacy heightens her awareness of El

Salvador’s poverty and violence; one that she implicitly ties to imperialistic control of the region by the United States. This remembrance of Sandino makes her critical of her lac k of concrete political

involvement. Debravo’s and Alegria’s poetic renditions of Sandino’s figure and legacy follow similar thematic paths.

This continuity of Sandino’s legacy as mythical in nature is reiterated in del Valle’s “Un discurso para negar la muerte de Sandino,” a text where he sustains that Sandino’s spirit lives on in the mountains and cities of Nicaragua, and in the hearts of any national subject seeking freedom from foreign dependence. In del Valle’s typical romantic style, the voice of a reincarnated Sandino declares “Yo toqué con mis manos de la patria/su cintura vendida y su paisaje;/yo toqué con mis manos su substancia, /su enterrado dolor, su piel de jaspe” (33 ). This dramatization of Sandino’s ideas relies on personified feminization of the nation that repeats patriarchal values while painting this revolutionary figure as a legend who continues to inspire anti-imperialist sentiments. In

“Patria,” by Debravo, a similar metaphorical view of the nation likens the Central American nation to a delicate woman who he would like to be “dulce” and “buena,” “sin rifles negros./Sin sables blancos” so that he might “kiss” the nation, and look into her “clear eyes” (Nostros los hombres 67).

Considering Debravo’s short verse cited above, one could envision these poems that link a romantic view of the nation to sociopolitical activism and resistance, as Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas describes in his novel Antes que anochezca.

La belleza en sí misma[es]peligrosa, conflictiva, para toda dictadura, porque implica un ámbito que va más allá de los limites en que esa dictadura somete a los seres humanos; es un territorio que se escapa al control de la policía política y donde, por tanto, no pueden reinar. Por eso a los dictadores les irrita y quieren de cualquier modo destruirla, La belleza bajo un sistema dictatorial es siempre disidente… (113). James Iffland calls this linkage of intimate love with revolutionary ideology in the context of Central

American twentieth century poetry el amor insurrecto; a concept that proves that Central American poetas comprometidos of the era often didn’t see personal love as an obstacle to their mission as revolutionary writers (237-39). Bearing in mind el amor insurrecto, del Valle, a poet who saw himself as a romantic before a fighter, frequently uses love and beauty in his poems to testify to the consequences of his revolutionary activism in Honduras. In “Cuando entre hierras me pusieron,”

from El fugitivo (1962), he uses the blazon to list and praise the attributes of his virgin lover despite being subjected to political torture. He then subverts this trope of amor cortés, by illustrating his muse’s purity and her ability to overcome earthly violence. Though the poem does not clarify if the poetic addressee is a real person or just a representation of an ideal of hope or freedom, del-Valle does clarify that all her attributes culminate in her being a “virgen combatiente” whose message of hope can seep through prison bars. and inspire the poeta comprometido to engage himself politically with the social realities catalyzed by imperialistic control of Central America, namely

Honduras. . Del Valle’s amor insurrecto is revolutionary because political torture and repression fail to impede his dream of love that echoe his hope for a socialist future. Like Cardenal writes in

Epigramas that his poems of love are just important as his poems of protest. From this standpoint, love and beauty often function to displace imperialistic or dictatorial notions of power and control; another poignant element of this dynamic literary movement.

Regarding aspects of anti-imperialism that typify proletarian triumph over capitalist society in a context that goes beyond Central America, one can look to Otto Raúl González’s “Decir Cuba”

(120) and “Cuba” (1952). In “Decir Cuba,” the author uses rhythmic refrain to embody revolutionary hopes for a new national agenda that the triumph over capitalism has ushered in. The title “Cuba,” then, is a symbol of freedom; of victory over corruption, and a contrast to discourse that painted communism as an evil that would destroy freedom: “Decir Cuba/es como decir: palomas desatadas,/peces en la red, tomates abundantes;/es como decir: ¡mercaderes fuera!/¡fuera podredumbre! (120). 36 Another interesting approach to his Carribean awareness of anti- imperialism is “Cuba” from Viento claro (1953) because it prophesizes the Cuban revolution, while suggesting that the problems in during the fifties, namely the early repressions of early socialist

36Del Valle, on his part, also wrote a sonorous sonnet to Cuba with a touch of romanticism employing the blazon poetic form. It is titled, “A Cuba.” The voice of this poem is better appreciated read by Del Valle himself See del Valle read, A Cuba” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krjoUnghQQkd by the poet himself in 2013.

movement by the Batista regime. Separated into six stanzas, the poem links the telluric black beauty of the island, with the rise of early socialist leaders like afro Cuban labor rights leader, Jesús

Menéndez (1911-48), a man who oversaw the Secretario General de la Federación Provinciales de

Trabajadores de las Villas

Yo anduve por las calles de la Habana buscando en las palmeras y en el puerto, en el rumor de plazas y mercados en las faldas mojadas de la noche, las huellas de Martí, los paso de Maceo y el latido profundamente humano del astro negro de Jesús Menéndez.

Sólo encontré persecución y sangre el pobre cuerpo desangrado y triste de una mujer: la democracia.

Sin embargo la isla está rodeada de un gran mar de esperanza y futuro que habrá de devolver a los cañales el sabor primigenio del azúcar y sentar para siempre la dicha de los hombres

Yo anduve por las calles de La Habana (Tres poetas centroamericanos 124).

Here, Cuban imperialism is shown to be founded on sugar, its number one export. In turn, the poetic speaker declares that the triumph of the revolution will revendicate the taste of sugar to its “origin” as a sustainer of an autonomous Cuban nation, not a catalyst of foreign interest and political repression; an eradication destined to (re)open the path for a dawning of joy and freedom in a

nation characterizes by colonial systems, such as slavery; systems that were used to economically move such a rich national resource. In connection to the valor of sugar for imperialism and the subsequent hindrance of true democracy in Cuba, González uses the metaphor of a woman’s corpse, since the island’s natural resources are tied to a feminized personification of the nation, as perceptible in the previous analyses of “Patria” by Debravo and “Cuando entre hierras me pusieron” by del-Valle. The poem goes on to mark the state of violence trigged by early movement against

Cuba’s pre-revolutionary governmental structure through the images of “guns” and “weeping” in the streets that persist parallel to the island’s majestic landscapes, whereby the color black is frequently used to epitomize its inherent beauty; a nod to the fact that Cuba’s sugar industry thrived because of the labor of its black population. This state of violence deeply entrenched in the persistence of imperialism, that mingles with imagery of telluric beauty foreshadows the revolutionary and worker’s rights leaders praised in stanza III, whereby the poetic speaker searches for “el astro negro de Jesús Menéndez,” and “las huellas de Martí” amid the chaos. These figures of anti-imperialism and workers’ rights embodied in Martí and Menéndez link to the tradition of anti- imperialistic literary discourse found in modernist Central American texts, such as

“A Roosevelt” by Rubén Darío and Martí’s landmark essay, Nuestra América. Of the latter, I would draw attention to Martí’s idea that Latin American should break free of imperialistic shackles and begin to explore the nuances of their own identity, rather than relying on European or North

American models of civilization. In reference to Latin American thought. In this essay Martí writes that Latin Americans had yet to reach “el gran árbol difícil” of freedom because they have “el brazo canijo, el brazo de uñas pintadas y pulsera, el brazo de Madrid o de París; illustration of his firm belief that many Latin American leaders of his time simply imitated foreign values in the arts and in the government, making it impossible for them to govern themselves or forge a complete Latin

American identity that accounts for the indigenous and the black elements of their hybrid heritage, groups whose histories had been crucially affected by colonization and imperialism (“Nuestra

América” 133-134). Like González does in this text, the poems in this section on anti-imperialism tend to point back towards or dialogue with Cuba, the first Latin American country to reject the imperialist system; the first steps to realized their economic, social, and political path of independence free from foreign rule, foreign customs, and foreign identities.

Poetic Approaches to Class Consciousness

Though the poets of this corpus come from both upper-class society (like Alegría, Dalton, and Cardenal), middle classes (like del Valle and González), and lower/rural classes (like Debravo), they all treat economic disparities, ethnic marginalization, and political violence suffered by people in Central America and beyond. They do this via person , conversational , documental, collage, testimonial , experimental, and traditional poems. In particular, Cardenal, Dalton, and Debravo in a manner that is metapoetic, because they saw themselves as carriers of the histories of those who didn’t have the socioeconomic or literary means to speak for themselves.

González’s Voz y voto de geranio is a collection in which class-consciousness is the main topic . Published in 1943, just one year before the October Revolution, the title suggests that everyone in the Guatemalan state should have full political representation and voice. At the title indicates, this topic is of importance in the context of Guatemala since electoral fraud was a continual issue, whereby only the “citizens,” the literate, ladino, or economically powerful had true political voice (Calvart, “A Nation” 103). The use of the geranio, as the collection’s main symbol is just as essential to the text’s sociopolitical position as voice and vote in that it represents both the splendor of poetic imagery and the resistance of the people. About this, I first considered the biological nature of the geranium. With over 422 species, and the ability to grow in mountainous, tropical, and temperate zones, this flower is marked by its ability to thrive in any environment, its diversity in color, and its pleasant aroma (“Geranium”). With these biological factors in mind,

González uses his nature-based poetic outlook and his lyricism to sing its beauty. On another front, the use of the geranium is political because it functions as a symbol of the lower, class, rural, and

native Guatemalan populations who survive and resist repressive sociopolitical conditions; and who, despite their everyday struggles, continue to emit beauty, hopefulness, and joy. This duality between struggle and beauty marks González’s poetic renditions of class awareness and solidarity with the masses of marginalized subjects of pre-revolutionary Guatemala. Another possibility for the geranium is that this book was published during a time of heavy repression against anyone who spoke out against the government. Therefore, it could be suggested that using geranio could help this book evade censorship. This possibility is heightened more so if one considers the fact that the author does not specifically reveal this metaphor of geranio-pueblo until the second part of the collection.

Structurally “Residencia,” the opening poem sets the socialist tone of class equality “Pues la tierra es de todos y de nadie/el geranio se propaga por la tierra…/ pues el agua es de todos y de nadie/el geranio vive en el agua…/el geranio vive en todas partes (6). This poem fits quite well with class struggle because it implies that the people of the new nation should divvy the land and resources equally, a political stance demonstrated by the attempts of Land reform carried out by the Arbénz administration. With its simplicity and anaphoric use of “pues,” it generates a perfect poem to be recited and memorized by the masses, a demonstration that poesía comprometida was a

“portable” literature that was easily circulated underground, an essential quality for poetry that threatened oppressive regimes and dictatorships. The collection’s overall viewpoint that an equitable distribution of land is epitomized in the geological spread of this plant demonstrates that people have the right to live in any land that they choose, a far cry from the unequal distribution of land ownership in Guatemala in that time and even today; whereby the Center for Economic and

Social Rights asserts that land concentration in the country remains among the most unequal in the region (qtd. in Frank, “Twenty-First Century Pragmatism”). Visually the poem’s simplicity used in this short sample, is its evident simplicity demonstrates that in the very structuring of nature, one can find the exemplification of the natural world order proposed by socialism. I believe that this

notion is crucial to a fuller understanding of Gonzalez’s obsession with the telluric, an obsession that suggests a strong sense of indigenous ideology, as a parallel to the political structuring of socialist society. On a broader scale, the structuring and aesthetic of Voz y voto, illustrates an overarching characteristic of poesía comprometida whereby simplicity in diction, symbol, and metaphor, more often than not, shrouds complex sociopolitical messages. In contrast to its first section, in the second section of this collection , the poetic speaker reveals that the geranium praised is a representation of the workers, the peasants, the natives, and other peoples who should be included in Guatemalan national discourse. “Sonidos del color” likens the colors of the geranium to the nation’s diverse populace. “Signo del geranio (a) and (b)” specifically parallel the crude realities faced by these underprivileged Guatemalans, whereby the image of the geranium that they carry on their person represents the hope and freedom that the author associates with a new social order. His style of poetry that he uses in this section is a hybrid mixture of testimonial and exteriorist approaches, in which he employs some elements of the testimonial and exteriorist stylings, by attesting to to the populaces’ sociopolitical realities from the first and third person. For instance, in “Signo del geranio,” González witnesses a rural girl who works in the big house, In it, he alludes to her sexual violation by the boss. However, this is not a concrete testimonial because we do not hear the voice of the testimonial subject. The poem, then, borders exteriorism because the poetic voice writes of the visual realities of her, and the working class in his neighborhood that she is a part of from an observatory standpoint.

Pasó la ágil muchacha, la góndola de todas las dulzuras, la muchacha más guapa de mi barrio, la que estuvo sirviendo en casa grande; y llevaba un geranio entre su vientre. …………………………………………………………………………………………….. Pasó el más explotado: ese pequeño voceador descalzo que grita noticias por la calle,

que a veces va a la escuela y siempre tiene ardidas las pupilas de frio, hambre, y sueño; y llevaba un geranio en la mejilla (“Signo del geranio” 27)

The culmination of his class-consciousness poems expresses the poetic speaker’s solidarity with the

Guatemalan proletariat, campesino, and the lower-class indigenous and ladino peoples reiterated in

“Fecundidad,” a sonnet that prophesizes that these dispossessed ones will be the lights of the world.

In later collections, González he turns his attention to urban workers. This time, his poetic approach leans more towards exteriorism, but lyricism and metaphor muscle their way in when the poet introduces the joy that the workers maintain although they are risking their life to build products that they could never enjoy and are paid very little to construct. In González’s take on this

Marxist outlook of class structure, his obsession with rhythm and song take center stage. This occurs in his urban worker-centered poem “Los albañiles cantan” from the collection, A Fuego Lento

(1946). In the first part of the poem, he explains their exploitative working conditions through a description of their clothing and state of poverty. Nonetheless, their life-songs continue even though their destiny is portrayed as shattered:

Los albañiles cantan, sus ayudantes silban.

A veces desde los andamios, se derrumban (Tres Poetas Centroamericanos 116). Poems such as these illustrate the poetic speaker’s solidarity with the proletariat, while they use a poetic style that wavers between the lyricism and exteriorism with an attention to metaphor, similes, and rhythm that reveal how the workers somehow remain joyous despite their misery. This is a recurrent style in the poetry of Ilka Oliva Corado, whereby the song of the rural women and girl workers are never silenced by their marginal and exploited positionalities.

Though del Valle writes similar poems of solidarity with the low-class sectors of Honduras and the workers, especially those of the banana plantations, my main contention here is the metapoetic nature of his class-consciousness poems, in which the speaker of the poem reflects on his assumed positionality, as a clandestine poeta comprometido. This style is locatable in del Valles’s first collection La Ruta Fulgurante: Poemas Materiales (1956)— a jubilant text in which the poetic speaker often inscribes himself into the “we” proletariat through the meta-poem. In “La ruta fulgurante,” the first five lines indicate his position as an organic intellectual who is conscious of the social, economic, and political exploitation of the working class in a manner that hails sweetness, and happiness, rather than anger or despair, as he signals their coming triumph over everything that rises against them: “Comprendo que esto/tiene que ser así. No debemos olvidarnos/de la alegría. A pesar de todo/tenemos que ser fuertes para reír/y para creer en la dulzura” (9 ).

Thematically, I think the notion of sweetness and happiness should be highlighted, because, he argues that strength is needed for laughter, and the faith that sweetness will trump evil and violence. This phrasing is a manifesto of del Valle’s style that was highly criticized. Because of this, a recurring topic in his most revolutionary poems, is the defense of happiness, sweetness, and love; as arms to fight violence and survive it. Structurally and in terms of class, what also interests me, is the poetic speaker’s identification with the group’s suffering through the “we” form. Despite the unification of the poetic speaker with the proletarian collective signaled in the pronoun choice, the one fundamental difference that he marks between them is that he has the writerly intellect to manifest in words their desires and the problems. He has the adequate words to enliven their resistance. This unification and separation of the poetic speaker and the pueblo he fights for and with climaxes in his metapoetic reflection on the mission of the poeta comprometido, in

“Presentación”

Somos órganos oscuros

instrumentos humildes del pueblo atacado, servidores de la voluntad popular. Estamos aquí para ser su eco para hacerla triunfar. Vivimos con el pueblo, en él por él diciendo en palabras concisas ……………………………… Unimos nuestras voces, Enlazadas por la dialéctica viva del combate, a las de todos los seres oprimidos. Ya no soñamos sino sueños posibles e inscribimos nuestros nombres en las decisivas proletarias banderas… (4 emphasis is mine) Above, del Valle mediates on the role of the poetas comprometidos via several metaphors, whereas poetas comprometidos are portrayed as “órganos oscuros,” meaning clandestine voices that function from within the struggle of the oppressed to drive social transformation. This metaphor, and others reiterates their importance to revolutionary projects in Central America, as “instrumentos humildes” of the popular will, who use the rhythm and musicality of poetry to express the sociopolitical desires of the people and to voice their pain and their exclusion. Next, he emphasizes that they must live arm and arm with the people with a goal to unite their poetry with the voices of the oppressed of Central America, and others oppressed peoples all over the world. This is clear illustration that del Valle’s message here is that poetas comprometido’s sociopolitical awareness must travel beyond the borders of the isthmus, driven by a socialist impetus symbolized in the poem by the nationless proletarian flag. As indicated in this chapter’s epigraph, Dalton’s approach to class consciousness often considers a similar notion regarding the function of sociopolitical poetry, in which poetas comprometidos are keepers of the people’s histories. He sustains a similar

view in his essay Poetry and Militancy when he writes with strong conviction that a poet’s best way of arriving at “truth” that will guarantee the future realization of a more just society, is precisely his love for and solidarity with the peasants and any social sector subject to oligarchic or imperialist rule. This textual analysis of del Valle clearly demonstrates similar postures.

Turning now to Dalton, his approach to class-consciousness is often carried through the person poem. According to Shira Wolosky, the speaking voice of person poetry

…denotes a speaking voice that is stylized, fashioned, or slanted in a way that distinguished it from the actor, or, in poetry, from the poet. The term’s application is clear when an obviously invented dramatic character is speaking in the text. But one can also speak of persona when the speaker is not an explicitly dramatized character…Each of these stances informs not only the speaking voice of the text, but its topics, imagery, strategies, and purposes. (113) With this definition at hand, it is easier to approach Dalton’s poems that use this form to embody the livelihood of both members of the lower classes and the oligarchy in a way that illuminates certain Marxist topics. However, in an ironic turn and with the humor that many scholars have called attention to in Dalton’s work, “La segura mano de Dios” assumes the person of assassinated president General Don Maximiliano Hernández Martínez to denounce this dictator’s violent repressions of the indigenous, the peasants, and the dissidents, and represent his contradictory nature and his violent character that he attempts to conceal via a veil of Catholicism(Roque Dalton:

Antología 78 ). Using a vulgar language with various instances of Salvadoran slang, his poetic voice relates a recent torture that he committed as if conversing with a friend. Nonchalant and related without punctuation, this text displays a hurried conversation, while the person poem itself helps

Dalton to embody the state of mind of this merciless assassin. In this context, the person poem functions to inform the reader of the complete lack of empathy of a powerful political man to exemplify Dalton’s stance that figures such as these should not maintain power in El Salvador, whereby his filthy language opposes the serenity and good manners of a just politician: “hoy creo que debí pensarlo dos veces/uno sigue siendo cristiano/áse vino a dar cuenta cuando ya le había

zampado/cinco o seis puñaladas/ y a la docena se tiró un pedito de Viejo/ y se medió ladeó en una silla…/ le metí cinco trabones más (63). This poem, like others that Dalton has written such as the prose poem, “Un campesino de mi país habla de la teoría y la práctica” demonstrate his attuned ear and frame his literary passion for theatre inspired by his admiration for the German playwright,

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) (“Un libro rojo” Roque Dalton: Antología 166 ). Because of this many of his poems are structured like plays with two or more characters in dialogue that depict the situation of the subjects, and their way of speaking, thinking, and reasoning. In the poem cited above, the campesino speaking voice describes the repressive situation in El Salvador, whereby the poetic speaker assumed he describes a Leninist philosophy without jargon or complicated theory with his rural diction that doesn’t veil his profound ways of thinking but deepens them.

For Alegria, she also uses the person poem in a similar way as Dalton does in “La segura mano de dios,” but instead uses it to embody the many unnamed persons who have repressed revolutionaries, revolutionary movements, protests , and native populations in several centuries, that go beyond Central America. This approach is evident in her short poem from Luisa en el país de la realidad (1983) titled “Desilusión”

Exterminé Mai-Lei para bien de la democracia. De nada me ha servido; a pesar de todos mis esfuerzos el mundo sigue igual (Guerrero-Guerrero 236) As notable from the final three lines, the poem discusses the difficulty to change the continued exploitation of and violence against lower classes and revolutionary movements across the globe.

An additional manner that poets of this corpus portray class consciousness is through the pseudo- testimonial. However, in texts such as Alegría’s “La mujer del río Sumpul,” located in the collection

De este poema-río (1989), they tend to include the testimonial voice of indigenous subjects, and

interlace them with the author of the poem, so that they might contextualize the social situation of the testimonial speaking voice. Therefore, one might see this approach to poesía comprometida as an amplified testimony. In this specific case, Alegría structurally separates the oral voice of the indigenous woman—who loses three of her children to military violence during the Sumpul massacre— with quotation marks, whereby Alegría’s poetic voice as creator of the poem flows freely around what the testimonial subject speaks of; openly commenting about the historical, religious, and political factors that encompass what has happened to the indigenous woman and her town at the hands of the military. This is an example of how the person poems frequently functions to contextualizes the testimonial in itself; an act that can help the reader comprehend not only what is happening to the testimonial subject, but why it is happening. This structure reflects how in certain literary testimonios the poetic speaker is positioned inside and outside of the testimonial speaking voice (Binford, “Writing Fabio Argueta” 27).

The documental poem is another recurrent way that many of these authors, namely Dalton,

Cardenal, and Alegría depicts class consciousness. This approach tends to substantiate violence against these classes of people and their economic, political, and social struggle. This style is carried out in certain moments of Cardenal’s Hora 0, and Alegria’s “Documental.” Though both of these poems are poignant portrayals of class struggles, they seem to come from an outside place of happenings, events, history from which the poetic speaker(s) function(s) as observer(s), whereby they don’t express opinions or their feelings about what is going on and imply present what is happening. Because of this, I have mentioned that many of González’s poems approach the documental style but don’t follow it al pie de la letra because he adds metaphor, personal opinions, and similes. I should emphasize, then, that this style mustn’t be confused with exteriorism because the documental isn’t as concerned with written data or historical texts as palimpsests. Instead, it centers on a movement of the poem in a similar way as a camera might change positions and

perspectives in order to portray different angles of a certain scene or act. A similar definition of the documental poem is provided by scholar of Cardenal Robert Pring Mill:

The documental poem expresses reality (and so redeems it) in a more dialectally visual way: picturing things, peoples, and events in the light of a clear-cut sociopolitical commitment; selecting, shaping, and imposing interpretative patterns on the world, with liberal use of such filmic editing techniques as cross-cutting, accelerated montage, or flash frames; and pursuing ‘the redemption of physical reality’ by bringing us ‘back into communication’ with its harshness and beauty” (ix-x) Via a brief citation of Alegría’s “Documental,” this style is easily identifiable

Se conmigo una cámara Fotografiemos la guarida, la hormiga reina expulsando café, nuestro país, estamos en el corte. Enfoca sobre esa familia que duerme obstruyendo la zanja… Un close up de la madre encita dormitando en la hamaca ( 222 ) ………………………………………. As demonstrated in these verses, the camera in the poem portrays the minute objects, the sky, and the campesino to portray ethnic class violence through imagery and symbols. Whereas, the documental focus is clarified with words like “corte” and “enfoque.” Though not all documental poems use this cinematic language, it is interesting to see how Alegria employs them to explicitly mark the texts’ documental style, whereby the poet breaks it not with metaphor and open critique, as if her poetic speaker cannot simply “film” the misery; she must denounce it explicitly to contextualize what the reader is seeing, so that the poems’ full social and political scope might be grasped. For instance, in the last stanza, Alegría’s indignance about the state of El Salvador spills out

via an image of coffee; a product that has been linked to ethnic and economic exploitation of the country’s rural populace since the late eighteenth century (Chink 73)

Desprende el café oro reflejos de malaria, de analfabetismo, de tuberculosis, de miseria. ……………………. (Guerrero-Guerrero Vía única 163 Though there are many other approaches to class consciousness in this corpus, these are the most salient, and will be the most important in the analysis of the following chapters.

Poetic Approaches to Indigenism

In Uruguayan writer’s Ángel Rama’’ (1926-1983) Transculturación narrativa en América

Latina (1984), he indicates that the indigenist movement in Latin American literature was preceded by regionalism, a type of narrative that described the customs and the land of Latin American people. This literary movement’s purpose was to extract those autonomous elements that made

Latin America different from its colonizers and (neo) colonizers, as outlined well in José Martí’s

Nuestra América. Once these differentiating elements of identity were unearthed by the regional writer, they were transposed to the national discourse through literature, ethnography, and history with the hope that they might somehow begin to transform Latin America’s attitude of dependence to independence in a cultural sense. Since the pre-Colombian inhabitants of Latin America were indigenous peoples, this is the sector that regional authors used as their historical and literary material; a subjectification that generated the full-out indigenist movement in literature led by indigenist, who were non-indigenous intellectuals or officials who shape public discourse about indigenous peoples, as critique Amanda Minks describes in “Reading Nicaraguan Folklore through

Inter-American Indigenism, 1940-1970.” This definition of the indigenist subject reflects Ramas’ notion

that the main problem with this literary movement is that the indigenist authors and anthropologists were mestizos and not pure natives, and, as such, did not, for the most part, write or speak in indigenous languages. So, he asks, how could they express the reality of the indigenous peoples? In “Literature on Trial,” Mariátegui raises a similar concern when he asserts that the

Indian doesn’t represent solely a type, a theme, or a plot character—he represents a people, a tradition, and a spirit—making it nearly impossible to illustrate his full complexity from a purely literary point of view (272). Despite this concern, he sustains that indigenism is just in that it seeks to repair the injustices done to the Indian through fuller representations of his complex totality

(272-3). Therefore “authentic” indigenist literature should not be confused with naturalism or costumbrismo, because it doesn’t only seek to illustrate Indian physiology but Indian thought,

Indian mythology, Indian history, and Indian class-struggle. Moreover, the overall representation of

Indian class struggle is of significance because, as Mariátegui writes, “new forces and vital impulses of the [twentieth century Peruvian nation] were directed toward redeeming him” (272).

As discussed in my introduction, indigenist struggle and culture was a crucial issue in

Guatemala during the revolution because the native population suffered class exploitation as farmers who often were mandated to engage in unpaid labor. Another reasoning for this revolution’s focus on indigenism is that Guatemala has the highest native population in Central

America. For instance, 59.7% of the population are indigenous persons from ethnic groups like the

Chol, Huasteca, Maya, Pipil, Quiche, Sinca, etc. (Zambrano 187).37 This class-race struggle is also reflected in El Salvador. About this, I might also remind my reader that in La matanza, most of those who were assassinated were of indigenous descent (Chink 32). Furthermore, the class problem of the native in El Salvador is locatable in the division of labor, in which most of the exploited peasants

37 In El Salvador, indigenous groups like the Nahuas, Pipil, Quiche, make up 2.3% of the population. In Honduras, the Carib, Jicaque, Mangue, Paya, et.al make up 3.2% of the population. In Nicaragua, the Misquito, Rama, Sumo, and Garifuna makes up 8% of the total population. In Costa Rica, groups like Boruga, Bribis, Mangue, and Terraba make up 2.3% of the population (Zambrano 187).

were of indigenous descent while the most powerful coffee families were usually white or mestizo

(Chink 27). These situations demonstrate that exploitation against native groups in Central

America was a prominent feature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and persisted simultaneously with “integration” projects that covertly promoted the idea that the natives can be redeemed if they “whiten” their skin and their thought.38 Another aspect to consider regarding indigenism in Central America is that it has roots in the Mexican Revolution (1876-1911) in which many indigenous soldiers played a crucial role in the anti-establishment uprisings. For example,

Amanda Minks writes that Sandino’s imperialist uprising in Nicaragua drew on the Mexican

Revolution’s overall challenge of European racial hierarches brought about by the revalidation of the indigenous subject. An illustration of this transnational interaction among revolutions is that

Sandino’s soldiers would sing Mexican corridos based on indigenous history and ideology to raise moral. We find this exemplified in Cardenal’s Hora 0. However, as Minks asserts, Sandino was not primarily concerned with the supporting of indigenous communities since his nationalist project assumed their cultural assimilation. This affirmation explains that the mere attraction toward indigenous culture, history, and ideology in twentieth century Central America did not solidify the position of indigenous persons in the national scene. Instead, the indigenist movement would continue to hold an ambivalent position. On the one hand, it served as a resource of cultural heritage. On the other hand, indigenous culture was also seen as inferior since the imagined nation as a unified mixture through mestizaje often favored European heritage at the expense of the erasure of indigenous culture and physiology (Venutolo 14). What my investigation has uncovered

38 Through the study of popular and intellectual discourse of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica in Patricia Alavarenga Venutolo’s complex article “La construcción de la raza en la Centroamérica de las primeras décadas del siglo XX,” she finds that during the twentieth century in Central America “el concepto de la raza, fundacional en la invención de lo que hoy se llaman identidades étnicas y nacionales, es consistentemente manipulado, pero queda atrapada en la hegemónica discursividad proveniente del mundo europeo occidental” (15).

about expressions of indigeneity in poesía comprometida are various attempt to reflect diverse elements of the indigenous subject from history, to mythology, to class struggle. I have found that several poets of this corpus integrate symbols, mythologies, and beliefs of indigenous peoples and groups to their texts. They also contrast the natives care of the earth with the capitalistic exploitation of the land. In other text, they assume the voice of the native through person poems that attempt to replicate— in Spanish— their linguistic patterns, depict the work that they do, and relate elements of their history. These are all easily identifiable elements.

González’s Elegía mayor abound with images of indigenism. The veneration of agriculture and mother earth is one of them because indigenous peoples are always striving to maintain a connection with nature (Sánchez 63). “Si no hay maíz.” “El río es un abuelo,” “Invocación a Yum

Kax,” and “Razones del Maíz” demonstrate the poet’s sensibility for indigenous gods and goddesses and the indigenous belief that “todo tiene kausai (vida) y todo tiene samai, (espíritu), desde lo más grande hasta lo más pequeño, desde lo más denso hasta lo más etéreo tiene esa sutil sagrada vibración llamada vida.” What is very interesting about “Razones del maíz” is the way the poet connects the spiritual veneration of corn agriculture to the spirit of the twentieth century indigenist uprisings. Writing in the fourth stanza that “en la sangre/de la gente de ahora/el maíz se convierte en llamarada” (123). Cardenal raises similar themes in his collection Homenaje a los indios americanos. However, his approach is different in that his book presents the anthropological history of Central American, Latin American, and North American Indian groups. Therefore, the poems are exteriorist in nature because they don’t only present generalized symbols of indigenism such as corn, but they present data that Cardenal extracted from his extensive studies on Native Americans in several continents. One of the essential ideas expressed in the collection is that the natives’ social structure was communal in nature, unlike Modern European and North American imperialist societies—an illustration of the fact that in these poems

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Hay una lección histórica para examinar y revisar: muchos de esos pueblos ‘primitivos’ encontraron la razón para vivir en la comunidad que ha perdido la civilización moderna. En nombre de ésta, el hombre, casi con naturalidad, mata, explota, saquea, y destruye. Las mitologías, las sabias leyes precolombinas, ya condenaron esos males, ya que nos maldijeron y nos anunciaron el caos presente (Oviedo 16). Aesthetically, Cardenal’s approach in Homenaje is very experimental. He doesn’t write in stanzas and the sentences float about the page without regard for fluidity. Instead, they function to amplify the message that many Indian communities lived without money and, above all, with a greater preoccupation for religion and community. Because of this focus, poems such as “Las ciudades perdidas” and “Nele de Kentucky” contrast modern society with the histories of native societies to deepen Cardenal’s criticism of imperialism already present in his earlier collections such as

Epigramas, Hora 0, and Salmos.

Though it could be argued that Cardenal romanticized the indigenous people, the important notion one might gain from it, is that his approach to indigenism was a critique of capitalism, violence, and class-disparities. However, these critiques are balanced with a beautiful portrayal of

Indian songs and ideologies that exemplify their deep connection to the earth and to the community. From this historical standpoint, what may appear to be a seemingly chaotic linguistic structure for a western reader such as myself, may be designed as such to depict the natives’ way of thinking about life, friendship, time, religion, and the earth in a fashion that refuses linearity—that resists western “reason.” This structure is what makes poems like “Cantares Mexicanos” so unique because the style of the writing itself attempts to capture the spiritual and material values of the natives:

Los collares de caracoles y de jades se desgranan como las sartas de flores de cacao…

las vasijas blancas como hojas de códice con las figuras de rojo claro y rojo oscuro amarillo

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y verde turquesa… Sí es pirámide se desmorona. (32) Because of this poem’s intricate indigenist qualities, it is almost impossible to analyze it from a western point of view. Instead, the reader would have to consider several indigenist ideologies to analyze it. For instance, they must consider the fact that in indigenist thought colors are an expression of spirituality (Sánchez 63). Because of details like this, a full indigenist framework is necessary to analyze this poem—a framework that unfortunately goes beyond the scope of this chapter. For now, I will indicate that what is vital about this poem is that it attempts to replicate indigenist language and thought through the pattern of the words and the words themselves.

Another point of importance in this text is that the poetic speaker uses the notion of circular indigenous time to show that time is “a hilo ininterrumpido que se sigue extendiendo” (Elías 205).

As such, poems like “Mayapán” illustrate the veracity of ancient indigenous religiosity by the poet’s incorporation of Mayan prophecies that have come true or that he has adapted to actual sociopolitical situations in Central America and beyond. Like similar texts authored by Cardenal,

Homenaje uses the history and mythology of several native tribes as a palimpsest to discuss current events with an emphasis on the ills of the present world that have come from the turn away from native cultural practices such as the communal sharing of goods and the land. Homenaje, then, embodies Mariátegui’ s notion that indigenism of contemporary literature is linked to recent events

(269).

In “Flores del volcán,” Alegría invokes indigenism, but from a very different perspective.

She uses figures like chacmool, Tlálocol39, and Chac to embody the spirit of violence causes by natural disasters and militarization in Honduras ( Fifi, 1974), Managua (the 1972 earthquake), and

El Salvador (The Civil War). The poem, then, turns to indigeneity in its open commentary that a

39 A Mesoamerican deity of celestial waters.

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spirit of pre-Columbian sacrifice (or an attack of the gods) has summoned all of this violence at once, as if the gods needed human blood to gain new life. This approach to indigeneity represents the existence of the continued belief in indigenous spirits and ideologies in Central American despite the regions’ displays of modern advancement. This text, then, point to García-Canclini’s anthropological concept of multi-temporal heterogeneity in twentieth century Central America that is exposed in this poem in which “Nadie cree en Izalco/que Tlácol esté muerto/por más televisores/heladeras/Toyotas/el ciclo ya se acerca /es extraño el silencio del volcán” (Guerrero-

Guerrero 229). For the poetic speaker so much death due to natural disaster and sociopolitical issues seems as something supernatural that must be attributed to a greater spiritual force that has existed in Central America even before the colonizers had arrived. In subtler terms, several indigenist poems within this investigation’s corpus present the pain and the nostalgia of the Indian soul that throbs with centuries-old pain of colonization, (neo)colonization, exploitation, displacement, racism, and genocide. Mariátegui describes this as “indigenist sentiment” or the pessimism of the Indian—a quality that he notices in the work of César Vallejo, a poet who has been called an influence of Debravo and Cardenal (252-4). Mariátegui furthers this notion when he describes it as a pessimism full of tenderness and nostalgia because it is not engendered by egocentricity and narcissism as is the case almost throughout the romantic school. On the contrary, it is an impersonal grief for the suffering of all mankind (254). If this indigenist sentiment does exist, Jorge Debravo embodies it in countless poems that deal with the suffering of mankind. For example, in “Yo no sabría decirte” his poetic speaker says to his lover:

Yo no sabría decirte por qué amo a todos los niños muertos, a todos los ancianos y a todos los enfermos. Puede ser que mi alma sea tan blanda que me la curve el viento.

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Puede ser que yo escuche la soledad de los que están muriendo. (Antología mayor 21) Through the metaphor by which the soul lets in the solitudes of the dying, Debravo’s poetic speaker admits to feeling the pain of the whole of humanity. Like Mariátegui writes of Vallejo poems, the speaker pains because of an inward solidarity with those who suffer all over the world. As literEY moments such as these exemplify, I do believe that Debravo, a man who took off his shoes as to not hurt the rocks that he tread upon, could indeed express indigenist sentiment (“El hermano

Jorge”). However, what is more important to notice here, and especially in the sampling of

Cardenal’s poetry, is that the expressions of indigenism in poesía comprometida go beyond the portrayal of the poetic speaker’s national indigenous peoples and struggles. In the case of Cardenal, he looks for continuities and discontinuities between North American and Latin American native cultures. For Debravo, he does not speak specifically about indigenous peoples, but emits a mysticism in his poems that venerate the earth and human suffering as his own suffering.

A more direct illustration of indigenist sentiment is found in González’s poem from the collection A fuego lento, entitled “El son es como una tragedia,” a text that demonstrates his fascination for native dance and song as spiritual embodiments of their connection to mother earth, and an expression of their centuries-long pain

El indio baila grave, sumergido en su tragedia antigua y subterránea como por ignorado dios herido ……………………………………………. El indio cuando baila rememora su tragedia vital, siempre presente al siglo, al año, al mes, al día, a la hora. (Tres poetas centroamericanos 120).

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This poem’s reiterated attraction to the native psyche and his spiritual expression via dance seems to emit from within the poetic speaker who, as a ladino looking man, feels connected to an indigenous heritage because of his intimacy with nature as a Guatemalan. “Las hogueras,” from El bosque (1955)echoes this point through his poetic veneration of the natural world that urges him to believe that perhaps his indigenous roots lie within himself and not only the indigenous person often observed and embodied in his person poem. The result of this sentiment is a poignant portrayal of indigenist sentiment that arise from the fire symbol therein. The text, a conversational poem with an indigenous spiritual deity, reads:

El hecho material de encender una hoguera …………………………………………………………….. era nada más que una humilde ofrenda de los hombres que tú has creado con maíz y de tu aliento. ………………………………………………….. ¿Cómo no amar entonces las fogatas de hielo de la orquídea? y la hoguera lejana de los astros?

Estas ideas tal vez un poco primitivos pasaron en secreto a los hijos de los padres y a los nietos de los padres de los hijos, como pasa en la sangre el color de los ojos, la forma del cabello y los lunares.

Por esas leyes terribles de la herencia es que a veces yo enciendo fogatas infinitas (Tres poetas centroamericanos 138 emphasis is mine)

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As Mariátegui had enquired in relation to Vallejo’s sense of spirituality, González’s speaker implicitly asks in stanza V and VI, just how deep does the implications of racial mixing in Central

America cut? Who has native blood in Central America and who does not? How does this mixture effect the indigenist writer’s feeling towards the land and its history? This is an inquiry that only further study can properly address. Or perhaps, it may remain a mystery that only poets who express indigenism can continually unravel. From this small yet complex sampling of indigenist expression in poesía comprometida, it is evident that literary approaches to it and the aesthetics implemented are diverse and certainly worthy of further study.

Poetic Approaches to Feminism

On par with the indigenist movement came the feminist movement that expanded women’s traditional roles in society such as homemaker, wife, mother, or nun, whereby women began to create their own discourse by which they could speak for themselves. In this chapter’s sampling of poetry, the tendency to write about women who challenged traditional roles is evidenced in poetry written by Claribel Alegría and some of the male poets. However, it is the strongest and most consistent in Alegría’s work. In many aspects, Alegría’s feminist poetry follows those characteristics of Central American women’s poetry of the late twentieth century outlined in “Algunas constantes de la poesía contemporánea escrita por mujeres: de objeto a sujeto literario” by Parejo, Ramón

Pérez, and García Dorde. For one, it parodies religious discourse because of its patriarchal nature. In “Confesión,” Alegría finds that intelligible dialogue with God and man is simply impossible as a woman: “No quiero dialogar/ni con Él/ni contigo. /Ni tú/ Ni Él/existen,” she declares in this conversational text from the collection Auto de fe (41). As further outlined in the article, her poems demystify patriarchal codes through a (re) writing of Central and Latin American myths of “bad women” like La Malinche in Mexico, who was the indigenous interpreter for Hernán

Cortés. Whereas, her poetic voice takes pride in La Siguanaba, an indigenous woman who, according to Manlio Argueta, after facing family separation after Spanish colonization, becomes a

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monster who punishes men who try to seduce or colonize her (qtd. in Oliva-Alvarado, “A

Gynealogy” 102). Thought of in this manner, La Siguanaba can be seen as a feminist mythological figure of Central American folklore who resists patriarchal forms of beauty, is in charge of her own sexuality, and punishes men (not women) who try to take advantage of her defenseless, since she is known to appear as a vulnerable woman who is washing clothes or stranded in the wilderness. In

Alegría’s (re)writing of female myths like La Malinche, she expresses a deep lament that the principal women integrated into the national imaginary in Latin American countries are monsters and traitors. If not monsters, then virgins or religious figures. However, when she writes about La

Siguanaba as a woman, she tends to take pride in the Salvadoran female mythological figure because, contrary to the patriarchal ways of seeing her that are still prominent in popular Central

American culture (as a woman who is cursed for adultery and bad mothering), in the colonial version of the tale La Siguanaba can be seen as a quite feminist figure because she “defies colonization and mocks her seducers or colonizer” in which her very monstrosity destroys the patriarchal representation of women. (Oliva- Alvarado, “A Gynealogy” 111). Via the original story of

La Siguanaba, it is no surprise that Central American female authors like Alegría employ this figure as prime material in their feminist poems about patriarchal and colonial resistance. Another perspective about La Siguanaba that I must indicate, is that those mythological figures like here usually mark the childhood memories of someone who has grown up in Salvador. For Alegría, then,

“La Siguanaba,” marks how this figure isn’t only about feminism but Central American cultural identity.

Another characteristic laid out in “Algunas constantes de la poesía contemporánea escrita por mujeres: de objeto a sujeto literario,”is that Central American women’s poetry of the late twentieth century is written via a confessional lyrical voice that is identifiable with the real author who has “una voluntad expresar la feminidad, el goce, el orgullo y la reivindicación social de sentirse mujer. Esto lo hace sin filtros, pantallas, o máscaras enunciativas” (684). Echoing this

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observation, Daisy Zamora notices an extraordinary symbiosis between Claribel Alegría and her writing; between her life and her words. Though Alegría isn’t “comprometida” in the militant sense of the word, early poems by the author like “La prisionera” quite sociopolitical because of their pioneering role in unmuting those hidden histories and everyday experiences of women

Cuatro muros me encierran y animales domésticos y niños. No importas tú Vivo un mundo que tampoco me importa. Otra vez interrumpes. Voy a estallar… ( Vía única 39). Breaking the accepted mold of the sweet, subservient wife who doesn’t voice her griefs, Alegría’s speaker reveals that being a mother doesn’t always bring her joy, that being a wife can be more like being a prisoner. These frustrations are emitted through the diction itself and the quick pace of the short verses. Whereas the very notion that the speaking voice has her “own world,”—her own thoughts, opinions, and imaginings that her husband, children, and even God himself cannot understand—destructs the patriarchal notion that a woman should solely define herself through motherhood, wifehood, or religiosity. Combating this idea, the femenine speaking voice is depicted to having a world of her own, that constant domesticity without space for creative freedom leads to feelings of imprisonment, rather than happiness. The title, then, fits quite well with the notion of an independent women’s world of intellectual thought, creation, and imagination that is interrupted, by patriarchally established duties that rob her of independence, both professionally and personally. The existence of this women’s world is exemplified in several poems in Acuario and Vía

única, whereby the poetic voice speaks about her dreams, and her imagination; representations that she is more than a woman in service to her children and her husband ,or, at least, she desires more.

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For the time it was written, this women’s world politically turns notions of women, as defined by

God, state, and men, on its head. In her memory poems, Alegría continues chipping away at patriarchy as she raises the issue of how Central American girls of the elite class are raised to be flower girls, pianists, and other professions that are non-threatening to the patriarchal order.40 In other poems regarding femenine experiences, she writes about women’s paid and unpaid labor, illustrating the quantity of unpaid labor that a mother and wife do. These tasks, however, don’t only serve to critique motherhood, but poeticize the negative and positive self-transformation that motherhood often brings, whereby the poetic speaker discovers new element of her “ser,” and loses pieces of herself in the process; a process that she loves and despises

Me descubro en la mesa del comedor mientras sacudo, en los uniformes de los niños, en los cuellos de las camisas. No me encuentro por días. Paso delante del espejo sin reflejar mi imagen. No tengo tiempo de conversar conmigo. Ni falta me hago a veces (Guerrero-Guerrero, “Aprendizaje” 145-6) Though many of the male poets of this corpus attempt to portray women’s issues, it’s very difficult for them to come close to nuanced views about motherhood, identity, isolation, and the many oficios of women in the way that Alegría does in matter-of-fact tone that captures an upper-class women’s everyday experiences. I say “upper-class” women because indigenous women’s experiences can be quite different, because they imply different labors, different oficios, and, often, different desires. The

40 “Te con las tías y las abuelas” from Vía única, p. 9

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intimate window into a mother’s life in Alegrías early poetry, however, was a big step for the time in which it was written. In her collections of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, she begins to turn her attention to the sociopolitical events and issues that she mixes with her already established feminist and women-centered poetry. This is carried out through the use of traditional women’s spaces, such as the home, and traditional women’s issues, such as motherhood and cooking, as a formula to discuss poverty, hunger, and injustice in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and beyond. 41 What stands out in the era of her literary creation, is her ability to fuse the personal with the political and the natural beauty of the

Central American countryside with the hideousness of violence and militarization. In Pagaré a cobrar y otros poemas, Raíces, and Sobrevivo, Alegría’s lyricism and precise treatment of time are fully matured and quite eloquent. The collection Sobrevivo draws on the notion of the testimony, whereby the poems often include testimonial female voices, who have suffered governmental violence at the hands of the Salvadoran paramilitary groups. These testimonial inclusions fit well with her feminist poetry that testifies to the experiences of being a woman from different social positionalities. Now, that I have covered Alegría’s main themes, and styles, I will now discuss how several of the male poets of this collective approach women stories in a manner that challenges, admires, or nuances traditional female roles.

In Jorge Debravo’s first collection Milagro abierto, he emphasizes the role of maternity in terms of the illustration of its “intensidad como su delicadeza, en confluencia, ocasionalmente, con la semántica telúrica” (Pérez-Parejo and Curvardic- García 687). Of this collection, leading scholar of Jorge Debravo, Jorge Sham Chen, finds that the collection’s poetic speaker presents a more inclusive conception of maternity, in which the burden of pregnancy and child raising is equally shared by the man and the woman. Despite this equality that the poet proposes, he doesn’t diminish the heroism of the woman who goes through the physical, spiritual, and mental struggle of

41 See “Traigo flores, dotor,” (203) and “Tamalitos de Cambray” (222).

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becoming a mother. To add a touch of indigeneity to this telluric representation of maternity, he employs metaphors of planting and harvesting. 42 Though I find this text to be illuminating, it still relegates the woman to her reproductive function. Nonetheless, this does not diminish Debravo’s feminist stance that the woman is the most fundamental element of creation. This stance can be located in Devocionario del amor sexual (1963) in the conversational love poem “Salmo de tres reinos,”a text that reflects indigenism in that it eludes to the ancestral reverences of the feminine presence of “madres cósmicas, que son muchas…la Madre Seres, la Madre Insoberta, y la Madre

Konciencia—la diosa madre creadora y sostenedora de Cosmos” (Sánchez 63). What makes this text stand out in terms of feminist thought, is its intersection of indigenism and revalorizing of women’s importance in society. For instance, stanzas III to VI are significant because the woman is symbolized to be the leader of modern and ancient cultures. To nuance this stance, the women’s body is linked to the Central American landscapes, such as the volcanoes, while feminism is underscored via illustrations of a liberated female sexuality to portray her as a liberated modern women: “Estarás sobre el mundo, mujer; todas las manos/ se ahogarán en tus aguas humeantes; /se hundirán en las hierbas silvestres de tu pubis/ y no volverán nunca de buscarte(16). Here, a notion of feminism is evident via the positioning of the female subject on top of the world, in front of the man, and at the roots of all creation through a sensuality that reflects the centrality of mother nature for the survival of all humanity. Nonetheless, this positioning is set in the future, an illustration that the poetic speaker is aware that full feminist liberation is yet to come. But if and when it does, he imagines it as an indigenous rebirth of the natural and spiritual world: “Quedarás sobre el mundo, mujer, y sobre tus/ (espaldas)/seguirán emergiendo los volcanes, resbalando las aguas como lobos hambrientos./ Pasando como flechas de los hombres y los ángeles (16).

42 Alongside the potency of the telluric, Debravo uses parallelisms/couplings to clarify the metaphoric nature of the relationship between the poetic speaker and the woman he addresses, and consonant rhyme schemes to evoke a pleasurable musicality.

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In the work of González, a less metaphoric view of feminism that goes beyond Central

America is found in the collection Cantigas para Joan Baez. In this work, he demonstrates his admiration for the U.S. folk and protest singer of Mexican descent Joan Baez. In “Ayer tarde llovía,” his poetic speaker announces the joy of finally obtaining a copy of her music. In the last section of the poem, the poetic speaker describes the intimate space of the home where he, his wife, and his children enjoy this protest music. This male admiration of a woman who is known for her leadership and activism demonstrates that during this time, male attitudes about women were slowly beginning to change. Despite the fact that Beverly and Zimmerman sustain that Dalton’s poetry contains women in the domestic sphere (130), my investigation has shown that Dalton includes intellectual female voices of women who take on non-traditional roles in society. For example, in “Poema jubiloso” (73) the woman in the poem is a guerrillera. In “El paso de los años”

(103) the woman disagrees with Dalton’s political ideas. Of the latter poem, Dalton uses a theatrical poem style set between a dialogue between “Yo” and “Ella.” Perhaps the strongest evidence that he believed that women shouldn’t be solely judged by their gender but by their humanity appears in

Poemas clandestinos. In “Para un mejor hogar,” one might note his sociopolitical redefinition of the women that he crosses it with the socialist ideology that women exercise paid and unpaid labor, evidencing that once sex is shown to be a “political category,” women can “comenzar a dejar de ser mujer en sí/para convertirse en mujer para sí,” whereby they might be free, as Alegría might say, to lose themselves in their own worlds without being interrupted by fallacious ideas about what being a women is also about. For Dalton, this will come about when women and men alike begin to accept the fact that “las labores propias del hogar/son las labores propias de la clase social a que pertenece ese hogar (17).

Throughout this chapter, I have reiterated how the content and aesthetics of this poetic sampling go beyond the national and the local. But, when it comes to feminism, the need to pinpoint the situation of women to national social movements is absent. This seems to nod to the notion that

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women worldwide were experiencing similar changes and struggles globally as mother, wives, freedom fighters, professionals, workers, and young women who had and were attempting to break into new roles on societies while redefining the ones already established for them under the auspices of patriarchy. Both men and women poets of this collective recognized this, but in the case of Alegría her poetic speaker was more testimonial and confessional because she was telling her own story as a Salvadoran elite woman who had broken social norms by becoming a writer, traveling the world, and “breaking free of the traditional reactionism that was expected of the early twentieth century Latin American woman” (Treacy 216).

Poetic Approaches to Liberation Theology

Before Liberation Theology, the ministers, priests, nuns, and leaders of the Catholic Church concentrated more on Jesus’s death and its implications in the next life than on Christ’s life and its meanings for humanity. This theological concentration usually pushed the implications of Jesus’s carnal life into the margins, causing the overarching message of church leaders to be grace and heaven, not action and life. This disconnect between the church and the sociopolitical reality of the church’s followers was only accentuated by the fact that mass was still dictated in Latin—a language that most of them did not speak or write. Along with changing the language of Mass from

Latin to Spanish, one fundamental change that Liberation Theology brought to the teachings of the

Catholic Church in Latin America and worldwide was their renewed focus on Jesus’s life in the world and what it meant for the Christian’s earthly experiences, actions, and behaviors. Because of this change in theological direction, beginning in the late sixties, the nuns, priests, and religious leaders who had been mostly serving the needs of elite Latin Americans in the city, began to flock to the country (Berryman 34) In hopes of following Jesus’s worldly example, they went to the poor communities, inquired about their social struggles, talked to them about the relevance of the gospels in their lives, and taught many people to read in the process. These were actions that helped many of the marginalized farmers, peasants, and indigenous communities gain a new

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consciousness about their economic situation and learn of the steps that they could take to transform it. Though there was nothing overtly political about what these Christian groups were doing, the context in which they were doing it in made it political. Whereas the inherent similarities between Jesus’s teachings and Karl Marx’s teachings didn’t help to mark the differences between them and any other social group who were working to improve the living conditions of the poor.

About this similarity, Alfonso Guillén Zelaya notes in “Cristo” that Marx, like Christ, also wanted to stop “la condición divisionista del clan” and erase “las fronteras territoriales” of privilege and race.

However, unlike Christ, Marx was decided to find the “las formas de su realización” on earth (Zelaya

“Cristo”). Unlike Zelaya’s conceptualizations, Liberation Theologists postulated that the form of carrying out important social changes in favor of the poor was by replicating Jesus’s love that he showed to humanity during his life—a love that led him to not only pray for them but to act in such a way that they may have better living conditions and eternal salvation.

Whether they formed alliances with agrarian leaders, socialist groups, or, in the most extreme cases, with anarchists or guerrilleros, Liberation Theology leaders, priests, nuns, and other

Christian intellectuals became dangerous to the ruling class because it encouraged a once reactionary mass of poor Christians to engage in political actions that were justified by Jesus’s life and message—both reflections of Jesus’s love. As I discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the church’s involvement in politics made them a new enemy of the state— an easy target of Cold War anti-communist raids and massacres. As in other sections of this chapter, some expressions of

Liberation Theology go beyond Central America, but this time the poets use simplified metaphor to express that the physical and the spiritual needs of men and women bind all of mankind together in a common struggle against those who oppress or suffocate the attainment of these needs. In terms of the aesthetics of those poems that reflect the Christ-life-Christ love focus of Liberation Theology, poets like Cardenal and Debravo tend to use biblical poetical forms such as the psalms, and usually, short, easily understandable verses whereby only the most essential elements necessary to express

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their message of what Jesus’s life should mean for the Central American believer in his or her sociopolitical context, and what it should mean for mankind in the present time that they were writing and in the future. 43 Published in 1960, Debravo’s Consejos para Cristo al comenzar el año connects Christianity to social and political struggle. In the prologue, the author reveals some concern for the public reception of its theme and the structure that he uses to develop it— a frank conversation with Christ about the local, national, and global social and political state of humanity that should concern him (and all Christians) and push him (them) to action.

In the context of pre-Liberation Theology in Central America, this collection represents a call for the implications of Christ’s life as a man to be reevaluated in the light of class disparities, governmental repressions, and violence nationally and globally. Poems 4 and 8 of Consejos takes direct hits at Central American sociopolitical corruption by indicating the existence of dictatorship and violence in connection to it. However, poem 5 could be applied to anywhere in the world:

“Muchos niños se caen en el pozo/del hambre y de la muerte, noche a noche/Muchos hombres fallecen en aceras/olorosas a alcohol, negros y pobres” (81). In poem 4, he tells Christ that “Ya es hora de cortar con machete estas tristezas” (80). Later, as the nuns, bishops, and other religious leaders were doing through Christian based communities, he asks Christ to “pasar por lo menos/los fines de semana/ en estos pueblos.” (83). This exemplifies how followers of Latin American veins of

Liberation Theology saw direct contact with oppressed, illiterate, and poor people as one of their duties as Christians. Debravo’s aesthetics with regards to sociopolitical poetry here include brief versification, crude imagery , and simple diction—techniques that drive the principal message: the world is in shambles, dictators propagate violence for power, many priests are corrupt, and war is in the air (1, 3, 4, 6, 8). Therefore, the presence of Christ as a man and a friend of the poetic speaker in the poem indicates that Jesus’s life should be considered when tackling these issues. Nonetheless,

43 See “Prologue” to Poesía completa: 1950-2013. . It should also be noted that del-Valle was very adamant in his stance to not mix Christianity with his sociopolitical writings.

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Debravo wasn’t the only poet from this sampling who talks about the differences between the views of Christianity rooted in Liberation Theology, and Christianity that propagates reactionism and staying in the state of grace as opposed to activity related to improving the living condition of men and women. In “Dos religiones” Roque Dalton speaks of the Catholicism of épocas normales when going to mass, paying tithes, and baptizing one’s children. Here, the important phrase is “épocas normales” because poet is saying that the revolutionary period has engendered a politized church.

In this light , Debravo’s reference to “este año” from the title of the previous poetic sample gains new significance because he also considers that the historical period has made a new way of looking at Christ’s life and message necessary to inspire social movement among Christians. Despite begin an atheist, Dalton does recognize that renewed Christian sociopolitical action demonstrate how religion can be a positive ally for revolutionary struggle “a la manera de los poemas y los cánticos,/y que se juega la vida en este mundo/y no hasta después de la muerte” (41).

In another approach to this subject, poems in Salmos by Cardenal implement the Lament

Psalm.44 This type of psalm is characterized by the writer’s heart cry to God for divine deliverance from trouble and pain, that is either individual or communal (Mathew, “Literary Structures”).

Cardenal uses this type of psalm to show that God himself should begin to act against the dictators in Central and Latin American imperial monopolies, and the overall broken state of humanity in the second half of the twentieth century. In this text, the oppressed (the workers, the peasants, etc.) are presented as those who love, and the oppressors (the dictators, the gangsters, the CIA, the financial institutions) are presented as those who do not love (Ifflan 48). In “Salmo 1”, he employs the

44 This form usually involves: 1) calling upon Yahweh by name (usually in the vocative), 2) lamenting complaints over the misfortune; almost always political in nature, 3) supplications and petitions to Yahweh to transform the misfortunes, 4) thoughts aimed to excite confidence in the suppliant or to move Yahweh to action, such as his honor or the sake of his name, and 5) endings that demonstrate certainty that Yahweh has heard the supplication (Mathew, “Literary structures of the Psalms”). 116

biblical trope of the blessed ones found in Matthew Chapter V of the gospels. The verse that he uses to construct his poem is the following:

3 Bienaventurados los pobres en espíritu, porque de ellos es el reino de los cielos.

4 Bienaventurados los que lloran, porque ellos recibirán consolación.

5 Bienaventurados los mansos, porque ellos recibirán la tierra por heredad.

6 Bienaventurados los que tienen hambre y sed de justicia, porque ellos serán saciados.

7 Bienaventurados los misericordiosos, porque ellos alcanzarán misericordia. (Bible Gateway) In reference to this text, and as Urbina rightly indicates, Cardenal uses these scriptures and their form as a palimpsest to talk about his sociopolitical ideologies and the political atmosphere in

Nicaragua, that he and others were struggling against in the era before Nicaragua’s revolution

(“Cardenal en la cultura”). In Cardenal’s version of these verses, he flips them around, making them relevant for the era in which his identity as a monk-revolutionary was at the forefront of his literary activities. Via his use of plain diction that resists metaphor, he writes that those who will be blessed are not the meek, but those who don’t’ follow the “consignas del partido”; that the blessed ones are not those who cry, but those who don’t accompany the “gangsters” of the Generals of war; that the blessed ones are not those who are meek but those who refuse to listen to propaganda or spy on their brothers. These phrases are a direct effect of the ways that liberation theologists defined the life of a true-believer, as one rooted in active resistance of capitalism, greed, and violence. In “Salmo

5,” Cardenal again uses the palimpsest of the lament psalmist form. In the article, “The Literary form of the Psalms,” Mathew writes that it usually involves calling upon Yahweh by name (usually in the vocative); lamenting complaints over the misfortune that are almost always political in nature, supplications and petitions to Yahweh to transform the misfortunes; voicing thoughts aimed to excite confidence in the suppliant or to move Yahweh to action, such as his honor or the sake of his name; and endings that demonstrate certainty that Yahweh has heard the supplication.

Cardenal applies this structure to the historical context of the mid twentieth century. Following the

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psalmist form cited above, he begins by calling upon the Lord saying, “Escucha mis palabras oh

Señor.” Next, he reminds God of his own characteristics in order to incite him to move on his behalf, reminding the almighty that he is the Redeemer and that he is not a friend of the dictators, nor a member of their political parties, nor a subject who is influenced by their propaganda. Though he has faith that God is not on the side of those that he sees as wrongdoers, he reminds Him, and the readers that their discourse is based on lies. Then, he goes on to complain over the political misfortunes that not only affect him but affect the world. In this fashion, he cites his belief that government leaders and coalitions speak of peace yet plan wars. After, in a perfect mirroring of the lament psalm, he asks God to move into action against the wrongdoers, while demonstrating confidence is God’s power to put an end to their plans (stanzas 7, 8, and 9). However, in stanza 10, unlike in “Salmo 1,” the poetic speaker emphasizes his uneasiness about the atomic bomb, a global rather than a Central American problem. In the text, the end-of-days trumpet call that will mark the end of humanity, as prophesied in the book of “Revelations,” is paralleled to the nuclear doomsday.

At the end of the poem, he expresses certainty that God not only heard his cry and will act accordingly. Like in his epigraphs, the last image is constructed to take the reader by surprise:

Al que no cree en la mentira de sus anuncios comerciales ni en sus campañas publicitarias ni en sus campañas políticas tú lo bendices Lo rodeas con tu amor como con tanques blindados This image calls my attention because it likens God’s protective love to an armored tank; an illustration that God is also a God of vengeance who permits believers to fight with arms for their liberation from violent repressive forces. This poem, then, goes one step beyond “Salmo 1” in its very suggestion that the Lord and the Christians can retaliate to their wrongdoers with the same weapons those wrongdoers have used against them. This is revolutionary indeed, especially when the passage in Mark chapter 5 calls for meekness, humility, and acceptance of earthly pain since the

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real reward lies in heaven. Like “Salmo 5” suggests, I find that several poems in Gethsemani,

Kentucky further the notion that true belief is more than a personal relationship with God. For instance, I encountered the following untitled poem:

Mientras recitamos los salmos, mis recuerdos Interfieren el rezo como radios y como roconolas. Vuelven viejas escenas de cine, pesadillas, horas Solas en hoteles, bailes, viajes, besos, bares …………………………………………………………….. Es la hora en que brillan las luces de los burdeles y las cantinas. La casa de Caifás está llena de gente. Las luces del palacio de Somoza están prendidas. Es la hora en que se reúnen los consejos de Guerra y los técnicos en torturas bajan a las prisiones (80) Here, the poet’s spiritual conversion does not and cannot separate him from his memories of the past, from his concern with violence and political repression in Nicaragua, from thinking of his own sins that seem to always be in front of him. It is particularly through the repetition of “it is the hour” that Cardenal demonstrates that his conversion has not erased his sociopolitical consciousness made so poignant in La Hora O. It is, however, in the last image of this same poem written with careful and exact language that the poet reveals how his inner anguish (that lies outside of the monastery) continues manifesting itself in his search for peace inside of the monastery “Afuera los primeros pájaros cantan tristes, llamando al sol. Es la hora de las tinieblas. /Y la iglesia está helada, como llena de demonios, mientras seguimos en la noche recitando los salmos” (81). Though the birds should represent beauty, they “sing sad songs.” Though the church should be a place of peace, it is “full of demons.” This realization illustrates Cardenal’s belief that his time in the monastery felt devoid of the gospels’ true spirit because he was cut off from the needs of the people; a realization that points to the lack of the church’s fulfillment of its God-given duty to the most desperate and destitute populaces.

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The last element that I would like to point out about these poems that mirror the Christ- love- Christ-life aspects of Liberation Theology is that they went beyond Central America, by prophesying a better future for all mankind, inspired by the life and work of Jesus Christ or the poet’s inherent love for humanity. One of the main symbols used is bread because bread implies that men have spiritual needs that go beyond physical needs, as represented by Christ’s declaration that he was the bread of life. It is also pointing to the Mana that fell from the sky to feed the liberated Israelites in the Old Testament. The other is the physical meaning of bread needed to survive. Liberation Theologist took both of these perspectives of bread into consideration—an action that inevitably led them down a political path. An excellent exposition of this idea of the quest for spiritual and physical substance is found in Debravo’s opening poem of Digo (1965).

Written in the psalmist couplet form, it reads:

A la corta del pan iremos todos Chorreando eternidad.

De la textura viva de la sangre Sacaremos la paz, la luz, y el pan.

A la corta del pan iremos todos, cada uno con su piel de caridad,

Y un fusil escondido por si el odio nos quiere encarcelar. (9) Though there is much to say about this short yet powerful poem, I will indicate only a few issues that relate to this present discussion. “Chorreando eternidad” indicates that bread is spiritual and physical, whereby he life of this world is presented as inherently linked to eternity. Next, it suggests the struggle for equal living conditions can become violent. This poem embodies the history of the

Central American liberation movement in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua that became

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violent when the masses started looking for physical sustenance alongside their physical substance, when they stopped waiting to die to seek heaven, but began to fight for a piece of heaven on earth.

Regarding the symbol of bread as a metaphor for freedom and equality, all the poets of this sampling were, in some form or another, concerned with the need to “conquistar el pan;” an ailment that modernity has failed to heal (Guillen-Zelaya “La inconformidad del hombre”). For instance, in Debravo’s poem “Canción divina” from Antología mayor, bread is illustrated as the true

Savior, to such a degree that the notion of an all-powerful God who watches over his creation from a distance is displaced by the image of an idealized society where no man or woman is in want of food, a sociopolitical utopia that is bound to bring about universal peace and harmony. Dalton takes a similar stance, albeit without any religious or spiritual undertones in his famous “Como tú” located in Poemas clandestinos, a beautifully written conversational poem that can speak to anyone in anytime because of the way that it identifies the universality of human experience . This poem is also important because it again illustrates how simple language can signify complex trues that venerate and lament the human existence. Lastly the uses of pan demonstrates a Marxist outlook that everyone everywhere should have their needs met; a message that is likened to the very mission and even the results of poesía comprometida. Though Dalton only refers to poetry in a general, I make this claim because in stanza IV the poetic speaker claims to feel pain, solidarity, and joy with everyone who must fight to survive, just as del Valle expressed in his metapoetic piece

“Presentación,” that reflects this genre of poetry’s mission is to call for equal access to the basic needs of life and liberty for all, as encompassed in the dually spiritual and physical implications of our daily bread.

Poetic Approaches to Exile, Diaspora, and Travel

Up until now, I have used both diaspora and travel as important theoretical concepts, but this section also considers exile—an involuntary banishment from one’s country of origin usually for reasons related to one’s political ideas and actions. In the case of this collectivity, diaspora,

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travel, and notions of exile are rather peripheral to authors who had little experience with movement from their country of origin and are more central to authors who have spent time abroad either as subjects of diaspora, leisurely travelers, or exiles—migratory hats that these poets interchanged frequently. One recurrent topic that this investigation has uncovered about notions of travel, diaspora, and exile is that the authors learned new things in other countries that would, in turn, affect how they viewed their countries of origin, and the sociopolitical changes that they would like to see occur in them and their approaches to poetry. The latter is expressed in the poetry of Cardenal and Dalton. For example, during his literary studies in the United States at

Columbia University in New York City from 1947 to 1949, Cardenal is introduced to the writing of

Ezra Pound—the author who would inspire his exteriorist style (González-Balado 57). He would also meet his spiritual advisor and poetic teacher Thomas Merton in Gethsemani, Kentucky.

Through this relationship Cardenal would learn his first notions of how to apply Christian theology to issues of social justice. About Merton, Cardenal says that “Él insistía mucho en que el monje no debía estar despreocupado de los problemas del mundo, sino al contrario: solamente teniendo preocupación por el pobre, por los oprimidos, por los grandes problemas sociales y políticos…era posible la unión mística con Dios” (qtd. in González-Balado 97). In terms of deepening sociopolitical ideologies while abroad or in exile authors like Cardenal, Dalton45, del Valle, and González traveled to and lived in communist countries like Cuba, Russia, and China and met other revolutionary writers, such as the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1902-63)—a revolutionary poet venerated by del

Valle and Dalton.46 These encounters with socialism, communism, and the literary voices, leaders,

46 Dalton spent 1961 to 1965 in exile in Mexico (where he wrote many of the poems in La ventana al rostro) and Cuba. After his return to El Salvador in 1965, he reported to Prague (orders from the Cuban communist party). In 1969, his book, Taberna y otros lugares, based on his long stay in Prague is published and wins the Casa de las Américas prize

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and revolutionary actors of these movements are depicted as moments of illumination for the authors that give them hope that new forms of society, particularly communist and socialist ones, are possible in Central America and that the work of those leaders and writers who fought for a transformation of their respective nations were not in vain.

Another persistent approach to notions of diaspora, travel, and exile is the notable development of different forms of contrapuntal awareness by which events that happen abroad occur against each poet’s collective and or personal memories, histories, and current events of the homeland or to the poet. This is awareness is a frequent driving trope of Alegría’s work. The topic is also of important when approaching the work of the exiled writer, Otto Raul González and; whereas

Alegría had spent the bulk of her life in the U.S./European diaspora because of her marriage to

North American journalist and editor Darwin (Bud) J. Flakoll (1923-1955).47 For González, exile was a huge part of his personal, political, and poetic life. In this respect, García Aguilar argues that his different cultural customs and countries are registered in his text. However, his attention is never fully separated from Guatemala’s collective history, its nature, its peoples, and its crisis, whereby scenes of his diaspora in Mexico and other communist countries are alternated with “su retorno a los bosques guatemaltecos y la de la infancia entrañable, con sus humareda de fogón y

áreas poblados de pájaros” (13). Though he tended to point out the days of his youth and the glorious golden years after the October revolution, he also writes heavily about the pain that he feels for Guatemala’s dealing with genocide of its indigenous peoples and the ecocide of its nature because of exploitation and foreign expropriation. In Tun y chirimía (1978) the poetic speaker reflects on his country’s social and political violence that he likens to a daily earthquake

(“Terremoto” 175). Whereas in El Cementerio clandestino the poetic voice grapples with

47 It might also be noted that there was a small window of time in the seventies when she was legally prohibited from entering El Salvador before of her non-fictional political writing.

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disappearance and massacres, in which the reader encounters poems like “Los huesos olvidados”

(93) and “Es natural” (166), two texts that lament the everydayness of violence in a country

(Guatemala) that he is many kilometers away from physically, but present emotionally.

Despite his exploration of the painful current events in his homeland, in this poetry of nostalgia and lament González doesn’t frequently write poetry that shows how the family is touched by violence or how via the intimacy of what happens in the family one can deduce the sociopolitical external environment of a particular place or time. Alegría’s poetry does this. She does it so much so that Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), famous Argentinian fiction writer, had advised her to look for new themes although he understood quite well that from her memories of family, one can extrapolate sociopolitical Salvadoran realities. Regardless of this advice, the past never stopped obsessing her as evident in Raíces (1975) y Sobrevivo (1978), collections where her relationship with Central American realities intensifies. Nevertheless, this intensification occurs on the heels of her preferred poetic tropes: the family, her favorite towns (Mallorca and Santa Ana), and her own experiences and feelings as a woman who finds herself facing perpetual sociopolitical awakenings. 48 In terms of diaspora and longing, these collections also illustrate a woman who is trying to hold on to her identity. This translates into images like the ceiba tree and the mother roots that serve to anchor the poetic voice to her Central American (Nicaragua and Salvadoran) identity that she vehemently clings to, despite long bouts of absence and despite her consciousness of the violence and repression that the people face there. In this regard, one important poem is “Aquí también nací” from a very early collection Acuario (1955). This poem demonstrates that from early on in her diaspora, she knew that her “Centralamericaness” would be questioned. However, she is adamant about holding on to her isthmian roots while celebrating the heterogeneity she has gained from diaspora:

48 Alegría was not permitted entry) to El Salvador in 1989 to report to the Sandinistas. The denial incited her official exile from the country.

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Partí llegó mi hora. Mas no partí del todo;

Mis verdes se quedaron. Cada vez que regreso los respiro.

Después volví a partir De muchos sitios. Nunca parto del todo. Pero no es mal negocio. Llego como invitada y acumulo riquezas ……………………………………………….. ¿Qué más da si me marcho o me quedo? Aquí también nací. (134) Apart from the unapologetic-manifesto like tone of this poem that celebrates the enriching experiences gained from travel and diaspora, the poet often writes about how transnational back- and-forth travels keeps her intimate and close to the homeland. Aesthetically the poetic voice proves her ownership through birthright to the beauty of the homeland. Thus, her “verdes se quedaron,” and she has a right to them whenever she decides to return. In other cases, diaspora, travel, and exile to other countries affected the poets at a linguistic level which caused them to implement words learned abroad in their poetry. For instance, in Alegría’s collection Aprendizaje in the section “Autos de Fe” one will come across “Morning Thoughts.” This poem portrays the loneliness Alegria felt in her marriage because it took her away from home. What interests me is the

English title and Spanish content, that creates a s structure which appears to suggest that her exterior world is in English and is surrounded by English speaking people and ideals. Nonetheless,

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Alegría still expresses a profound relationship to her roots, in which Spanish continues to be her principal mode of writing in the hostland. Because of this, there are very few poems in her complete works that have English titles other than “The American Way of Death,” a poem I explored earlier and in other languages such as French. 49 For del Valle, an author who spent a considerable time in

France, he implements many words in French and writes about his passion for the country with a sense of sadness that he cannot return home. Poems like this are found in the collection Nostalgia y belleza del amor.

Considering the use of language of the diaspora in poetry, Cardenal has a very advanced diasporic language. Perhaps this is due to his passion for North American poetry and the amount of influence people from the English-speaking world have had on his sociopolitical formation. In some of his most dynamic moments of the implementation of two or more languages as once, Cardenal does not limit himself to a title or a solitary word in languages other than Spanish, but longer and more significant phrases. This is evident in “Coplas,” an extensive poem written in homage to

Thomas Merton who had died of an electrocution in November of 1968. Of this poem, Cardenal says that it alludes to Merton’s world and the contemporary word. For my purposes, it is one of the most linguistically and thematically hybrid poems I have encountered via my investigation of this corpus of poetas comprometidos. This hybridity is evident when the poetic voice satirizes the lack of true human love in societies all over the world (especially in capitalistic societies), the lack of God, and the lack of authentic spiritual contemplation: LOVE? It’s in the movies/las irrupciones de la eternidad/fueron breves/—los que no hemos creído los Advertisements de/[este mundo/cena para 2, <>/How to say love in Italian?/me dijiste: el/evangelio no menciona contemplación/sin LSD (González- Balado 111) . Though other poets like Dalton implement notions

49 See “Dans le metro” from Aprendizaje, 85.

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of diaspora, travel, and exile in their poetic language, for questions of time, I will move on to another concept that seems rather specific to Dalton.

Dalton poeticized his international travel (in exile and during his journalistic project) through his rising consciousness of the diasporic culture that was beginning to take shape in El

Salvador, as more and more poverty-stricken people were forced to look for work in Honduras and other neighboring regions. In “Poema de amor” (Poemas clandestinos 157), a text cited by contemporary poets like Javier Zamora and contemporary Central American critics like Ana Patricia

Rodríguez, Dalton speaks about “…los que nunca sabe nadie de dónde son…los que fueron cosidos a balazos al cruzar la frontera…los eternos indocumentados.” I thought this was an important poem to call attention to in this section because the poetic voice uses his own feelings of political exile and journalistic travel to consider the implications of forced diaspora of fellow Salvadoran migrants for economic reasons. If my reader might recall, in the section of class-consciousness, I discuss how

Dalton demonstrates that he is quite aware of Salvadoran diaspora to Honduras and the trauma and repression the migrants faced because of it. Still, in “Poema de amor” it seems that he is prophesying the increased culture of forced diaspora from the isthmus that is often accompanied with violence and dehumanization of the diasporic subject that has solidified itself in the present century. Though one can never know exactly what his perspective or thoughts were when he wrote the poem, it is clear that he was making an argument for the existence of forced diaspora and a denouncement of violence against a people because their life-circumstances had forced them to move away from everything that they know and everything that they love in search of survival.

Unlike Dalton’s early excursions through Latin America his young life (see “El Mar”) and more like his time in exile after 1965 (see Poemas clandestinos), Dalton is referring to a very violent diaspora that is characterized by persecution and poverty. From my investigation, he is the only poet who consistently made this connection. Perhaps this explains why Central American poets and scholars of today, and even non-Central American historians and scholars of literatures consistently return

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to his poems. Nevertheless, the non-naming of los eternos indocumentados in Dalton’s poem gives it a universal feel by which anyone in the world can be subject to forced displacement and the pain and violence involved with movement and settlement to a foreign land. In a broader view if diaspora, and notions of travel and exiles, poets of this corpus often used media reports of international news, as a way to gain consciousness about things happening in other countries when there wasn’t an opportunity to travel or they weren’t unfortunate to be exiled. This is particularly poignant in the work of Debravo—a poet whose writings demonstrate that he knows about human suffering abroad, a pain that his poetic speakers are vulnerable to. In this way, Debravo’s poetic voice(s) travel(s) in spirit, gaining consciousness of the world’s pains, catastrophes, and crisis. This is evident in “Otro poema de amor inevitable” whereby a reading of the newspaper takes his mind to the possibilities of another war, to the pain of people in other lands, to the violence of imperialism, to the destruction causes by natural disasters. Much like in our days, the Costa Rican poet gets a word tour without leaving his home.

In conclusion, this panoramic analysis of the selected poetic sampling of Claribel Alegría,

Ernesto Cardenal , Roque Dalton, Jorge Debravo, Pompeyo del Valle , and Otto Raúl González, spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s, has illustrated that imperialism, indigeneity, class- consciousness, feminism, Liberation Theology, and notions of travel, exile, and diaspora are the most prominent themes of their particular poesía comprometida. This is because of the historical period in which it was written and the diverse subjectivities, identities, and experiences of each poet. This chapter also delineates their employment of different stylistic approaches such as the person poem, the collage poem, the epic poem, the sonnet, and the documental with the use symbols, metaphors, and overall themes that are easily communicable to the scholar of literature and to the common man. With similar styles and themes, this chapter of Central Americans in

Movement demonstrates that each poeta comprometido of this investigation’s corpus had diverse sensibilities to and consciousness of local, national, and global sociopolitical change and crisis.

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Nevertheless, each poets’ global visions of their world and history didn’t cause them to lose sight of their homelands. This anchoring to home is emitted in many ways, such as memories of their childhood, images of their homeland’s telluric beauty, and illustrations of the people who live and struggle there. As a culmination of these poet’s sociopolitical consciousness that spans from home to abroad, they end up expressing what Hernán Loyola has called the “prophetic dimension” of sociopolitical poetry, a notion that he originally applied to the work of Pablo Neruda. His theory states that:

lo profético alude a dimensión activa de su escritura frente a la realidad (natural e histórico) del mundo. Alude al plano de la acción, opuesto y complementario al plano de los sueños. Alude, en suma, a la proyección práctica, a la misión sacra pero concreta con que su poesía buscó siempre traducir activamente el amor infinito y apasionado hacia la Tierra de los Hombres, hacia nuestro planeta con todos sus habitantes, hacia nuestra Casa Común en todas sus manifestaciones, historia y potencialidades (92).

With this idea in mind, I might postulate that what marks this sampling of poesía comprometida is similar in that it evidences a consistently active stance toward the natural and the historical reality of the twentieth century (and previous centuries) in a local, national, and global sense that is grounded in and goes beyond Central America.

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Chapter IV Manifestations of Diasporic Hybridity within a Revival

The vicarious “re-conquest” of the land from the Roman invaders came to replace the aspirations of

a physical return; as a consequence, the longing for Zion became ritualized. The homeland was

turned into a place of metaphysical desire for wholeness and thus was removed from geography into a spiritual category…The diaspora faced a new challenge in view of a real possibility of a return

to the homeland.

“Between goldene medine and Promised Land: Legitimizing the American Jewish Diaspora”

Ursula Zeller

The theoretical structure of this chapter functions as a family in two ways. First, theoretical subdivisions often incorporate several elements of diasporic hybridity during the process of textual analysis. For example, in the subdivided section that treats metaphoricity, I also consider “roots” and “routes.” Next, different facets of complex theories, namely diasporic consciousness, appear within subdivisions multiple times because they tend to assume different characteristics when considered from the standpoint of certain concepts and theories. In the case of diasporic consciousness this occurs because this theory has many ideological planes, such as the state of dystopia felt by diasporic person or community, as a s consequence of hostland alienation. This structural approach responds to the unstable nature of each poet’s diasporic condition that, thanks to literature, can be frozen in several moments linkable to several theoretical and conceptual categories of hybridity and diaspora.

U.S. Time-Lapse, Salvadoran Time Lapse…Both?

In response to time lapse, and other related concepts of my theoretical framework, I have discovered that poems by Guardado, Lytton Regalado, Oliva Corado, and Zamora express this

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theory in a manner that subverts and calls into question master narratives in the United States and

Central America in a contrapuntal manner. One prominent master narrative that they challenge is that which suggests that violence and poverty generated by civil war and genocide of the native peoples in El Salvador and Guatemala have been replaced by peaceful neo-liberal developmentalist projects (Rodríguez, “Dividing the Isthmus” 87). Another is that the United States is peaceful and welcoming towards all migrants. Moreover, their poetry presents a challenge to the notion that the effects of colonialism and (neo) colonialism no longer affect today’s race relations or relationships between developed and underdeveloped countries in negative and quite tangible ways. This use of time lapse that correlates to each poet’s diasporic consciousness presents several aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities with poesía comprometida.

Turning to the master narrative of peace and neo-liberal development in Central America, texts by the writers of Salvadoran descent often demonstrate that violence is still a prevalent issue in El Salvador. One way that their poems aesthetically illustrate this variant of time lapse is through the archive and the repertoire, whereby they often rely on newspaper stories and historical documents that exemplify gang violence or structural violence of the state and criminal organizations. Then they enliven them through repertoire. For example, in “Cenizas” of Cenizas,

Guardado’s poetic speaker relies on the archive of June 22, 2010, that attests to the attack of a city bus, authored by the gang Mara Salvatrucha. Fourteen people were burned alive. From this archive, she imagines her poetic voice as a witness

Passengers are showered in gasoline by two young boys who threaten them with Ak-47’s. They scream before a lit match is thrown. The smell of gasoline terror. I watch their arms break glass, as they try to squeeze their bodies out of windows the size of oven doors. Traffic has stopped and all anyone can do is watch them burn.

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Later when the bus lays charred and caution tape sections off the city the smell of burning flesh will stick in my hair and I will be afraid to wash it away, to let them go.

Imagery recounted in the present tense evokes the sensation of a violence that does not respect age or class, whereby details such as the age of the gang-members demonstrate that in El Salvador, the youth are most influenced by gang affiliation. The “smell of burning flesh” that will “stick” to the poetic voice’s hair is a symbol of the permanence of trauma that keeps one testifying to the acts of violence long after the physical act is done. This poem that uses time lapse and the archive and the repertoire demonstrate both continuities and discontinuities in their revival of poesía comprometida.

First, this text revive a notion of the traditional testimonio, whereby Guardado’s is a creative testimonial selected from the archive and embellished with the realistic sounds, smells, and visions.

This social realism illustrated through the notion of repertoire, reflects Guardado’s desire to understand why people migrate from El Salvador (Guardado, 2019). On the same front, this creative testimony depicts a situation that urgently needs to be told so that actions can be put into place to stop it, just as many testimonials of the poets studied in chapter II did (Beverly and

Zimmerman 178). The discontinuity with poesía comprometida is the emphasis on gang violence rather than on military violence, although, in other poems, militarization of el Salvador is another preoccupation of hers. To illustrate this point, Guardado turns to her own testimony about witnessing a soldier almost shoot his gun in public. The poem is “Anonymous.” In this text, her poetic voice functions as an unmediated testimonial subject. However, as an imaginative poet, she doesn’t conform with solely telling that single act, an act that doesn’t occur until the second stanza.

In the first stanza, she places the masked police officer behind a “barrier of sandbags.” Then, she writes of a massive, yet “fading cathedral” in the background; whose very fading behind the police

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officer, should “remind” the reader of “another story” (42). In a continuity with the main topics undertaken by Cardenal and Debravo in reference to religion and politics, the fading cathedral and the policeman who dresses and behaves as a soldier, recalls the clash between the military and

Liberation Theology activists. But in the present time it signifies the decreased social activism by the church leaders and their followers. In the second stanza, the poetic voice uses a similar conversational tone, as Debravo and Alegría to relates the details of the soldier’s dangerous actions

In stanza III, the police officer is unveiled as he goes about his daily activities because he, the poetic voice says “is a citizen just like you,” a critique of police concealment that continues a similar military impunity of the soldiers of the civil war (42). Like Cardenal’s “Salmo 5,” “Anonymous” indicates a deep distrust for any governmental authorities, especially those that carry arms and hide their identities.

Several Salvadoran motherland poems of Lytton Regalado’s Matria also expresses time lapse.

With a death rate of 105 per 100,000 citizens and an average of 30 murders each day for a country whose population is estimated at 6.4 million, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world that is not at war (Sawyer 72). This might partially explain why violence is a difficult literary theme for a Salvadoran writer of today to evade. Because of this social reality, the poet shows how violence has become commonplace by using dehumanizing images that attempts to humanize these victims with a more nuanced, and even critical testimonial voice whose imagery evidences a

“picking apart” of the state of Salvadoran violence, that deconstructs it to reveal its innerworkings.

These images reflect Judith Butler’s assertion that in the domain of representation of precarious situations, dehumanization can occur (140). Like “Anonymous” and “Cenizas,” “La Mesa” uses the newspaper archives to embody violence in El Salvador as well. But, unlike Guardado, she shows how one can become indifferent to it, especially if they are members of the upper class. In this sense, diasporic condition comes into play, because Guardado does not permanently reside in El

Salvador. So, there is a certain element of surprise when the poetic speaker is confronted with the

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“in-your-face, everyday militarization and violence in El Salvador because it feels quite different to her to violence in the United States, which she locates in the U.S’s political structuring and in the realm of representation, where violence and racism continue, albeit heavily veiled.50 Lytton

Regalado writes from the standpoint of continual residence in the region, that has caused her attempt to understand how one often becomes indifferent to it as a means of survival, an attempt highlighted in her irreverent poem “Salvadoran Bingo,” in which Salvadorans will take a man lying in the boulevard for a drunk or a corpse; and women tuck their real purses under the passenger’s seat (4). This state of violence shows up on the faces of those who endure it daily “like the façade of our houses: bars on windows. broken glass embedded into to walls” (4). Poems like these display

Lytton Regalado’s need to go beyond the statistics, beyond the archive and the repertoire, an act that is necessary to understand how someone can continue to live in this society without losing their sanity. What is interesting about “La Mesa,” is that it begins in the archival, external space, but then, it moves to the internal spaces, dehumanizing violence to such an extent that it becomes more humanized, and real than a newspaper story, or a statistic.

The first aspect that contextualizes “La mesa” is its epigraph from Carolyn Forché’s “The

Colonel,” a piece from The Country Between Us (1981). In this collection, Forché writes of several aspects of the Salvadoran Civil War era, a time that she personally witnessed during her fellowship there in the 80s. One landmark moment in the poem is when the colonel casually “dumps out a bag of human ears while he speaks about justice.” The epigraph of “La mesa” is used, to contrast how the state of violence has changed in El Salvador from the 1980s to the present times, and it reflects how the author considers to depict violence as such, but, instead, chooses another routes. As is speaking to Forché herself, she addresses the poem to her—a women who spent enough time in the region to formidably portray the exterior in-your-face violence, but hasn’t spent enough time to

50 See “Gage Avenue,” “In the Medi-Cal Food Stamps Waiting Area,” White Skin Privilege,” Endeavor: Inglewood Just Another LAX Flight Route.” “So that She is Not Forgotten” in Endeavor.

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truly grasp its inner-workings, such as its effect on children who grow up there, its implications in the home-space, and the countless ways it almost must become dehumanized, or seen as a thing that simply happens, because it is the only way to live in it for life:

Yes, what you’ve written is true. A Salvadoran colonel might have collected a sack full of human ears in the late 70s. I know a retired colonel and I’ve hears his talk to consider it possible…I’ve sat with threaded lips listening to stories of the ex-guerilla-leader now our current president, of the former president’s shopping binges and a totaled Ferrari, of a winning mayor’s campaign: go-go dancers grinding on the table in their political-party- colored thongs, of gang leaders watching their flat screens alongside lovers in their hotel- prisons, of 6pm city buses overturned and lit on fire… (19) Like Forché’s text, and the stories it tells, these are the stories that every Salvadoran who lives in the region knows. They are commonplace. They don’t surprise, in this sense.

Lytton Regalado’s poems want to described a different aspect of the violence, on that “hits home” in a sense that it confronts the horrific truth about the ways the privileged Salvadorans live with it, deal with it, and talk about it . The truth, as argued in this prose poem, is that Salvadorans, especially those whose economic status can buy them increased protection from the state of overarching violence and poverty, have become so accustomed to it that they learn to keep silence about it . This truth is is perhaps more horrific than an overturned bus, or a bag of ears because silence never catalyzes social change. The answer, then, as to how to represent it to people who already know these stories, isn’t as simple as one might think:

We’ve left behind the sandbagged street corners and now its only the bodyguards driving us around in bulletproof SUVs that keep us from the gun-toting assailant at the stoplight. The thick glass that separates us from the children begging at their mother’s side—and my own children asking, What does she want mom? Where is her car? Where is her house? And the driver staring ahead at the road through the tinted glass. his ears listening and listening for my reply. What to answer; this is something for my poetry, no? (19) The poem completely goes in a different direction than Forché’s, in that it isn’t about the differences between the United States and El Salvador, or the implications of the U.S.’s investment in the region’s right-wing military. It is about what separated privileged Salvadorans from poor

Salvadorans. It is about how violence is lived out differently because of social status. This is a stance

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that Alegría touched on in her novel with her husband Cenizas, but not often in her poems. Dalton did, but more so in his essays, namely, in his speeches recorded in El intellectual y la Sociedad.

Lytton Regalado’s poem goes on to openly consider the ways in which economic stability distances the poetic speaker even more so from it.

Turning to the archive, the poetic voice laments that in every morning paper one can find information concerning the “guaranteed ladle of casualties” and pictures of corpses “splayed across page two” (19 emphasis is mine). Murders found in the common place archive of the daily paper in

El Salvador are so dehumanized that their occurrence is likened to the maid saying that a “dish broke,” a detail that encapsulates the casual nature of murder (19). I have italicized the word

“casualties” because it denotes a war zone. It also can be understood as a correlation among the victims and the surviving Salvadorans. Though in the poem the war in El Salvador is “officially” over, evident from the removal of “sandbagged street corners,” the violence published in the archives function to highlight the distance of the poetic speaker from it, but her desire to commit herself to certain social issues, by refusing to remain silent

in the morning I’ll hold my grandmother’s porcelain cup and pour sugar into the bitter black while I read the newspaper, guaranteed a ladle of casualties… My husband across the table says with his eyes, says nothing. And I think of this life: of pears stewed in wine, the instant gratification of artichoke hearts, the chalice always refilled, music in stereo and the velvet wind through the pine, a pair of loyal dogs sleeping at our feet. The moon shines its white beams across the lawn’s smooth plane. (19) Like del Valle’s “Cuando entre rejas me pusieron,” her poetry also includes peaceful images that coexist with the violent ones. Still the distance between her family and the violence is compromised by the very objects of peace and stability that surround her. For instance, the “porcelain cup” of the grandmother symbolizes the delicateness of the situation, and the way that it is a result of another moment in Salvadoran history. Whereas the “bitter black” represents its bleakness as a sort of black hole that swallows the population. The husband who “says nothing,” demonstrates the incommunicability of this violence, even between those who share an intimate relationship. These

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representations demonstrate how critical every word is for the analysis of a Lytton Regalado poem.

At the same time, it is as if the poetic I searches her intimate environment for something positive to discuss, instead of the somberness associated with living in an unsafe society. This “turning the other way,” exemplified in her resistance to focus on obvious violent acts like Forché and other political poets have done in the late-twentieth century, and even now in the realm of diasporic poetry, (as in Guardado’s “Cenizas”) do not render this poem ineffective in portraying it. Instead, this approach results in a poignant illustration that those live within violent societies aren’t always addressing head-on violence. Instead, writers like Regalado and del Valle allow (ed) joyfulness in despite a grim reality. Whereas Regalado’s work, as a diasporic poet, who has known what it is like to live for years in the United States and El Salvador, grapples more intensely with the fact that she can buy relative distance from the violence and poverty, and questions the veracity and effectiveness of her representations of it from a space of privilege.

In “El Salvador,” Zamora personifies the nation as a difficult person to love via a romantic blazon-styled poem, whereby the nation is blinded to the truth about herself. Because of this ignorance, Zamora’s poetic praise of her attributes fades: “Stupid Salvador, you see our black bags, our empty homes, / our fear to say: the war never stopped, and still you lie/and say: I’m fine, I’m fine” (11). Via his use of sociopolitical romanticism, such as his feminizing of the nation, Zamora’s poetry shows continuities with that of Debravo and del Valle but seems to be less understanding of the nation’s politicized weaknesses. On the other hand, Debravo’s and del Valle’s poetic conversations with the feminized national figure are more merciful and sweeter. In Debravo’s conversational poem to the weak feminized Latin American nation, the poetic speaker pardons her shortcomings, which he likens to forced prostitution of the nation’s natural resources to foreign economic powers, namely, the United States:

Sé que no eres pura, intocada, silvestre. Sé que manos oscuras se han posado en tus muslos

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y en tus hombros. Sé que has vendido tu cuerpo por la luna del dólar. Sé que de tu inocencia sólo quedan los mapas como viejas fotografías donde ya no te reconoces.

Pero te quiero, América, y puedo perdonarte. (“Canción en tiempo de esperanza” Nosotros los hombres 69) This forgiving language is a far cry from “Stupid El Salvador,” a word choice that emits anger and erases any sense of misericordia. An additional poem by Zamora that embodies present-day violence in El Salvador is “Dancing on Buses.” This poem represents a continuity with Alegría’s

“Tamalitos de Cambray” and other poems by her, because it uses traditional food staples and other everyday Salvadoran cultural expressions to portray the region’s violent underpinnings. However,

Alegría uses a recipe to additionally discuss the historical, mythological, and current events of El

Salvador, while Zamora uses translation of contemporary U.S. hip-hop dance style lyrics to describe its current state of violence

Do the Pupusa- Clap-finger dough clumps. Clap. Do the horchata scoop— your handle’s a ladle, scoop. Reach and scoop. Now, duck. They’re shooting. Duck under seat and don’t breathe. (23) The U.S. hip-hop translation functions well in this conversational poem because it places the reader into a Central American cultural space (thus differing Salvadoran experiences via its food, from other Latino/a groups) where violence happens at any time without warning. As irreverent as this song seems, it captures everyday violence well, in that it demonstrate how one can be perfectly fine and going about his daily activities when, out of nowhere, he must, “Roll over./Face the mouth of

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the barrel./Do the protect-face-with-hand” (23). Therefore, underprivileged Salvadorans who continue to live in the homeland have one choice: dance with violence every day or migrate without documents— a decision that also comes packaged with its own violence. Via a translation of

Salvadoran violence through U.S. hip-hop dance music, “Dancing on Buses” is like but not quite like

Alegría’s “Tamalitos de Cambray.”

Turning back to Lytton Regalado, another poem that subverts the narrative of peace time in

El Salvador via time lapse and the archive and the repertoire is “La Quinceañera.” This text relates the murder of Sara, a fifteen-year-old girl. Through the poem, it is revealed that three female gang members of MS-13—an international gang that was formed in Los Angeles, then reterritorialized to

Central America— commit the murder. Like other testimonial texts in Matria such as “La Jarra,” the events that are creatively recounted in the text come from an actual testimonial (see acknowledgements) in which the author expounds upon what she has learned from the testimonial subject. One prominent thematic underpinning of “La Quinceñera” is that her treatment of gang violence between teenagers coincides with the data that gang members tend to recruit children as early as age seven (Sawyer 5). Though in the poem Sara has her mother around, the history of her three victimizers are unknown. All that is known is that they are completely desensitized to violence, as they are capable of committing murder because of Sara not wanting to be “Chepe’s girl anymore;” a nod to the notion that this criminal organization is structured around male domination over female bodies (15). Poetically the “face” of the victimized is embodied in the unexpected images that link to how she was murdered and the remnants of that murder, such as her sandal stuck in the sand. These images highlight how Lytton Regalado tends to zero in on the small objects and nature itself serve as reminders of the overall precarity of Salvadoran youths’ lives in El

Salvador. In contrast, the actions one might associate with gang violence such as gunfire, overturned buses, or street fights are rendered obsolete at humanizing the victim and the countless forms of gang violence. In one instance, the girls who commit the murder stand “shoulder to

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shoulder” becoming as mountains around “the slate waters of Lake Coatepeque” (15). Instead of screams or gulps, the victim silently thrashes. Her ultimate death by drowning is alluded by clouds that stuff the mouth of the sky (15). Through this imagery, Sara’s suffering is juxtaposed to the nature-scape, very much like Alegría uses nature in Luisa en el país de la realidad to symbolize civil war violence.51 In a manner similar to the final words of “La mesa,” the reader is left with images of beautiful happenings at Lake Coatepeque at the “Hilltop restaurants” (16). In this description of two different aspects of society coexist: one of violence and disparity and another of peace and carefree living, leading to the very last image of children “warring spinning tops”; a message that El Salvador is at war within itself in which children are not an exception. They too can become casualties in the war to survive, “to be the last one standing” (16). This poem displays the power of the creative testimony to better explain and contextualize why acts of violence happen, who is affected, and what these acts reflect about the greater society.

Considering the subversion of a utopic vision of the United States , Guardado, in a nod to her strong contrapuntal vision, points to the violence against African-American men at the hands of police forces, an obvious continuation of issues surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement.

“How do I Bear Witness” demonstrates continuities with the Liberation Theology t in Central

America, because of how she uses Christ’s example of dangerous solidarity with the marginalized to denounce black death that stems from the fact that, for her, “blackness hasn’t changed a target/still laying claims to stomachs overflowing” (Endeavor 55). In response to the murder of Eric Garner, a man who was strangled after selling illegal cigarettes in New York City, and the many other known and unknown African Americans who have encountered police violence, she claims, as Cardenal or

Debravo have claimed under Central American circumstances that:

it is not enough to be witness

51 See “Hoguera de otoño” (Alegría 174) and “Los ríos” (Alegría 117) from Luisa en el país de la realidad.

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i must be Jesus too i must preach in the square about love and humanity even if it means i may be crucified at my brother’s side (57). With the sign of the little “i,” she diminishes the ego of the self for solidarity with the other, a similar notion exemplified in many of González’s poems that emphasize solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Guatemala. However, because of her diasporic condition, she doesn’t only reiterate solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Central America, but with the black and brown children in the United States who suffer structural racism, police violence, marginalization, and limited sociopolitical visibility. Through poems like these, Guardado revives attitudes of colonialism that suggest blacks are less-than human to show that today, even in a society of progress, “a brown child/is nothing/a brown or black child/is nothing/ this is what they want you to believe”(“White

Savior” 53). Like Debravo and Alegría did in their era, poems like “White Savior” denounces racism and call for equality. In a poem from Digo, Debravo writes that love like a fruit—where love is a metaphor of justice--- should be readily and equally available “para el blanco, / para el chino o el negro.” (13). Whereas in Alegría’s “The American Way of Death,” a less metaphorical and more documental view of global class and racial disparities are demonstrated in a similar manner as

Guardado’s sociopolitical poems that treat racial violence.

In other instances of time-lapse, Guardado’s poems indicate how terrorism is systematically racialized in the United States, whereby when a white person commits an act of violence, he or she is seen as mentally ill and is treated amicably by the police forces. But, when a person of color commits a mass murder or any other act of violence, he or she is deemed a terrorist. She denounces this unequal criminal treatment for the same crime in “This is terrorism” relying on the archive in a conversational style, she writes the following critical reflection about Dylan Roof, a twenty-one-

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year-old white male who massacres nine African Americans at the Emmanuel African Methodist

Episcopal Church on June 20, 2015 because of his white supremacist ideologies

They said he was just a troubled teen, but they forgot to call him by his true name: terrorist.

I want them to yell it: terrorist!! terrorist!! to unveil this white man. I want them to say: he is a thug, he is dangerous.

But I hear nothing nothing but my own terror, nothing but my own suspended breath. (Endeavor 41). More than the obvious denunciation of racialized criminality, this poem interests me because of the spaces that the poet enunciates from, spaces that evidence the impact of Guardado’s diasporic condition on her approach to poesía comprometida. First, she is speaking from San Salvador. This shows that even while she is in her ancestral homeland, the social events of her homeland of birth occur against the events in El Salvador in which the United States is still alive in her diasporic consciousness. Next, with an earlier reference to North Carolina, a former slave state, the poem indicates that racist attitudes remain vigilant in contemporary times, as Roof is deemed a troubled teen instead of a terrorist because he is Caucasian and those, he mercilessly killed were people of color. The poem, though specific, and with data as the exteriorist style outlined by Cardenal, points to a larger narrative about the United States. That is, she is denouncing how the media (movies,

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newscasts, music, television) has unequally depicted peoples of color as dangers to the society, and as criminals, whereby this very representation of them related to the violence that they suffer in society, such as higher incarceration rates, police brutality while unarmed, and lack of opportunities for economic advancements. Tracey Rose calls this structural racism. In this sense,

Guardado is using a notion of time lapse to show how attitudes of colonialism, specifically that which says that blacks and people of color are inherently violent, and whites are inherently good and pure, is repeating itself, but it is veiled in the majority of discourse that is used to talk about criminality in the United States. Because of this racialized discourse that functions to keep racism alive, a mass murderer like Dylan Roof can be seen as a “troubled-teen,” while Trayvon Martin, a teenage African-American teen who was carrying nothing but a bag of Skittles is pursued and shot by George Zimmerman; the neighborhoods watch, whose defense in the case was that Martin looked “dangerous.” With the failure of the U.S. justice system to erase racism, Guardado’s poem calls for equality in political newspeak, whereby a white man who commits an act of terrorism should be called by the name that befits the crime he commits. It is here, in the realm of discourse, where structural racism must continue to be deconstructed. In “Gage Avenue,” from Endeavor,

Guardado points to a similar problem, whereby the news refuses to report stories about the “hood” that don’t relate to “armed robberies or territory” nor do they divulge the stories of the injustices suffered by the communities there at the hands of the state governmental powers (43). One solution she puts forth to push back the lack of more nuanced representations of these ghettos in the U.S. media, is for the people who populate them to tell their own stories,

But they never report our stories or how freeways are meant to divide. Only green crosses burn brightly like halos and we’ll have to imagine the cameras and lights, we’ll have to imagine people on the avenue and remind ourselves

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that we are not invisible (43). Like Bhabha reiterates time and again, it is through the enunciative act that diasporic and postcolonial subjects can actively resist the repetition of colonial-based racisms, violence and

“othering” in which they must tell different stories from other places that function as counter narratives to the master ones. In a sense, this is what all these time-lapse poems are doing, whether from the U.S. or Salvadoran discursive space. And, because of their diasporic conditions, these poets often tell at least two stories at once. Specifically, these last two poems presented here by Guardado subvert the notion of a peaceful and just U.S. nation follow the poetas comprometidos aesthetically via Guardado’s use of common diction and the conversational poem, whereby her diasporic condition marks a thematic discontinuity with the poetas comprometidos because of her increased consciousness of violence and structuralized racism in the discursive realm and in the systems of justice in the United States. The only poet who comes close to Guardado’s complex sociopolitical awareness of racialized violence in the United States is Alegría in “The American Way of Death.”

Still, her perspective of racialized violence in the United States doesn’t parallel Guardado’s.

Diasporic Third Spaces of Witness and Diaspora Space

In this section of Central Americans in Movement, I will demonstrate and analyze the ways in which several poets inhabit and create politicized discourse around Anzaldúas notion of borderlands-la frontera, Bhabha’s’ notion of the third space of witness, and Brah’s concept of the diaspora space which together create, what I have termed, the diasporic third space. As I present how these spaces are expressed in their poetry, I will continually reveal the sociopolitical consequences of their illustrations of these diasporic third spaces, the linkages of these spaces with the poet’s diasporic conditions, and the continuities and discontinuities that the portrayal of these spaces have thematically and aesthetically with poesía comprometida.

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In the introduction to Ilka Oliva Corado’s collection Destierro, she reflects on the spaces that the migrant must pass through during irregular migration and the trauma it causes to the diasporic subject:

Como si fuera poco tener que irse, así, de esa forma tan cruel; el camino que hay que transitar es un desafío a la muerte; insondables heridas quedan para siempre en las emociones de quienes logran sobrevivir la travesía de las fronteras. Destierro es un sollozo, es el dolor de la diáspora, de la ausencia. La incertidumbre de deambular en un suelo ajeno, donde no somos bienvenidos, donde nos explotan. Donde no existimos. (13) In relation to the topic of this section, her use of the word “borders” in plural is crucial because it indicates that the Central American migrant must cross several borders instead of solely the one that separates Mexico and the United States. The use of fronteras in the plural indicates crossing from one Central American nation and culture to another nation and culture; from Central America to Mexico; from Mexico to the United States; and from one U.S. state to another. Likewise, each border space contains numerous diasporic third spaces of transit and movement that connect those who have gone with those who have stayed; those who arrive with those who consider themselves native to a region; and those who the migrant meets along the journey. Each of these relationships carries a sociopolitical weight in these texts by diasporic poets of Central American descent. After the first paragraph of Oliva Corado’s introduction, she then specifies the emotional and sociopolitical borders that migrants must overcome such as exploitation, racism, marginality, and linguistic inabilities. These are borders that she relates with the pains of diaspora in the collections sited for this investigation. Destierro presents several third spaces that function as sites of witness in which the perils of irregular migration are presented. Some of them are the U.S./Mexico border,

La bestia freight train and the Sonoran-Arizona desert. Specifically, the U.S.-Mexico border functions as a third space of witness because it interrupts U.S. media discourse that, according to the poetic speaker, hides the militarization of that border. In Zamora’s third spaces, he repeatedly present T.S. Elliot-like-spaces of wastelands that are positioned on dirt roads in Mexico, shabby

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safehouses in the United States, vans that move migrants from place to place, and spaces near the

U.S.-Mexican border— a series of stops in the dark that might be likened to a twenty-first century underground railroad. Nevertheless, this underground railroad described is full of shady characters whose mission is to harm the irregular migrants rather than help them along their routes. Like

Oliva Corado, these spaces witness, question, and present the contradictory character of irregular migration of adults and unaccompanied minors from Central America—something that both Oliva-

Corado and Zamora have experienced in real life. Aesthetically, the poems that I present in this reflective analysis on the third spaces of diasporic roots tend to embody Lemke’s notion of an art that invites a multiple viewpoint because it sends the readers’ gazes in route. Oliva Corado’s poem

“El desierto es un cementerio” discusses five unique diasporic routes, related in five different poetic voices. These routes demonstrate that diasporic consciousness is not solely connected to the notion of exploitation of the diasporic subject in the hostland but can begin to arise in the homeland and become more acute as their journey continues towards the hostland. Once settled in the hostland, these poet’s diasporic consciousness continues to shape and reshape as they acquire different sociopolitical outlooks. These perspectives depend on the poetic’s speaker’s experiences of settling, working, and building relationships in the hostland, while attempting to maintain relationships formed in the homeland; a difficult situation that echoes Clifford’s affirmation that the character of a subject’s diasporic consciousness in the hostland, depends on the degrees of diasporic alienation in relation to class, gender, race, and migratory status. As Oliva Corado and

Zamora sends the reader’s gaze in route, the reader gains different perspectives of that subject’s unique diasporic consciousness. With these ideas at the forefront of poetic analysis, I will commence with “El desierto es un cementerio,” found in Destierro.

Voice I of this witness poem takes the reader on route to the poetic speaker’s hometown when she, a mother, decides to migrate. In this section, the voices of warning against irregular migration are heard. These present of the naysayers in contrast with the speaker’s dreams for a

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new life, illustrate that diasporic consciousness can be rooted in fears of the unknown, as well as hope for a better life. Because Oliva Corado often ascribes to irregular rhythmic pattern that dotes her poems with musicality, she employs an a/b/a/c rhyme scheme to rhythmically portray the warnings against irregular migration: “Me dijeron morirás/la frontera es cosa seria/no lo lograrás/el desierto es un cementerio” (29). In section II, the next poetic speaker leads the reader to a third space in the desert where she finds unidentified bones, In a clear illustration of the disposable nature of the migrant body in the eyes of officials who vigil the borderlands, men who wear uniforms tell the poetic speaker to not worry about these bodies because “El desierto los enterrará/devorará sus huesos sin identidad” (30). This witnessing of the clandestine cemetery from the desert third space represents the ultimate dehumanization of those migrants who don’t survive the borderlands or, looking beyond, those that don’t survive irregular migration across the

Mediterranean to France, Italy, and Spain; other diasporic third spaces presented in Destierro. As the poetic speakers reflects on the complete disregard of the dead in order to notify their kinfolks, trauma is shown to be another layer of diasporic consciousness that is gained in route. Zamora also writes about seeing the dead in route and the trauma and confusion it causes him. At the end of the poem, he expresses (as an adult) the trauma he was unable to articulate just weeks after his arrival to the United States:

Next to what might be yucca plants or a dried creek: Javier saw a dead coyote animal, which stank and had flies over it. I keep this book in an old shoebox underneath the bed. She asked in Spanish, I just smiled, didn’t tell her, no animal, I knew that man. (“from The Book I made with a Counselor My First Week of School,” 8) Both poems demonstrates that diasporic consciousness demonstrates that trauma from seeing death in route and the feelings of desarraigo that ensue are key elements of their diasporic consciousness. As political poets, however, they know that in order for the reader to feel what a migrant feel, they must take the reader’s gaze in route through the rough and violent terrain of

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diaspora through witness, exteriorist, person, and testimonial poems. It is, then, not enough to merely talk about their personal experiences as testimonial subjects, they must also look at the situations from a detached point of view or embody the experiences of other migrants to create a larger narrative contemporary diaspora from the Isthmus and beyond.

Turning back to Oliva Corado’s diasporic third space in the desert or near the U.S.-Mexico border, I might suggest that its main purpose is that of a space of witness to the senseless deaths of migrants. This creates a thematic continuity and discontinuity with several poems found in

González’s Cementerio clandestine. The continuity comes about because the poetic voice witnesses and denounces death brought about by unequal power relations.52 Here, I recall González’s poem about a clandestine graves of Marxist freedom fighters. Its epigraph, taken from a local newspaper, is an important element to understanding the slippages between continuities and discontinuities between this poem and Oliva- Corado’s:

Tus huesos están ahí sin nombre ni ladrillos ni cifra ni etiquetas. ….. De tanto amor al mundo, de tanta acción, de tanta frase

52 However, this poem and others related to death via la travesía presents a discontinuity with González’s themes in this text because the clandestine cemeteries he writes about of our found in Guatemala as a result of the era characterized as la violencia, a name that denotes the indigenous genocides, the murder of political dissidents, and the overall death toll instigated by the 36 year Civil War. In contrast, Oliva-Corado’s unidentified graves are found in route to the border be it from injuries resulting from a fall from La bestia (“Desaparecidos,” 27), a rape by immigrations officers (“Aquí en el desierto” 18), or murders committed by Central American, Mexican, or North American vigilantes or thieves who target groups of irregular migrants (“La bestia,” 51-4).

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correctamente pronunciada,

solo estos huesos olvidados quedan en un barranco desde donde se puede mirar el infinito (“Los huesos olvidados” González 192) The first difference between these two poems is that González’s knowledge of this gravesite comes from the archive, while Oliva-Corado’s comes from lived experience. The bones found in González’s poem are few, whereas the bones in Oliva Corado’s border poems that witness clandestine graves, are seemingly infinite in number. Thirdly, those bodies in González’s poem have died because they were fighting and protesting imperialism and capitalism as Marxists. But, in Oliva Corado’s poems, the bones of the dead are of people who are looking for a living wage due to the class disparities in their countries of origin, a situation caused in part by their nations’ dependent status and foreign exploitation therein. As I will demonstrate in a long poem that follows, her representations of clandestine bones are not immovables. Rather, they are personified as ghosts who continue their diasporic routes repeatedly because their souls have not found peace. Oliva Corado’s rendition of clandestine graves are shown to be created by forced or semi-forced migration and the subsequent militarization and dehumanization of the border. Whereas, González’s clandestine graves are populated by those revolutionaries who were fighting for a new government. Aesthetically,

González uses conversational poetry to speak with bones and Oliva Corado uses notions of la facultad to imagine their restless phantasmagoric lives after death. As a persecuted one, the poetic voice undermines the “official reality” of the border situation, in which the dead assume life as guides to the migrants who remain alive and in movement. In this respect, a poetry like Oliva

Corado’s that bears witness to clandestine graves in the borderlands should begin to open up the doors for justice for those who disappeared in their attempt to get to the United States from Central

America by telling their stories, and attempting to render them more complete identities. In this

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sense, one of the most aesthetically and thematically complex third space witness poem is found in

Oliva Corado’s “Desierto Sonora-Arizona:”

I Corren, todos van de prisa el miedo los atemoriza quieren escapar.

En silencio agonizan los deseos de la libertad agitadas las respiraciones la frontera han de cruzar.

El desierto los observa es de noche, está alerta ¿cuántos morirán?

No hablar las instrucciones son precisas no hablar.

Las patrullas con sus luces los alumbran Desde el cielo una avioneta los movimientos les controla no hay de otra se deben entregar Nadie se entregará con auto parlantes les avisan ¡Les vamos a disparar! ¡No se detendrán! ……………………………………………………. En su melodía de noche entristecida

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camina lentamente la muerte ensombrecida ¿Cuántos se llevará? Corren, no se detienen, ¡corren! los cercos saltarán la piel despedazada entre las púas no importa, ¡Nos los atraparán!

Logran llegar al otro lado entre el zacate, acuclillados bajo la sombra de los cactus no los delatará eso es el norte, sin pasaporte sin documentos sobrevivirán.

II Como un lamento acontecido ceñido al cuello van los migrantes enfilados entre suplicios buscan el norte, aquel país de la ilusión,

En un desierto la emboscada los policías y sus granadas piden el pago también los nombres ¿Quién los trafica? ¿Los pasaportes falsificados? ¿Quién es el encargado?

Entre el tumulto un despistado se acerca para arreglar ¿Cuánto es el precio?, soy el coyote

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paga la multa en billete verde fajado al cincho va el paquete el comandante es quien recibe con alevosía de militar un sonrisa, todos cateados ¡Se pueden largar!

III Agua, suero y mezcal entre mochilas sobre los hombros con diez delirios dos manicomios entre las sienes las voces no se quieren callar los pies cansados la espalda rota hay un desierto, debemos avanzar,

No se intimiden por los cuatreros quieren dinero no se resisten abran las piernas que a todo nos violarán hombres y mujeres por igual esto es la guerra de los desiertos estamos vivos hay cientos muertos.

Quien desista del paso urgido se queda ahí entumecidos viene la migra lo va a rescatar si con cuatreros no se resista con un disparo lo harán descansar. ……………………………………………………… IV …no dejar huella en carretera busquen el monte y sobre las piedras corran

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corran sin detenerse no volteen hacia atrás,

Llegó la hora de dejar Sonora al otro lado está Arizona otro desierto que debemos perforar es media noche suelten los miedos corran ligero no nos deben atrapar hay un desierto con tantos muertos ellos nos protegerán. (22-26)

This epic poem of odyssey through the Sonora-Arizona desert complete with elements of the underworld, presents several continuities with the aesthetic of poesía comprometida, namely. the documentary-style poem utilized by Ernesto Cardenal and the testimonial used by Alegría. Through the documental style the author permits herself to narrate the collective migratory journey from a distance using dialogue and flash frame. At the same time, it is important to point out that what is described here isn’t very different from the recent accusations of murder and sexual abuse by

Border Patrol, unfortunate accusations in Oliva Corado’s poem that truncate the idea that only women face sexual assault. For example, in January of 2019, Border Patrol Agent Juan David Ortíz,

35 was accused of killing four women in South Texas. They were Melissa Ramírez, 29, Claudine

Luera, 42, Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35, and 28-year-old Janelle Ortíz (Chávez and Silverman, “Border

Patrol Agent”). Also, in February of 2019, the U.S. media revealed thousands of reports of sexual assault of detained migrant children since 2015 (González, “Sexual Assault”). Thus, as these two cases and “El Desierto Sonora-Arizona” show, the U.S.-Mexico border, paraphrasing Anzaldúa, continues to form scabs, only to be reopened and bled again (25). Thematically, this poem demonstrates discontinuities with the approach of poetas comprometidos like Cardenal and Dalton regarding structural violence that marginalized and persecuted people face. As such, Oliva-Corado points out a very different power struggle that lies behind irregular immigration, unlike those

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economic and unjust political power systems indicated in Cardenal’s Hora 0 and in Salmos. For example, the system of power and human domination in this text includes coyotes and their bosses,

Border Patrol agents, and gangs. Whereas in Cardenal’s “Hora 0”, he includes the Nicaraguan dictator, Somoza, those military men, and politicians who worked under him (las guardias civiles), the foreign banks that controlled Nicaragua, and the U.S. politicians who backed the Nicaraguan government. Though the themes are quite different, Oliva-Corado’s text, in a similar manner to

Cardenal’s Hora 0, employs several elements of the documentary style poem that is also quite exteriorist though without the data. To exemplify the differences and similarities, I have included a few stanzas from Cardenal’s Hora 0

Como algodones ensangrentados, y la luna roja sobre la Casa Presidencial. La radio clandestina decía que vivía, El pueblo no creía que había muerto. (Y no ha muerto). Porque a veces nace un hombre en una tierra que es esa tierra. Y la tierra en que es enterrado ese hombre Es ese hombre. Y los hombres que después nacen en esa tierra son ese hombre. (qtd. in González-Balado 67)

These stanzas demonstrate the same sense of persecution in a dramatically lyrical fashion as Oliva-

Corado’s piece. Nevertheless, there is no “I,” and there are no heroes who are painted as revolutionary or Sandino martyrs. There is only a sense of a collective trying to survive the journey, a journey that doesn’t stop for there will be otras fronteras para perforar that are linguistic, cultural, and economic (Corado Post frontera). Furthermore, there is no sense of nationalism nor any notion that the migrants have any weaponry to combat the violence they often encounter in the desert, in

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which non-nationalist sentiments point to the fact that the liminal space between the United States and Mexico is neither one nation nor the other. Rather, it is a place “where the Third world grates against the first” creating “the life-bloods of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (Anzaldúa; “The Homeland, Aztlán/ El otro México 25). This point is imperative when thinking of this group of diasporic poets of Central American descent as a whole because in contrast to the poetas comprometidos who revived national heroes, freedom fighters, and revolutionary guerrilleros in their anti-imperialist poetry, such as Francisco Morazán, Augusto Sandino, Adolfo

Báez, Nazim Hikmet, Juanito Mora, and Lenin, the notion of heroicness tends to either be illustrated as a collective of mostly nameless marginalized peoples, a method that disrupts the idea that heroicness is embodied in a handful of masculine public national figures. When heroes do arise in their poetry, they are usually painted as everyday people who struggle to eat, to work, to feel safe, or to escape traumatic memories. From a gendered perspective, many of the heroes that they include in their poetry are diasporic women or the women who stayed in the homeland, but continually inspire the diasporic woman or the diasporic son to march on through adversity.

Though poetas comprometidos did integrate everyday heroes such as mothers, daughters, trabajadores, and indigenous farmers in their sociopolitical poems, as noticeable in Voz y voto de geranio by González and Nosotros los hombres by Debravo, revolutionary figures such as Sandino and Che Guevara were also present. For González, the new revolutionary Central American nation would arise with the legends, myths, beliefs, and lives of these heroes.53 Thus, his poetry, like Saker-

Ti, the literary group he was once associated with, had a nationalistic perspective that is not present in the work of these diasporic poets (Valdés, “Nuevo Signo” 66 ).

In relation to this common thread of this contemporary corpus of poets, Oliva Corado’s poetic speaker spreads all the migrants on common ground from the diasporic third space,

53 See González’s “Cuchillo de caza” (1964).

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paralleling their powerlessness and silence with the economic power from those figures around them who rule with violence and capital. This is exemplified in the anaphoric metaphor, no dejar huellas (or don’t leave a trace). It is in route, then, that the irregular migrant metaphorically become dehumanized, as an object of capital who is mandated to remain quiet while their lives and their bodies are negotiated by powerful and corrupt forces. This situation of exploitation continues if they arrive to U.S. hostland, whereby their workforce is taxed and often solicited, but their personal well-being is condemned to lock itself within the shadows (Brah). Hence, a vital action statement in “Desierto Sonora-Arizona” is no hablar or don’t speak. This precise command given by the coyote in the poem points to another element of diasporic consciousness, whereby the migrant begins to gain consciousness in route that he/she is already beginning a slow interpolation as an object of exploitative power systems. Despite the emphasis on the documental and dramatic lyricism used in parts I and II, Oliva Corado blends this documentary style with testimony in parts

III and IV by employing the nosotros form. In this way, the author induces the poetic voice to speak with greater emphasis, detail, and intimacy about the fears and hopes of the migrants that they would make it to the other side without losing their lives in the war of the deserts. This is an example of what I might term, “poetic speaker’s integration,” when in a diasporic poem, the poetic speaker is at once outside the group like whose vision can be likened to a panoramic camera and inside the group as a travel companion. Regarding the poetic aesthetic in “Desierto Sonora-

Arizona,” the push and pull between the documentary and the testimonial suggest that the poetic voice wants to distance herself from this traumatic journey to tell a collective story, but finds that complete distance becomes an impossibility since this travesía is an element of her lived experience. As indicated in the previous chapter, the poetic speaker refuses to offer a complete documental vision because of her strong attitudes, and even bias she has because she has experienced it and is saddened by its continuation in this state.

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About the testimonial aspects of Oliva Corado’s poem, there also arises a discontinuity with the poetas comprometidos and the many testimonial works that they have written. Namely, in the case of Alegría, a discontinuity arises because in contrast to her appropriation of testimonies from testimonial subjects like in “Flores del volcán” and “La mujer del río Sumpul,” Oliva Corado and

Zamora are testimonial subjects, whereby their first-hand witnessing tends to influence the interchanges between testimonio and documentary approaches in their poems concerning border routes. This pattern is more prominent in their texts than in the work of Guardado, Lytton

Regalado and those poetas comprometidos that frequently employed the testimonial styled poem like Alegría, González, and Dalton. This occurs because Oliva- Corado’s and Zamora’s first-hand witnessing hinder their complete implementation of a documental viewpoint. This is a very important observation that one might link to the differences between literature in the twentieth and twenty-first century. For instance, in the present time of social media and more self-publishing outlets, writers like Oliva-Corado have a more equal chance at publication than before when the majority of poets, as noticeable in the corpus of poetas comprometidos chosen for this study, are from the upper or middle class, a social positioning that implies a developed educational background, literary contacts, and sufficient leisure time to focus on writing, a positioning that increased their chances of being respected and accepted as literary voices.

In a general sense, Oliva Corado’s third space witnessing of irregular migrant routes in

Destierro depict several developments of diasporic consciousness, bear witness to the militarization of borders, demonstrate both the psychological and physical borders that the migrant must overcome, and shows various stylistic and thematic continuities and discontinuities with poesía comprometida. Nonetheless, like González’s class consciousness depictions of workers and indigenous persons, are not all doom and gloom, For instance, several of Oliva Corado’s illustrations of the irregular migrants demonstrate their strength and valor through song in an attempt to capture the universal state of globalized diaspora from a gendered perspective:

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Mi piel es de mil colores mi nombre como me quieran llamar de tantas tierras hoy he venido no tengo patria soy universal

Migrante del mil idiomas que solo entiende el corazón la vena intacta que quien intenta cruzar frontera de devastación.

Yo soy mi letra, yo soy mi canto soy clandestina, así como vos que al otro lado de la frontera escuchás el eco de mi canción. (“Clandestina” Destierro, 19-20) With a woman-centered vision that goes beyond Central American diasporic witnessing, this triumphant poem, like González’s poems signaled in the class-consciousness poems of the previous chapter, shows that the diasporic subject embraces her clandestine character and finds strength in her own bravery. At the same time, she is fortified by the memory of her female ancestors who have had to embark on similar diasporic routes, in which the routes cited in the poem (the ocean, the border wall, the fences) add to the way that it begins in a very specific diasporic route from the

South to the North and then breaks into a globalized sociopolitical perspective of diaspora. This movement of the poem demonstrates a parallel of “going beyond Central America” that marked the poem analyses of the previous chapter. This is only reiterated in her metaphoric division of the diasporic-female-speaking subject into different races, and languages to evidence the global nature of forced and semi-forced diaspora today.

Now, I would like to discuss the ways in which Zamora uses various notions of the third spaces and borderlands-la frontera to testify about and aestheticize his experiences of migration as

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an unaccompanied minor and irregular migrant in the United States, with a style shifts from a documentary-like style to an exteriorist style which names specific people, places, and things found in the diasporic third space and related to the relationships fostered in the diaspora space. This style, moreover, is very much like Dalton’s; irreverent, theatrical, and deeply metaphoric, but in a manner that is inextricable from diasporic aesthetic. For instance, the theatricality of these poems generates the diasporic aesthetic of plurality of voices signaled by Lemke. This dialectal plurality generates a variety of political perspectives. Whereas their irreverence exposes the crudeness of this space. For instance, in “To President Elect,” a title similar to Darío’s “A Roosevelt,” he writes in prose form: “There’s no fence, there’s a tunnel, there’s a hole in the wall, yes, you think right now

¿no one’s running? Then who is it that sweats and shits there for the cactus. We craved water; our piss turned the brightest yellow…” (15). Poems like these force the reader’s gaze to go in route, and to imagine the crudest, most dehumanizing, and most violent diasporic routes they might dare to imagine as truth and as witness. In terms of his youth migration, Zamora introduces the reader to his adolescence in homeland as a boy who began to develop diasporic consciousness since his mother and father left for the United States, leaving him under the care of his grandmother and grandfather. As I will demonstrate in chapter V, the use of the family saga, in terms of gender, becomes an increasingly vital puzzle piece towards a more complete understanding of the political message that underlines Unaccompanied, because it shows that Salvadoran women weren’t only fleeing war-time violence in the mid twentieth century but patriarchy. This approach to routes exemplifies that Zamora’s frequently implements his family’s oral histories as a living archive that function as a “critical source of historical memory” and “testimonies of the struggles and lived experiences of displacement, migration, and diasporic belongings” (Osuna, “Obstinate

Transnational” 77).

Like other hopeful migrants in Central America whose parents had migrated, leaving them behind, young Zamora dreamed of a comfortable life in the United States complete with a pool, a

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Jeep convertible, a furnished living room, and the love of his parents (“June 10th, 1999” 79). The statements illustrates how his early diasporic consciousness was firmly rooted in hope and illusion that was kindled by letters (with addresses he couldn’t pronounce) that came from his mother in the

United States (see “Aubade” 54). It is his route to and his subsequent irregular-migrant-survival in the U.S. hostland that adds new layers to his poeticized diasporic consciousness. To aesthetically depict the diasporic third space of witness, in which his diasporic consciousness begins to transform, he employs exteriorism. But unlike Cardenal and more like Alegría and del Valle, he fuses the exteriorist viewpoint with his inner-feelings of estrangement and abandonment to exemplify that “unaccompanied” is physical and sentimental:

To cross Mexico we’re packed in boats twenty aboard, eighteen hours straight to Oaxaca. Vomit and gasoline keeps us up. At 5 a.m. we get to shore, we run to the trucks, cops rob us down the road—without handcuffs, our guide gets in their Ford and we know its all been planned. Not one peso left so we get desperate—Diosito, forgive us for hiding in trailers. We sleep in Nogales till our third try when finally I meet Papá Javi >> Mamá you left me. Papá you left me. Abuelos, I left you. Tías, I left you. Cousins, I’m here. Cousins, I left you. Tías, welcome. Abuelos, we’ll be back soon. ……………………………………………………………………….. <<

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You don’t need more than food a roof, and clothes on your back. I’d add Mom’s warmth, the need for the war to stop. Too many dead cops, too many tattooed dead. ¿Does my country need more of us to flee without nothing but a bag? Corrupt cops shoot “gangsters” from armored cars. Javiercito. parents say, we’ll send for you soon, (“Cassette Tape,” 13-14) Via an exteriorist perspective, on side A of the tape (the routes side) Zamora writes of specific things, people, and places he witnessed during his diasporic odyssey, such as the specific time that they left, how long it took to arrive, and the number of people in the group. At the same time,

Zamora offers a personal touch in the second stanza that reiterate Kitaj’s notion of the restlessness of diasporist life. Thus, the rewinding, fast-forward experimental style that he employs via the symbol of the cassette tape, shows how his diasporic consciousness is frozen on the tape, a tape that has two sides. Side A implicates his routes to the United States and Side B indicates his roots in

El Salvador. Despite the violence and longing present on both sides of this metaphorical tape, his diasporic consciousness hovers between trauma and hope, of leaving loved-ones behind in the homeland to reunite with others in the hostland. The irreverent tone of the text is illustrated through its crude diction and its profound metaphors. The retelling of his border crossing in the present tense suggests the poetic speaker’s psychological and physical trauma caused by his journey and those he had to leave behind is ongoing. Lastly, the use of “Diosito” via the dialogue of the migrants in the poem, represents a discontinuity with Central American expressions of

Liberation Theology because it is used more so as a representation of the faith that the migrants

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carry with them on their diasporic routes rather than something seen as a weapon of sociopolitical action.54

In stanza II of “Cassette Tape,” Zamora presents the intricacies of diaspora space, as the narrative therein contains the people who have gone and the people who have stayed, whereby when the poetic speaker leaves a loved one in the homeland, he later gains the physical closeness of a loved one in the hostland. Either way, the interrelations that the diaspora space portrayed in this poem reflects García Canclini’s notion of the pains involved with deterritorialization and he positive gains of reterritorialization. For example, the swift change from “I” to “we” in the fourth verse of stanza II is a vital axis when it comes to analyzing the effect of diaspora on those left behind in the homeland. This “we,” that now includes the poetic speaker, signifies the daughters, sons, and grandchildren who have left the grandparents behind in the homeland and may not return. This sense of abandonment of relatives for the insecurity of the border is symbolized in “Nocturne,” when Zamora confesses that as a boy, he envisioned the border as a monster that would swallow people up and take them away (70). In a similar way, “Abuelita says goodbye” (58) and

“Deportation Letter” (72) demonstrate the diverse ways that semi-forced diaspora disrupts the traditional family system in the homeland. For instance, in many Latin American countries the grandparents tend to live with their daughters or sons well into old age. Though these migrants could and normally do send remittances to aid their family members economically, which intimate moments between them are lost? What conversations that can only come about from sharing the same national or social realities are obliterated? What feelings of abandonment arise? These issues

54 This representation of faith as connected to identity, is also portrayed in Oliva-Corado’s Destierro when a migrant woman packs her flowers and her cross in her bag in case she dies along the way (“El desierto es cementerio” 30) She also illustrates an identarian faith when she likens their laments in route to a rosario de procesión (“Desierto Sonora-Arizona 24). Thus, in both Zamora’s and Oliva-Corado’s diasporic third spaces, faith is seen as an element that many migrants carry with them on these dangerous journeys, rather than the center of any sociopolitical agenda. This discontinuity, however, is more so a continuity when it comes to Cynthia Guardado and Lytton-Regalado as already exemplified once in Guardado’s “How do I Bear Witness.”

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are reiterated on Side B of the tape when the poetic speaker asserts that he needs his mother’s warmth more than food and more than clothes. Side B mainly indicates that Zamora’s and many others Salvadorans’ migrancies are caused by violence between gangs and cops. Still, Zamora problematizes this violence when he suggests that cops are murdering individuals who may not even be gangsters after all. Though his poetic testimonials of homeland violence don’t directly correspond to diasporic third space witnessing, it remains important because, without it,

Salvadorans like Zamora, wouldn’t have to migrate in this manner. In sum, the diaspora space illustrated in this poem that arises as result of Zamora’s exteriorist witnessing of his migratory journey, indicate the physical and psychological impact irregular diaspora exercises on the family unit, both those who have gone and those who have stayed; relationships that are severed, redefined, and put under stress because of it.

Turning now to the use of obstinate transnational memories, Zamora’s works often acts as witness to his family’s diasporic routes. In chapter 3 of U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing

Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance, Steven Osuna reminds his reader that the future has a past, and we must look to it to illuminate the present (93). By naming and exploring obstinate transnational memories, defined by Osuna as those memories and oral testimonies passed down from migrant parents to their children, several of Zamora’s poems illustrates the ways in which these struggles of migrancy function as living archives that interact with the past and present, by communicating historical memory to the next generation—a communications that often inspires the receivers of these ongoing memories to sociopolitical action (92-3). In Unaccompanied,

Zamora employs obstinate memories of his family members to create person poems about war and migration from both femenine and masculine perspectives; from both the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. One poem that illustrates this fascinating use of memory is “Deportation Letter,” a piece where Zamora relates his aunt’s diasporic testimony via person poetry. Separated into seven prose-like stanzas, it is told by a poetic narrator who contextualizes several elements of the

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implications of the deportation letter and the memories that arise from this letter. He also discusses and contextualized the aunt’s feeling and important testimonial data about her life and experiences in the diaspora. In the first stanza, the poetic narrator sets the tone of the poem, making the reader aware of the political implications of the deportation letter. He writes that the words “notice to appear” translate into “ten years in a cell cold enough to be named Hielera. If not that, a plane with chains locked to her legs” (72). Next, he introduces his reader to the complexities of the aunt’s diaspora space. It contains a daughter born in “Greenbrae” who speaks English, Adriana and a daughter born who “can’t come here” named Julia. The mother is depicted as being so desperately torn between the two that she “swam across the Río Bravo twice to see her” (72). The second stanza of the poem is told entirely in the person of the aunt who recounts a close encounter with death during migration, in which a collective of women come to her rescue. In stanza III, the poetic narrator re-enters, but now from the perspective of El Salvador in which he assumes the vision of

Julia who wakes up and “sees them and the volcano, and fire flowers through her windows” (72).

This “accompanied- person poem”- (the thought of Julia is accompanied by the poetic narrator) is well captured by Zamora who has experienced similar longing for things unknown in the hostland.

In stanza IV, he continues narrating as an all-knowing relater of the transnational obstinate memory that now allows him to speak about his aunt’s life in the homeland, as a pupusa seller near the pier in his hometown of La Herradura, a labor that occurs contrapuntally with “cleaning houses, baking bread, anything in Larkspur,” a city in either Colorado or California. This contrast adds to the poem’s sociopolitical message because it reflects on how the diasporic woman’s labor tripled after migration, and now, because of her migrant status, only criminality awaits her. The complexity of this situation is only heightened when the poetic narrator reminds the reader again of the daughter left in El Salvador, to which he adds the data that “Most people in La Herradura haven’t seen their parents” (72). In stanza V, Zamora deepens his person poem in the aunt’s voice as she witnesses her experience in the borderlands:

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The first try we were already in that van and La Migra was chasing us. The driver said he was going to stop, we should open the doors and run. There were a lot of trucks. Sirens. Men through the speakers. I got to a bush and hid. One dog found me. He didn’t bite. He just stood there next to me til one gringo handcuffed me (73) In stanza VI, the voice of Adriana is presented as carefree, but missing her sister and feeling cold. In stanza VII, Zamora embodies the voice of the daughter left behind and the mother who has returned to the homeland only to encounter a broken relationship that might take time to repair:

It’s complicated. Mamá me dejaste, decí que vas a regresar, I said, at night on that same bed you sleep in now. Same bed next to the window from which you see the lemons, the custard apples, the bean fields, then the volcano. I’m sorry none of us ever saw you draw butterflies like we see Adriana draw them, with the caption: “the butterflies we’re going to save the world from tornado. And did.” (73) Like many of Zamora’s poems, one must follow a non-linear map of here and there, memory, and imagination to feel their full scope. This is because, like Kitaj points out, diaspora is unstable, and it doesn’t follow a linear route, as it concerns itself with homeland and kin. From this viewpoint, to follow the sentiments and experience that mark the protagonist’s diaspora space in “Deportation

Letter,” readers must allow their gazes to follow the uneven route. As if responding to this crooked diasporic path, Zamora, the writer seems to understand that he couldn’t use the typical person poetry that he learned studying Dalton. So he includes the poetic narrator because it allows him to create metaphors and give extra background so that the reader can better understand what deportation means and the many people in the diaspora space that the deportation can affect.

“Deportation letter” is a continuity with the way that poetas comprometidos used person poems to raise awareness about specific political issue that affect the livelihood of someone other than themselves, in a manner that is distanced from the writer’s ways of thinking and feeling.

Nevertheless, because of Zamora’s diasporic condition, he had to modify the traditional political person poem in order to fully capture the crooked routes of diasporic life that always seem to reflect a piece of himself.

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So far, I have depicted how the Oliva Corado’s and Zamora’s approach to diasporic third spaces as firsthand testimonial subjects. Now, I will turn to examples of phycological third space borders in the poetry of Guardado and Lytton Regalado. This topic in their work demonstrates that diasporic consciousness of precarious migrant journeys of Central Americans doesn’t only stem from first- hand experience but from an attitude of solidarity to family members, ancestors, or compatriots who have. As the case with Guardado’s, “Border Crosser,” Lytton Regalado demonstrates that she is ever-consciousness about the dangerous migratory routes of Central Americans and other diasporic subjects worldwide. One way she presents this diasporic consciousness of the third spaces of crossing is how del Valle would have, through a love poem. In this piece entitled “La Lluvia,” she creates a highly experimental poetic structure that is shaped in the form of rain falling in irregular spatters. In it, she describes a moment of intimacy, that is interrupted by the poetic speakers’ diasporic consciousness of semi-forced migration in which:

families abandon their homes to cross the swollen river with nothing but a rope tied around their waists (11)

Despite the trope of love instigated in this poem, it is interrupted by the diasporic consciousness that her compatriots are on the move in some of the most dangerous ways possible. As the daughter of a woman who had to flee under similar conditions, Lytton-Regalado, a product of this movement, cannot help but hear migration despite love, despite intimacy, despite safeness. So her poem, as well as Guardado’s, witnesses the pains of displacement without witnessing through a notion of la facultad. These verses show continuities with the poetry of Debravo and Alegría who despite being in the safe zone much of the time, still felt the call to make their poetry speak for those who could not, to be comprometidos who called for justice for the oppressed. The poem is in discontinuity

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with these poets, as it alludes to current events, such as true story of Óscar Alberto Martínez

Ramírez, 26, and his daughter Valeria who drowned in the Río Grande on the 23 of June 2019 after

Valeria jumped into the river unexpectedly (Hausloner; Thebalut; Velarde, “The Father and

Daughter who Drowned” Washington Post). The image, pictured below, captures the precariousness of this situation, and encapsulates the desperate search for asylum of many Central Americans today. Because the poems doesn’t specifically point to Central American migration in an exteriorist fashion, it simultaneously evokes other situations of semi-forced diaspora such as the Palestinian diaspora to Europe. As a poeta comprometida, these are situations that Lytton Regalado, despite her position of relative safety and the romantic moment encapsulated in the text, cannot ignore.

Figure 5: Óscar and Valeria are engulfed by the river . Found in “The Father and Daughter who Drowned at the Border Were Desperate for a Better life, family.” Written by Reis Thebault, Luis Velarde and Abigail Hauslohner. Found in The Washington Post, 25 Jun. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/26/father-daughter-who-drowned-border- dove-into-river-desperation/, Accessed 19 Mar. 2020.

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Figure 6; Óscar, Valeria, and his wife Tania Vanessa Ávalos before migration. Found in “The Father and Daughter who Drowned at the Border Were Desperate for a Better life, family.” Written by Reis Thebault, Luis Velarde and Abigail Hauslohner. Found in The Washington Post, 25 Jun. 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/26/father-daughter-who-drowned-border- dove-into-river-desperation/, Accessed 19 Mar. 2020.

In terms of this poems’ staggered structure, I would connect it to the style Cardenal uses in

Homenaje because of its experimentality. The difference in Lytton Regalado’s text, is that her poetic structure does not evoke the circular spirit of indigenous cyclic time, but a sense of unnatural pauses that embodies the pain and desperation that irregular migration entails.

The New Mestiza Consciousness and Multi-Temporal Heterogeneity

Now that I have explored and analyzed how the poets approach certain third spaces in relation to irregular diaspora through the physical, psychic, and emotional perspective and their impact on the relationships fostered in the diaspora space, I will now turn to how their work employs elements of the new mestiza consciousness that relates to multi-temporal heterogeneity that revive notions of poesía comprometida because of how embrace and call forth indigeneity to critique the exploitation of the indigenous subject, and to call forth—via syncopated time— ideologies and mythologies that connect to this ethnic culture that has often been marginalized in

Central America. Overall, these facets of the new mestiza conscious and multi-temporal

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heterogeneity present in portrayals of Guardado’s and Lytton Regalado’s echoes how their culturally hybrid speaker’s critique what they find unjust about U.S. and Central American cultures and societies. whereby they enter and leave one cultural or ideological practice with fluidity. In general, their poetic inhabitance on “two shores” demonstrates an acceptance of dualities, whereby their texts reverberate “the breaking down of paradigms t.hat impacts the way that they perceive reality, the way that they perceive themselves, and the ways that they behave (Anzaldúa , “La conciencia de la mestiza/Toward a New Mestiza Consciousness” 102).

At the heart of this aspect of their poetry is simultaneously feeling “outside” and “inside” of

U.S. and Salvadoran culture. In the United States, their difference is having ethnic roots in El

Salvador. Whereas in Central America, their difference is having grown up in the United States. This creates “identarian” tensions for them both in the homeland and the hostland. In section I of Lytton

Regalado’s “Hombre de maíz: Variations on a Mayan Creation Story,” she relates the pre-Columbian passages of the Popul Vul which discusses men being created from corn by the Nahuatl God

Quetzalcóatl. Stylistically, she relates this mythological passage via narrative prose, almost as a historian would. It could also be considered a collage poem that floats between historical narrative

(section 1; section 4; section 6; and section 7) and poetry (section 2; section 3; and section 5), in a similar fashion as those poems found in Dalton’s Un libro rojo para Lenin and Alegría’s Luisa en el país de la realidad, a nod to the author’s hybrid literary character as poet and novelist.55 In section

II, she relates how corn continues to be the main sustenance of Central American peoples and her own poetic speaker’s passion for this Central American food staple as an adult. Through the use of the “we” form, she confirms her poetic speaker’s place in pre-Columbian Central American cultural history and identity that remains alive in modern times: “From, then on, corn was our sustenance”

(32). From this opening stanza, the poem already begins to show signs of continuity with the

55 See “The Trouble with Plot” on page 73.

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poetas comprometidos under investigation, especially Cardenal, who used his historical knowledge about pre-Columbian and Indigenous cultures to compare them to modern society. In an interesting turn due to her diasporic condition, Lytton Regalado uses this mythological tale to segue into her own identity and feelings of difference as a child during her visits to El Salvador:

There was a time when my brother and I ate only chicken potpies for dinner—that’s all we wanted. But the twins cried for tortillas and frijoles. My brother and I, the dark ones, would stare at each other and shrug, piercing through the flaky pastry to scoop up the creamy meat; while the twins, the cheles, born here, blond and blue-eyed like our grandpa, folded more refried beans and tortillas into their smiling mouths. Chabelita would clap her hands on their shoulders, just like my niñas, she’d say. Her daughters rising in the darkness of their adobe house to help their aunt sell tortillas, walking along the roadside with only the light of the morning star, Nixtamalero, to guide them (32). Underlying this poem is the issue of race because it suggests that Chabelita didn’t only take liking to the twins because they were real Salvadorans, but because they were blonde haired and blue-eyed; a sharp contrast to her other grandchildren; the “dark ones” who refused to eat the staples of the

Salvadoran diet. Though the poetic speaker might have been born in El Salvador, she grew up in the

United States causing her to return with a U.S. palate, represented in the chicken pot-pie. Through transnational travel, the poetic speaker would have to construct her own sense of

“salvadoreñenismo” throughout the years. In part V, she continues her identity tale which describes the sociopolitical aftermath of the Civil War as demonstrated by the items she would find on the beach such as “smooth stones: chicken bones, shining green beer bottles, and once, syringes” (33), whereby they are reminded of the remnants of war present on “a billboard on the highway:/a little girl with a missing leg leaning on crutches, /above her—Víctima de las minas” (33). Though the

Mayan story seems to have faded into the background, she revives it when the poetic speaker (a curious child) comes across “skinny knobs of corn that” haunt her. This last image portrays the existence of different historical and indigenous elements of Central America that all exercise diverse sociopolitical impacts on the exterior environment of the poetic speaker and her innermost feelings of identity that emanate from her tense relations with the homeland. In this sense, the corn, that in previous sections of the poem connected to a sense of “Mayanness” and “Salvadoranness,” is

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no longer only employed to represent a balanced expression of multi-temporal heterogeneity in El

Salvador. Rather, it is now additionally linked to the remnants of war that has led to gang violence and substance abuse. In a simultaneous fashion, this haunting corn seems to symbolize the blows to the indigenous communities who were usually at the frontlines of death squad massacres during the Civil War and during the 1932 Mozote Massacre, a mass killing that caused Dalton in “Todos” to declare that all Salvadorans are born half-dead. In Lytton Regalado’s poem cited here, this symbolic demonstration of indigeneity is only furthered in section 6 when in a fantastic display of syncopated time, the narrator of the poem recounts the coming of the first colonizers who had

“corn-silk hair and eyes of royal jade [that]shone from their pale face,” who caused “all to become slaves under their foreign tongue” (33). This section of the poem serves as a third space where acts of colonialism come to haunt the modern times; and connects the heterogenous moments in the poem itself in a manner that shows the tensions between language, race, and diaspora with a focus on indigeneity. The implications of diaspora, then, entangles with the symbolic destruction and exploitation of indigenous culture and peoples become deepened when the poetic speakers discusses how indigenous empires were buried, revived, and their jars and other artifacts were

“sold for five or ten dollars” (33). In the present time, the poetic speaker buys one and takes it to her home in Miami. This act represents the deterritorialization of the indigenous component of her culture to the hostland and her sense of Salvadoran identity that—albeit fragmented—is, in the way of mestiza consciousness, never left behind.

In the poem that immediately follows “Land O,” Lytton-Regalado remembers being ostracized in her U.S. school for her ethnic “Indian” look. This poem is of importance because it suggests the lack of education that surrounds Native American and Latin American indigenous peoples in the United

States. The “blonde” girls who taunt her for looking like “the Land O Lake’s Butter” Indian cannot be fully blamed for their treatment of the poetic speaker because their opinions of her can be linked

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to the invisibility of Native American history in the United States and the limited historical coverage of their genocide, resistance, and traditions on the U.S. educational system and in popular culture:

When I moved to los estados, I became Violeta, a thick that stumbles clumsily from the gringos’ mouths… The idea of those tiny purple flowers, quiet and elegant, the shades didn’t translate. To them, my dark skin meant Pocahontas, Tiger-Lily from Peter Pan, The Little Indian girl from the Land-O-Lake’s Butter package. I couldn’t explain that in my country the Indians build pyramids, not t.v’s…Tina taps me on the shoulder. She said she got me a present. Close your eyes. She grasps my hands and puts something in my palm. A dirty white feather about the size of my thumb. So, you can where it in your hair Land O.

This stanza demonstrates the untranslatability of Central American indigeneity in the United States where school children of the eighties and early nineties were rarely taught about indigenous cultures outside of the United States, one cause, I believe of the racism the poetic speaker faces.

Though Alegría writes of racism against Mexicans by whites in the United States of upper class economic status in here poem “Ni perros ni Mexicanos,” she doesn’t mention their racism towards

Native Americans, marking a slight thematic discontinuity with “Land O” (Luisa en el país de la realidad 171). The poem comes to a close, after the fight that ensues between her and the “pale- faced blond girls,” whereby she finds strength in her ethnic roots deterritorialized from El Salvador to Miami: “Yes, I will be the hunter, I will start fires with my hands, chanting on mountains, their faces will be pale in my darkness” (34). Foreigners and natives in two different societies, Regalado’s poetic speakers find strength in difference, indigeneity, and ambiguity.

In further examples that embody the new mestiza consciousness, Lytton Regalado also writes about La Siguanaba, a mythological female figure of Central American culture. An interesting possibility for her use of this figure that goes beyond its obvious nod to female sexuality, is that it is a way for her to highlight Central American cultural differences with Mexicans or other prominent

Latino/a groups in the United States. This fits well with the books’ structural use of what Lytton

Regalado calls “The Salvadoran Bingo,” in which each poem is preceded by a riddle which is answered in the poems that often exemplify cultural practices and social realities of El Salvador.

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Her inclusion of La Siguanaba, then, functions as a symbol of the Salvadoran woman’s strong survival tactics—first of colonization, then of imperialism, and of the Civil War; and now of gang violence, continued poverty, and diaspora Because la Siguanaba does not (in her origin story that links to colonial resistance) represent the consequences of female punishment, but male promiscuity, the use of her story follows the women-centered theme of the books, as La Siguanaba is known to undermine the signs of patriarchal forms of femenine beauty (Oliva-Alvarado, “A

Genealogy 111). In this way, the very empowering of La Siguanaba in Lytton Regalado’s Salvadoran- woman focused text reiterates Matria’s emphasis on Central American cultural difference from other Latino/a groups, a differencing that Arias has deemed necessary for the construction of U.S.

Central American identity politics.

Unlike the poetas comprometidos like Cardenal and Dalton who have appropriated indigenous figures and notions of indigeneity to only call for a revalorization of the natives in Central American society and, in some way, push them from the economic and racial hinterlands of the nation, Lytton

Regalado uses them to reevaluate femininity in itself in a fashion that is internalized, whereby the diasporic subject who speaks in this poetry uses symbols and images to recreate the face of the indigenous other within the “self” as an excluded “dark one,” as one who possesses la facultad and can see and feel those deeper realities via an “acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols, which are the “faces of feelings”

(Anzaldúa, “Entering the Serpent” 60). For Antonio Cornejo Polar, similar imaginings of indigeneity and reflections of self are the beginnings of true and revendicated expressions of heterogeneity

(Spanish-Indigenous biculturality), as “el verdadero objeto es ese cruce de contradicciones” in which “su materia es la historia que imbrica inextricablemente varios, diversos y muy opuestos tiempos, conciencias, y discursos” (195):

tal vez no se trate de otra cosa que de la formación de un sujeto que está comenzando a comprender que su identidad es también la desestabilizante identidad del otro, espejo a

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sombra a la que incorpora oscura, desgarrada y conflictivamente como opción de enajenamiento o de plenitud (195). This tension that Cornejo-Polar elucidates between la voz (indigenous oral culture) and la letra

(Spanish colonial culture) that can either lead to feelings of up rootedness or plenitud within culturally heterogenous peoples, is noticeable in Guardado’s expressions of hybrid new mestiza consciousness and la facultad, in which her poetic speaker wavers between feelings of exclusión and inclusión in her attempts to reconstruct various elements of her Salvadoran identity while rejecting others—a wavering that often results in poignant sociopolitical commentary.

Written after Anzaldúa, in “How to Tame a Wilde Tongue” from Endeavor, Guardado’s poetic speaker rejects the patriarchal notion that women must remain quiet and subservient, affirming that she is going to set her tongue “free from this mandible/that unravels her” (Endeavor 104). This poem symbolized how she stands outside of the patriarchal aspects of any culture that condemns women to silence; positionality that mirrors Anzaldua’s affirmation that, even in Spanish, with the heavy use of “nosotros” Spanish speakers are “robbed of [their] female being by the masculine plural” (76). Following the new mestiza consciousness that accepts the ambiguity of being both inside and outside of culture, the collection Cenizas, a text written from the sociopolitical context of

El Salvador, Guardado writes poems that represent ethnic tensions between her U.S. and

Salvadoran cultural identity (“Your Tía finds you un taxi seguro”; “Eight Women In a Kitchen y Una

Poeta”). For instance, to better stand on the Salvadoran shore of her identity, the poetic voice takes root in the sociopolitical panorama of the ancestral homeland via religion, an exploration of present history, a critique of women’s roles in the society, a knowledge of folklore, and a picking apart of memories from her childhood. For instance, her connections with her Salvadoran grandma’s

Christianity is employed in “Mama Chila Appears in the Middle of the Night,”56 when the poet

56 Published as “Eating in the Middle of the Night” in The Packinghouse Review.

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describes a driving scene to symbolize her unstable cultural wavering between El Salvador and the

United States

I drive until nothing is familiar Fumble through layers of memory. In my glove compartment I keep a rusty steel cross an heirloom from abuela I clench until my knuckles turn white —until I see the cows grazing in Buena Vista. I smell the humidity of this faint childhood memory is what I anxiously hold. My hunger fills me with fear That los Estados Unidos is how I will forget. Written from the United States in route to El Salvador, the poet turns to the memory of her grandmother’s religion to keep her spiritually and psychologically connected to her Salvadoran roots. However, this constant movement between two nations engenders the fear of “forgetting” the ancestral homeland capable of cutting her ties with diaspora. Above all, it questions the idea of new mestiza consciousness, which emphasizes fluid movement between two or more cultures, histories, languages, and identities. This in-betweenness of the poetic speaker leads to sociopolitical action as she acts as a mediator between the two countries—one of her birth, the other of her ethnic roots— when her people fall victim to a circle of violence that “deterritorializes” from the homeland and

“reterritorializes” in the hostland, a demonstration of Kitaj’s notion of diasporist art that concerns itself with the kinfolk and the scattering of her people. Therefore, in “Before We Send my Cousin’s

Body Back to El Salvador,” the poetic voice cleans her apartment, translating the fragmentary character of the objects that her cousin left behind. This fragmentation embodies the life of a diasporic subject who lived in between two cultures; who had migrated from the homeland only to die at the hands of violence in the hostland.

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Though Guardado’s expressions of the new mestiza consciousness aren’t at all stable, fixed, or comfortable – which means she still sometimes feels like a guest or a visitor in her homeland— she delves into the oral indigenous history (“Papá Victór: Folklore”); the ideas and livelihoods of the common peoples who still call El Salvador their home (“El Portrero”); its archives of present-day violence (“Cenizas”); and her mother’s experiences there (“A morning en la Casa de mi abuelo”).

This is done so that the poetic voice might remain connected to her roots, although these roots must be consciously and consistently reconstructed and are inherently shaped by her experiences in the United States and El Salvador. In this way, like Debravo did, she takes on the pain and certain sociopolitical ideologies of El Salvador upon herself and makes them tangible and deeply felt. As

Alegría did, she permits her poetic voice to become a cemetery that never ceases to mourn the senseless death of her people in the United States and in the homeland because of Central America’s history of violence in the twentieth century, that have led to their often-precarious lives in the U.S hostland in the twenty-first century. As a result, multi-temporal heterogeneity takes center stage because her approach to the new mestiza consciousness emphasizes the connections between two different time periods whose consequences continue to be reaped in contemporary times.

The sense of multi-temporal heterogeneity is felt through Guardado’s approach to indigeneity that encapsulates structural continuity with the poetas comprometidos is evident in

Papá Victór: Folklore,” from Cenizas. Told in a prose-like story form with four stanzas, the title suggest that this poem will express a veneration for native traditions. Nevertheless. unlike approaches to indigeneity in the sampling of poemas comprometidos studied here, this folkloric story is used to denounce an Indigenous man who leaves his wife and nine children for a mistress without providing her any economic support. In the story form characteristic of slam poetry,

Guardado leaves the reader with a surprising image of this patriarchal Native man’s tragic end:

His skin hard as clay stretches over his swollen body. He stands in his underwear baring a crooked smile. He is alone new. His wrinkles like growth rings in the pockets of his face gather each time he loses a child—each time they choose to leave him. He stares into a

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mirror far back into the cavernous rooms of his mind. Sees himself in an empty field once a forest the lone tree among the ashes 57 Aesthetically, this poem uses a similar conversational tone utilized by Cardenal, Dalton, and Alegría; a tone that relate to Guardado’s practice of the slam poetry style, which originated in the 1980s in

Chicago. It is a high-energy poetry that is meant for the people, is informal, and unconventional.

Slam poetry also uses strong words and stories to make its message more impactful and is meant to be spoken (performed) out loud.58 I think where Guardado most represents this style via the written word, is the feeling that her texts, especially the prose-like texts that revive a collage like style of the comprometidos, are telling a story with stunning openings and surprising endings.

Nevertheless, through the written word, we can’t hear, for example, Guardado’s voice shake as her emotion begin to take over. Because of the importance of reading and denouncing publicly for poetas comprometidos, I would say that Guardado’s slam poetry style represents a continuity with poesía comprometida.

This section of Central Americans in Movement has applied Gloria Anzaldúa’s new mestiza consciousness concept as a form of subversive hybridity in the work of two binational writers who frequently engage in transnational travel from the hostland to the ancestral homeland with an emphasis on indigeneity, la facultad, and multi-temporal heterogeneity (García- Canclini). Due to this diasporic in-betweenness, I have demonstrated that they find their psyches split, which produces an uncomfortable and unstable relationship between their Salvadoran and U.S. ideologies and worldviews. Meanwhile, they use the new mestiza consciousness to connect with certain elements of their Indigenous (or at least their country’s female Indigenous) identities and reject others.

Expressions of Metaphoricity

57 Published in Palabra: A Magazine of Chicano and Literary Art as “An Old Indio’s Tango.” 58 See, https://www.britannica.com/art/epithalamium-wedding-lyric for more information on this history of slam poetry.

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As discussed in chapter I, another vital act of subversion related to hybridity is metaphoricity, a traveling theory that applies to peoples of imagined, migrant, or metropolitan communities whose writings truncate the idea that the space of the modern nation is simply horizontal.59 Metaphoricity, then, produces a sort of doubleness in writing that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centered casual logic. Though this is the basis to metaphoricity, its significance and implications are a little more nuanced than I let on in my introduction and methodological chapter. Regarding diaspora, Bhabha asserts that from the lonely gatherings of scattered peoples, their myths, fantasies, and experiences emerge as an attempt to turn the loss and uprooting into the language of metaphor (“From DissemiNation”). For the diasporic poets under investigation, they transfer the meaning of home and belonging across the

“middle passage,” or their specific diasporic routes that tend to that present itself in their writing as a vertical notion of nationalism that disrupts homogeneous national discourse, expression, and community that is

more complex that ‘community;’ more symbolic that ‘society’; more connotative that ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications that can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of antagonism. (“From DissemiNation”)

With these notions in mind, the concept of metaphoricity can help scholars trace the psychological strength that “nationess” exercises on cultural and political projection and the effects of the ambivalence of the “nation” as a narrative strategy, whereby the nation as an apparatus of symbolic power, produces continual slippages between sexuality, class, affiliation, territorial paranoia, or cultural difference” (From DissimeNation”). This results in the subversive act of writing the nation because it permits displays of displacement and repetition of terms that allow one to measure the

59 Here we can see Bhabha reiterating his idea of time lapse, in which the time of the nation is represented by the postcolonial subject as heterogenous.

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liminality of cultural modernity via national discourses produced by the diasporic subject (“From

DissemiNation”).

Each poet’s expressions of metaphoricity as a hybrid tool that subverts the horizontal and homogenous idea of the nation-states is founded on very open critiques of the U.S. nation in relation to migration and diaspora. For example, in Post-Frontera, Oliva-Corado (who is “undocumented”) makes the following assertion that links her disdain toward the United States to hers and others’ traumatic routes across various physical fronteras and the exploitation encountered after crossing; that have resulted in changes to the psyche , a culmination of what she calls, the true odyssey of the irregular diasporic subject

Estados Unidos no merece el esfuerzo de cruzar la frontera sin documentos y mucho menos arriesgar la vida. No sabía que me victimizaba porque no podía identificar las señales. Eso sucedió hasta el año pasado. Mi proceso de recuperación ha sido lento. Pasé cinco años sin dormir más de dos horas, porque cuando el cansancio me vencía las pesadillas aparecían y me hacían despertar de golpe y saltar de la cama… En los Estados Unidos pierde sus derechos humanos y cualquiera la ofende, la agreda, la utiliza, y explota. ¿Eso era el sueño americano? En realidad, es una pesadilla con la que nos topamos todos los que entramos en este país sin documentos. Explotan en los mil oficios que desempeñamos los indocumentados. Explota el gringo, el asiático, el europeo, el africano, y el más explotador de todos es el mismo latino o el hijo de latino nacido aquí. Cinco años duró mi silencio sepulcral y mi estadía en el culo del abismo, rodeada de: frustración, pesadillas, cólera, y licor. No fui la única es algo que le sucede a la mayoría que llega a este país y que cruzó las fronteras de la muerte. Realmente la odisea del indocumentada es sobrevivir este sistema y no en la frontera. Este país es una carrera de resistencia mientras que la frontera es de velocidad. Esto es cosa de años y la frontera es de horas y de días. (Emphasis is mine)

Zamora, a diasporic subject who passed 19 years of his life in a state of irregular migratory status in the United States, has similar ideas even though he has obtained legal documentation because of the

Extraordinary Abilities Act; a cause of his continued sociopolitical concern for new migrants and

Latinos in the United States who encounter discrimination, and, those who are U.S. born yet threatened by the Trump Administration’s actions of denaturalization because their parents were

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irregular migrants (Lima 22-27). In response, he writes in “I Have a Green Card Now, but Am I

Welcome”:

The date printed on my actually green “Permanent Resident” card is July 11, 2018: 7/11, a date that will always remind me of the bright blue 7-Eleven Slurpees I used to drink. And also, in the year 2018, of a long summer of the Trump administration’s cruelty on family separation. A summer when “Where are the children?” was a trending topic. Then, even though so many of the kids were still not with their parents, people forgot about the kids, or the people fleeing for their lives and hoping that this country would grant them asylum. That was until a few weeks, and now, a few days before the midterm elections. The president stirred up fears of a caravan that was an “invasion of our country” — so dangerous that he is sending thousands of United States troops to intercept the invaders at the border. He’s also floated the idea that, despite the Constitution, being born in this country is not a guarantee of citizenship. This is the cynical manipulation of white Americans’ fears, fears of the other. Watching this on TV, I feel exactly like I felt in my first days in this country in 1999 — different, unwanted.This is the country I can permanently stay in now. (“Am I Welcome?) Ending this section of his essay with this is the country I can stay in now connects to his continued tense relationship with the hostland, in which he is a permanent resident, but has a clearly-defined diasporic consciousness that makes him quite aware that all irregular migrants won’t have the opportunities or cultural resources that he has had. Open U.S. xenophobia makes it difficult for him to accept that he has, in some way, benefited from the “American Dream” (“Am I Welcome?”) Both

Zamora’s essay and Oliva-Corado’s testimonial Postfrontera demonstrates that their approach to the nation-state is interrelated with irregular diasporic conditions, but what do these strong sociopolitical positions look like in their poetry via metaphoricity and which continuities and discontinuities does it present with ideas of nation and migration in the leading themes and aesthetics of poesía comprometida?

Regarding Oliva-Corado, her poems in Nostalgia, Desarraigo, and Destierro point to metaphoricity in that they tend to create a language of loss and up rootedness from the homeland.

One prominent way that metaphoricity is expressed in her poetry is via her gathering of memories of other worlds lived in the past. Sociopolitically speaking, this gathering indicates child labor in

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Guatemala, and the exploited labor of campesinos, a group that the writer associates with the indigenous peoples while Corado describes herself as Garifuna, Indigenous and Guatemalan (Oliva-

Corado, 2020). These elements of her poetry depict what she and other poor Guatemalans are fleeing from when they come to the United States. Symbolically, she uses images like the tomato field and illustrations of drug use and invisibility to carry over the memories of underdevelopment of Guatemala, a country in which the “wealthiest 10 percent of the population owns nearly 50 percent of the national wealth and the poorest 10 percent own less than 1 percent” ("Guatemala:

Poverty and Wealth"). In poem III from Desarraigo, she narrates the dark side of the Guatemalan nation-state that is revealed via the physical and emotional consequences of child labor and social invisibility:

La María del tomatal las niñas y sus canastos las ganas de llorar Ciudad Peronia, mi infancia la arada y el volcán Olían pegamento para no sentir se inyectaban tanta sustancia para resistir lloraban en el silencio de la invisibilidad los golpeaba todos los días la imposibilidad

…………………………………………………………………………………………………. Siempre nos llamaron los huele pega los mareros, los pandilleros los delincuentes de arrabal… Nunca preguntaron si teníamos hambre si nos dolían la exclusión siempre nos llamaron los delincuentes de esta nación… nos encarcelaron y nos mataron somos la memoria, la brasa viva y la rebelión (6-12) Taking on the past tense, the poetic voice reveals herself as a part of this collective of marginalized children deemed by the government as gang members and criminals. The anaphoric word choice of

“siempre” indicates that these children never had a chance to become anything else, nor did the government try to make sense of their situation in order to transform it, whereby the stigmatic

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markings of “mara” or “pandillero” are exposed as mere excuses to rid these children from society be it through murder, disappearance, or incarceration. This is extremely important in recent debates about Central American migration and their being linked to gang violence because Corado’s poetry refuses to accept this at surface value, opting instead to question the social construction of the gang member himself/herself with the consciousness that many of them are children hurt by societal exclusions.

Another facet of Oliva-Corado’s “Poema III” is that being born into this disadvantaged position in Guatemala begins a cycle of marginalization that brings upon the subject an overall sentiment of politically “non-belonging” within the country of origin; that, for her, is a catapult to migration.60 Aesthetically, this poem is quite lyrical due to its emphasis on rhyme and rhythm. The coupling of similar-sounding verbs and nouns like “mataron,” “encarcelaron,” “exclusión,” “nación,” and “rebelión,” creates a sound that simulates an irregular heartbeat that increases in velocity, a rhythm that symbolizes the consistent social genocide upon these economically underprivileged peoples of the ghetto. This adrenaline-like rhythm leads to a robust final couplet: a prophecy that the children excluded by the nation will become pillars of the next rebellion. This implementation of prophecy of future sociopolitical movements is in clear continuity with the work of Cardenal, who often made poetic prophecies about Nicaragua’s sociopolitical future. Regarding prophecy, Oliva

Corado also predicts in the last poem in Destierro, that migration from Central America will never cease. In a further construction of metaphoric phantasmagorias Oliva Corado’s homeland as translations of uprooting and loss, the poetic voice of “A dónde va la alegría de los pueblos marginados” (from Nostalgia) inquires as to where will the children—who learn to answer “yes sir” and “yes ma’am”—play if they are exploited? (3). This attitude of subservience that she notices in

60 I have borrowed this term from Yural Nural-Davis's ideas about the implications of political “non-belonging” in the nation despite one’s social, economic, and cultural contributions to that respective nation; a predicament also explored by Angela Davis in Women, Race, and Class.

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herself and in the most marginalized subjects of the Guatemalan nation, more specifically in her home city of La Peronia, travels across the middle passage of migration and (re)embodies itself in the economic experience of the irregular migrant who are characterized as peoples of

siempre yes sir. del yes ma’am, que nunca dicen que no que no tienen horarios los del siempre sorry Pidiendo perdón por todo por existir… (“Los que han cruzado fronteras” Destierro 90-1). The latter poem echoes metaphoricity because it represents a very rare linguistic hybridity

(English and Spanish) in the work of Oliva Corado that articulates cultural differences via the shattering of mere “binary structures of antagonism” (Bhabha, “From DissimeNation”).

Furthermore, it shows linguistic and thematic continuities with Dalton’s “Poema de amor.” (157). In

Dalton’s case, the poem focuses on Salvadoran migrants of the mid-twentieth century who were mostly began to squat in the Honduran borderlands, and laborers, prisoners, and farmers from all over the isthmus (Roque Dalton: Una antologia 157). With his renowned irreverent language and exteriorist stylings, he “Poema de amor” argues that these are the peoples who should be the most loved. In this sense, Dalton pays homage not to the rich and famous or the beautiful people. Rather, he honors the exploited, the one who faces violence in search of a better life, the victims of depression, and the hungry with the structure “los que” instead of “los de” and “los” prevalent in

“Los que han cruzado fronteras”

Los que llenaron los bares y los burdeles (La gruta azul, El Calzoncito, HappyLand). los sembradores de maíz en plena selva extranjera,… los que nadie nunca sabe de dónde son… los que fueron cosidos a balazos al cruzar las fronteras, los que murieron de paludismo

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o de picaduras del escorpión o la barba amarilla, en el infierno de la bananeras los que tuvieron un poco más de suerte. los eternos indocumentados (Roque Dalton: Una antología 157) ……………………………………………………………

Then, he delineates their labor and psychological states; a reverberation that portrays how they are easily incited to self-destruct

los hacelotodo, los vendelotodo, los comelotodo, los primeros en sacar el cuchillo, los tristes más tristes del mundo, mis compatriotas, mis hermanos. The last two couplets here are vital to understanding a discontinuity between these two poets in their approach to this subject of “los eternos indocumentados” or who Oliva Corado calls in her dedication to Destierro, “los indocumentados del mundo…los nadies universales.” In contrast to

Dalton in “Poema de amor” before many of her characterizations of the subject of diaspora, she adds “somos.” This is an indication that she, as a primary testimonial subject, is speaking from within the group, whereby she blames herself as well for accepting this situation and continuing to accept it. Her depictions, in contrast to Dalton’s, are specifically related to the U.S. diaspora, the diaspora space, memory. language acquisition, resistance to assimilation, nostalgia for the homeland, deportation, remesas, the inability for the diasporic subject to return, and the sexual violence diasporic subjects may encounter n route or in the hostland. Because all these situations point to the several complex sociopolitical issues of diaspora, it is no surprise that Oliva Corado overtly links them to the Jewish Exodus. This linkage only adds to Oliva Corado’s implied argument that twenty first century irregular diaspora from Central America and other areas of the world today is not decided. Rather, it is forced by economic and sociopolitical factors. From this

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perspective, her poem recurrently goes beyond an exteriorist portrayal of their situation. Rather, it also speaks from within, in the sense that one sees not only what happens to the victims of hunger; irregular migration; and dangerous and exploitative labor conditions, but is presented with their inner-most feelings, fears, and dreams with a very intimate touch of beauty and diasporic historicity. All of these aspects of the pains an irregular diasporic subjects face is elucidated in stanzas 7 through 10 of “Los que haan cruzado fronteras”

Somos los de la marcha forzada que no hablan inglés que no quieren olvidar que traten de no recordar que no saben que están vivos cuerpos lacerados violados marchitos pestilentes los de las pesadillas recurrentes los del maldito dolor latente

Somos las remesas las cenizas lo que sobró somos los que fueron los bandoleros de la emigración. ……………………………………………….. Somos los espectros lo infecundo somos la poesía una invocación el éxodo somos la legión nómada

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sin casa sin patria le perenne tribulación la sublevación errante somos los eternos emigrantes somos las fronteras y sus demonios somos la llegada la post-frontera la belleza de la quimera (92) In addition to my analysis of this poem, the last stanza should be highlighted because it suggests that poetry is a perfect medium to describe diaspora because it captures the in-between, it captures the beautiful in the obscene. What better way to capture the confusion of diaspora than via metaphor, personification, and simile, whereby the semi-forced diasporic sentiment is likened to becoming the border and its demons, and the existence after diaspora is described as a “beautiful pipedream.” The metaphors reiterate how a subject of irregular diaspora might find something worth the pains of the journey in the Post-Border life, but it will never mirror their original notions of how things would be in the hostland. Though this poem in more limited in thematic scope that

Dalton’s, it goes beyond the overall exteriorist perspective of Dalton and his voiced solidarity with these subjects.

Considering Zamora’s perspective of the character of irregular migrants, on one plane, the migrants learn to be subservient in the hostland because they perceive it as a tool of survival without documentation. This subservience points to a certain adaptation to invisibility that forces them into the shadows of non-existence, as is reflected in “from The Book I Made with a Counselor

My First Week of School” when his mother and father school him on how a person without legal documents should behave in the U.S. hostland:

Earlier, Dad in his truck: “always look gringos in the eyes.”

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Mom: “never tell them everything but smile, always smile.” (8) In this take of learned subservience, the parents in this poem see this attitude as an act of survival of the diasporic person that unfortunately results in a silence that is uncapable of changing their precarious diasporic conditions. Poetry, however, as a form of an alternative public sphere is doing its part in breaking those silences.

Turning back to Oliva Corado, metaphoricity also works to demonstrate the struggles of farmers, the peasants, and the rural peoples; a prime example of the ways her poetry represents a continuity with the indigenism of González. In “¿Cómo me verá usté Patrón?” she assumes the voice of a female adolescent who works at the big house her whole life. She is not only economically exploited, but she is raped. The language is, as González recalls in those social realist poems that he admired greatly, “netamente guatemalteca.” Whereas the theme points to the sociopolitical, as it denounces intersectional violence against indigenous women in Guatemala—one cause of their decision to migrate. According to Cook-Heffron, this problem is backed by data indicating that rape, domestic violence, and sexual assault against women in The Northern Triangle remains underreported due to societal stigmas while violence against women, as opposed to men, is seen as normal (3). In other texts about rural existence in Guatemala, Oliva Corado evidences some important continuities with the poetry of Dalton and del Valle, poets who employed Marxian and socialist language in their class-consciousness poems. Thus, she uses the words “proletario” and

“revolución.” “Proletario” because it represents the value that the poetic speaker sees in the working class as opposed to how the landowners may see them, as capital or beasts of burden.

Whereas “revolución” signifies that there existed a time (perhaps during the Guatemalan October

Revolution) in which the workers banded together and created a new government. However, the subjects in this poetry do not pronounce the word “revolution” (although they want to scream it) because of fear and acceptance of their socioeconomic class positionings. Like the irregular migrants of “Desierto Sonora-Arizona,” they are trapped in a system of power where the poor

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people of close but not equal socioeconomic standing are pitted against each other so that it might be simpler for one big boss to control them and keep them in a state of subservience and exploitation. At the end of the poem, the poetic voice celebrates the pueblo and invites them to revolution as del Valle did in so many of his poems: “¡Loor a los campesinos, a los obreros y al amor del proletario!/Que sin afán de locución grita fuerte, ¡revolución! (Nostalgia 32). This represents her poetic continuity of Dalton’s view that the poet’s best way of arriving at “truth” (that will guarantee the future realization of the poet’s hope of social change) is his/her cultivation of love for the workers, the middle classes, the peasants, and any social sector subject to oligarchic or imperialist rule—a solidarity highly evidenced in the poetry of González, Debravo, del Valle,

Cardenal, and Guardado. Oliva Corado’s revival of poesía comprometida via metaphoricity is yet another call for the workers, the campesinos, and the Indigenous peoples to protest and rise, an uprising that is occurring today, presenting itself in various indigenous movements in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile.

Oliva Corado was twenty-two years old when she departed, deeply rooted, as she might say, in her Guatemalan identity and Guatemala’s sociopolitical landscape. Therefore, some of the most bucolic memories of her homeland are laced with its violence and economic disparities (“Abuelo,”

Nostalgia, 22). However, there are dozens of poems that focus solely on the wonder of Guatemala that are frozen in her diasporic imagination. In this way, she writes, “Peronia,” “Desde el destierro” and “Convite del mercado.” Many of these poems, especially dealing with the specificities of

Guatemalan land and fauna would be better interpreted by a Guatemalan linguist or ecologist.

Nonetheless, most of her poems about home balance homing desire with the sociopolitical consciousness that the home that she loves is also dangerous and unjust, especially for campesinos, women, and indigenous persons. Due to this antagonism. many of her poems might be characterized by a phrase that she writes “Yo te extraño/y empiezo a recordar” (“La Comapa amada”). Where “to miss” means untainted nostalgia, and “to remember” is to interpret the lived

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experiences of underdevelopment in Guatemala. This love-hate relationship with the homeland is also poignantly expressed in del Valle’s “Los pinos.” In this poem, del Valle uses parallel structure to show his love of Honduran geography, his distaste with Honduran violence, and his hopes for the future; that he carries out with an exceptional use of personification, image, and rhythm. In this first line, he announces the poems tone of national pride: “En mi país los pinos/son verdecidas torres de esperanza” (34). The next stanza reiterates this hopeful image with the last two lines that employ two 12 syllable lines with frequent spondaic meters. This dotes musicality to their imagery as birds that carry, “las silenciosas músicas del alba.17” Here, he reiterates the passion he feels for the homeland. However, in the third stanza, the poem takes a turn through personification of the pinos that know both “el secreto de la orquídea” but don’t ignore “el espanto/ nocturnos de un ahorcado/ y de los hombres muertos en el barro.” In the fourth stanza, the dangers and beauties that characterize his country are placed one in front of the other that come to view only after the

“peligros de la noches” give way to the “naúfragos solsticios.” The description of the sun’s positioning as “shipwrecked” or “lost” suggests that the dangers of the night are pursuing the hope of a new day, a situation that the pinos “know” very well since blood drips “gota a gota/en sus raíces.” The “gota a gota” is not positioned on the branches of the tree, but in the roots, a symbol that this violence is deeply rooted and ongoing in Honduran society. In the last stanza, the poet returns to the tone of the first and second stanzas: “Pero también los pinos/son árboles que cantan” and it ends with the pinos singing a song in the future of “aleluya”; a spondaic and religious choice

(Like Corado’s “Loor”) of word that indicates the rising praises that will come from the voices of the people after revolutionary changes are realized. Just from this one poetic sample, it is evident that del Valle’s love song for the homeland is deeply problematized, as Oliva Corado’s is by intensely rooted violence and “darkness” that symbolically pushes out “the light of day.” It exposes this duality of hope and violence through personification of the Pino that simultaneously represents the timeless beauty and constant struggles of Honduras. It is, like many of his other texts in this

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collection and those of Oliva Corado, a hope that is untainted by ignorance of the country’s seemingly hopeless present condition.61

In contrast to the love-hate, beauty-hideous binaries noticeable in del Valle’s and Corado’s poems, Zamora’s metaphoricity represents Lemke’s notion of the diasporic aesthetic of “frozen in the past.” At the same time, this nostalgia of his is “reflective” because it exemplifies fragmentation of memories and temporalization of space (Boym 44). Therefore, his expressions of metaphoricity via memories of his boyhood marks the good life— gazing at the Pier, the “cornfield-skirt” of El volcán de Chichontepec, the bay, “the kingdom of sand,” pomegranates, mangroves, marañon trees, flor de izote, and paper boats on flooded streets.62 The metaphoricity of these positive aspects of home are sociopolitical because they demonstrate that many of the people who have been forced to leave did not want to go but were forced to. Therefore, the telluric qualities that the poetic speaker attaches to his life lived retroactively, as González had done of Guatemala in many of his poems written from exile, seem even more dreamlike because of their placement in the text. They are usually found sandwiched between very disheartening poems that locate themselves in “another narrative of entry permits, passports, and work permits” that “at once preserve and proliferate, bind, and breach human rights of the nations.” (“From DissemiNation”). For instance, “San-

Francisco Bay and “Mt. Tam” is located between “Citizenship,” a poem that bespeaks a border between those who have the right to vote and those who are homeless and “undocumented”; and

“Doctors Office First Week in this Country,” in which stanzas 6-8 allude to the notion that the poetic speaker might have been raped during his clandestine journey. Since El Salvador represents his

61 Poems like, “Estas canciones,” “Balada sola,” and “Digo” from La ruta fulgurante also contrast the public love he feels for the geography of his country and its most marginalized subjects (in particular, the workers). This love coexists with del Valle’s sharp critique of the countries’ sociopolitical woes with colloquial and elevated languages, parallel structure, and the personification of animals and even hope itself.

62 See “Montage with Mangoes, Volcano, and Flooded Streets,” “Pump Water from the Well,” “San Francisco Bay and ‘Mt. Tam.’”

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refuge from memory and his growing sociopolitical consciousness that El Salvador is no longer the place that he left as a child, the poetic speaker says in “To abuelita Neli,” and in “Vows” that he can never go back (3; 75). That is, he knows that a physical return is imminent, but going back to a homeland that is now “deforested,” “cratered,” and full of everyday violence that keeps people fleeing is shown to have the power to shatter his nostalgia, this place of refuge that he had used over the years to survive the pains of displacement (“Dancing in buses 23; “Exiliados” 75). “Home,” then, represents his pre-migratory childhood years whereby his nostalgia and memory remains frozen in many sweet memories. As illustrated in “Exiliados” Zamora is fully aware that a physical return home would present a break in his ritualization of the longing for the homeland, which, if the reader recalls this chapter’s epigraph, was for the Jewish people, the longing for Zion. Like the notion of “frozen in time” in Unaccompanied, when many Jewish people could return to Israel (like

Zamora could return to El Salvador after he got his greed card), it didn’t quite represent a salvation from the troubles of diaspora and their history of violent displacement and genocide that continue to mark Jewish collective memory. Rather— as eluded to in Zamora’s’ collection via metaphoricity—it destroyed the image of homeland as the diasporic subject has always imagined it frozen within their homing desire. Therefore, physically returning home, something the poetic voice reiterates that he cannot do, might mean facing the music of the present sociopolitical reality of the homeland as Lytton Regalado has, a poet who rides in a bullet-proof truck for safety and witnesses violence from behind the “looking-glass” (“La calavera” 26). Nevertheless, she has been able –in her return to “Zion”— find new Salvadoran landscapes and delights to write about, particularly its women and their will to survive, elements that have transformed her poetry from

“existential whining” to talking about real struggle, deep violence, family, love, and womanhood (“I

See Myself in Her”).

In order to find an increase of the violent memories of the homeland in the work of Zamora, one must look towards those poems created from the oral testimonies of his family members that

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attest to the displacements, deaths, and infighting between family members of differing sociopolitical positionalities during the Salvadoran Civil War. They are, “How to Enlist,” “Arena,”

“This Was the Field,” and “For Israel and María de Los Ángeles” (24-34). This use of oral memories as a catapult to his own sociopolitical attitudes about a war that had been officially called to a close two years after his birth, coincides with Steven Osuna’s thesis that the memories that Latin

American and Central American migrants parents pass down to their children become enduring elements of their consciousness into adulthood. He calls this transfer of sociopolitical consciousness from parent to child, transnational-obstinate-memories. However, Zamora’s poems go beyond this thinking because Zamora is also highly influenced by the memories of other family members in relation to migration and to war. What is even more curious about these poems of obstinate transnational memories that bring the memories of underdevelopment and livelihood of the

Salvadoran homeland to the U.S. diaspora is that they mirror Dalton’s poetic style in a way that is found at the semantic and thematic level although Zamora writes in English. This element of

Zamora’s revival of poesía comprometida demonstrates that elements of homeland can survive in and through the hostland language. It also indicates a sharp continuity between Zamora and the late Dalton that is not surprising since Zamora wrote his master’s dissertation on Dalton’s work and cites him in two epigrams in Unaccompanied. Like Dalton, he employs the person-poem and presents textual evidence of the peoples and groups that he sees as responsible for the destruction of the country just as Dalton did. For instance, in Dalton’s second stanza of the poem “Morazán y la juventud,” the poetic voice names those oligarchic groups of Salvador and other Central American countries who couldn’t have made it into Morazán’s circle because they exploit their nations and its people rather than sacrifice their wealth and well-being for its greater good. Some of the groups and peoples named are: El General Idígoras Fuentes, ODECA, and El Partido Unionista. El General

Idígoras Fuentes was the conservative president of Guatemala from 1958 to 1963 and the main opponent of the Jacobo Arbénz. ODECA was a loose affiliation of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala,

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Honduras, and Nicaragua established in 1951 between heads of state, foreign ministers, legislative councils, etc. Though this groups objective was to bring about Central American unification, the organization failed at meeting its objectives. El Partido Unionista is a Guatemalan political party established in the 1920s via a liberal movement. However, as the group developed it became increasingly conservative and supported the free market. What these groups and people have in common is that, for Dalton, they represent the opposite of Morazán’s vision because they claim to support Central American unity, but their interests are economic since their members are constituents of the oligarchy. Unlike Morazán who believed that he would die “pobre y con deudas,” the members of these groups are wealthy and distanced by class and social status to the Central

American working classes, peasants, farmers, and indigenous peoples.

In a textual continuity of this approach to sociopolitical poetry via metaphoricity, Zamora writes in “Disappeared,”

Hold these names responsible: ARENA, Roberto D’Aubuisson. Escuadrones de la Muerte, Las Fuerzas Armadas, Battalón Atlaccat, La Guardia Civil, Escuela de las Américas (also known as: Fort Benning or Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), Batallón Atonal, Bush Sr. Ronald Reagan… (28). This poem that seems more like an incriminating piece of evidence, gains importance when speaking of how expressions of metaphoricity speaks to the non-horizontal character of the modern nation. For example, due to the inclusion of U.S. Presidents and organizations to the list of those responsible for the disappeared in El Salvador indicate that the U.S. should take some responsibility of El Salvador’s actual fate that is embodied in its twenty-first century embodied in clandestine migration, whereby the direct naming in the text invites one to research this history, to uncover a different truth about the U.S. and Salvadoran governments. Since the poet believes that the war has never really ended in El Salvador, this documentation of those peoples, governments, and subjects who are connected with it, demonstrates that its aftermath is a reason why he can never go back and a reason why he and many of his family members have been forced to leave.

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In retrospect, it seems that what I have done via this analysis of metaphoricity is to lay out some of the cultural, historical, and linguistic elements these poets have deterritorialized from the homeland and reterritorialized in the hostland. But, when reterritorialization occurred via metaphoricity, it tended to adapt itself to U.S. migratory politics, mirroring, in this sense, each poet’s diasporic condition or diasporic routes. However, this doesn’t tend to the question as to how metaphoricity changes as the elements that are deterritorialized from the homeland have passed many years within a process of reterritorialization or adaptation? Or what happens with metaphoricity or the process of reterritorialization once the writer’s diasporic condition changes?

Because of the limited number of collections that these poets have written, it is difficult to make strong conclusions. However, their most recent texts, for Oliva-Corado, her full-length collection,

Invierno and for Zamora, his most recent poem “Vivíamos en el Pulgarcito,” offer some evidence that could help to answer these questions. Of Invierno, a collection published in 2019, marking 16 years of her diaspora, the poet calls its her renovation because, for the first time, she is completely

“fuera de Guatemala” and she has located herself in “el invierno de las tierras” of Chicago (“Invierno

Presentación”). She also writes that the book is different from all others poetry collections that proceed it because it is not emotional; marking a new era in her poetry that focuses on her everyday life, this time the introspection and majesty of a U.S. northern winter, something her nostalgia and anger when she first arrived did not let her see, whereby she could only gather the memories and retroactive livelihood from the homeland to try and understand how she had found herself in such a vile existence. My reading of this collection of poetry, shows that she has indeed began to adapt, but should this transformation be painted as assimilation or adaptation? When I think about it, these beautiful short poems of reflection still carry the spirit of Guatemalan indigeneity in Mariátegui’ s sense of the term in which the objects, the animals, and any living thing radiates a certain life-forced in the same way as those Guatemalan landscapes she paints so poetically in Desarraigo

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El cielo tiznado se emponcha y las nubes bajan unas veces en tormenta, furiosas y otras como suave brisa y despolvorean los copos de nieve como coco rallado sobre la gran ciudad. Ríen como niñas felices por la travesura (XIII 211)

Though the poetic scenery is a wintry place, the tropical metaphoricity still sneaks in through the backdoor with images like the “scratched coconut.” Whereas her preoccupation with movement is now attached itself to the movement of the people, animals, and things in her rented homeland, such as the snow that allows for las huellas que quedan or the frozen ice that allows the first to swim

“libres de los anzuelos; a veces”; images that point to a sense of temporary freedom (XV 229; XIV

220). This collection demonstrates a new metaphoricity, or the language of the migrant, melancholic, or diasporic subject who has, after so many years of pain, learned to capture and express the poetic trope of carpe diem in a land that the sometimes still feels alien in, but, closer to with the years, a demonstration that the sociopolitical poet isn’t always heavily “sociopolitical,” as noticeable in those reflective and short poems of Debravo’s Milagro abierto. But, even in Invierno, this seemingly apolitical collection of poems whose style fit well with Cardenal’s epigram poems in their liberation of only one poetic image, there is evidence of her sociopolitical consciousness that all is not well as her writerly gaze transfers from the inward memories of Guatemala to the U.S. exterior social-scape

Como despojos se apilan debajo de los puentes en la intemperie fría: fingen no verlos. (VI 141)

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With this poem in mind, a poem without campesinos or migrants, I don’t think that one could say with certainty that the underdevelopment of Guatemala or the pains of migration are left behind as a faint memory of her diasporic consciousness. Rather, her gaze has shifted, and is looking out and translating her immediate surroundings via a Guatemalan cultural lens rather than searching within her memories or nostalgia of Guatemala to make sense of her feeling of alienation. In sum,

Invierno demonstrates that reterritorialization, in literary terms, can mean a reworking of the gaze to capture what is different in the new environment, and what is the same. Rather one might call it assimilation or adaptation is simply a matter of word choice. But after sixteen years living in the hostland, one might surely find something they like or want to hold onto while there, though they know that it is temporary. Svetlana Boym calls this diasporic intimacy.

In terms of Zamora’s there is only one evidence in poetry to see how his metaphoricity has changed now that his diasporic condition is that of a permanent residence. Unlike Oliva Corado, there isn’t a feeling of coming to terms with being a North American and living and traveling in the

United States as a famed poet. Rather, there is a feeling of a growing distance between him and the

Salvadoran culture, language, and the people. It is almost as if he has a survivors’ guilt of overcoming the “bad” migrant narrative. As such, he fears that he is being portrayed as the “good” migrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and made it! This poem demonstrates that he knows full well that the “good migrant” is only a social construct in the United States to rid these lands of the “bad hombres,” to build walls, to separate families, and to conduct raids with impunity and acceptance of these actions by many U.S. citizens. In response, Zamora continues to gather incriminatory migratory statistics and infuse his poetry with the memories of El Salvador that have got him to this point in his life, highlighting, above all, the dark-side of deterritorialization, the loss of language and the loss of a piece of his Salvadoran self that he wasn’t afforded much time to develop fully in the country of origin. In a review of the poem by Distópica’s René Patricio Carrasco

Mora, he describes this piece as one that emphasizes being an “other,” so much so that it is

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romanticized, arguing that his prose become descriptive and melodramatic that it signals a victim who suffers and feels special. In my opinion, I see his wanting to be “other” as a cry for the desire to

“really” be Salvadoran again via the language and experience of growing up there, and not being the

“good” migrant who is accepted in Yankee literary circles, while all the other bad migrants are still persecuted and have no way back home but through deportation. For me, the takeaway from this poem is that there is, in general, a pain of deterritorialization, as “melodramatic” as it may seem, that marks the poem’s inherent character and demonstrates the ways in which diasporic condition and positioning of the diasporic consciousness is always changing and impacting this corpus’s approach to sociopolitical poetry.63

63 Like his chapbook, Nine-Immigrant Years, this poem has also been removed from the La Piscucha magazine that it was originally published in. The only evidence of its existence is the review found in Distópica.

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Chapter V The Centrality of Women within Diasporic Poetry

When I wrote that poem, I was thinking of the weight of the things that we carry. I was not only thinking of the science of genetic trauma that has been researched in recent years, but also the way that we pass down our grief and trauma to other women like the stories that my abuela shared with me. So, over the years the women in our family carry the weight of those stories. I am not sure if this same dynamic is true in all families, but I do think that that it has a parallel in Latino culture in that when major traumatic events happen, women carry the burden of holding everyone together. So, our levels of grief are different because it is inside of us. In that way, a lot of the sections focus on sexual assault and violence against women like when I talk about my cousin’s murder. So, it also is an argument about the grief that I carry in that all these societal pressures that are going around are a part of women’s experience. .

Cynthia Guardado on “How Women Grieve” Endeavor64

In “La sandía” by Lytton Regalado writes in stanza I

Before I chose to exist not just as a woman, or mother, just human. And then, when the pains of labor came, like a machete to a watermelon, splayed, I was sent searing into my gender. (66)

With pain and sweetness, the birth of a child has awakened in this poet a sense of feminism that wasn’t present before. It is in this moment that she begins to turn her gaze outward, looking towards contemporary Salvadoran women from all sectors of society for guidance on how to raise a family in a nation riddled with violence

Matria was my obsession with women. I recently moved back to El Salvador with my husband, a Salvadoran man, who, like me, grew up in the United States … About a year and a half later I was pregnant, and I didn’t have my mother nearby, so I had to look around for

64 See full interview in Appendix.

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examples of other women, other mothers to understand how to do this… So, that’s where I got most of the testimonies and all of the experiences that lead to this tapestry [Matria] of what it means to be a woman in El Salvador. (Lytton Regalado 2019) As was the case with Alegría, one can find in her writings, an upper-class female poetic speaker who feels a deep sense of solidarity with the struggles of women of lower-social classes, but due to

Lytton Regalado’s diasporic condition, the livelihoods and testimonies of these women also indicate a reencounter with the tense sociopolitical environment of the homeland as a woman and mother whose experiences as a Salvadoran will be forever marked by a sense of translation; of being quite, but not exactly like the women she is looking at to help her understand how to thrive in the murder capital of the world.

Stemming from her position as a diasporic woman who has had more opportunity than the majority of her female compatriots, she admits to suffering from an “observer’s guilt,” and fear of becoming one of the women that she “once despised:/ Victorian ladies in petticoats, riding saddleside on shoulders/of bare-breasted beasties [who] pretend, with our laced booties and fine ankles, to sidestep/the eggshell topics on the table, brilliant as it is with our polished words” (“La

Doña” 50). These fears mirror Alegría’s apprehensive jump to the political that counteracted the idea that Central American women of high society should not concern themselves with issues outside of the home. Despite this fear, Lytton Regalado refuses to sidestep the issues on the table, and dives headfirst into a documental style of poetry to represent intersectional violence against

Salvadoran women, and their unending will to survive not only for their sake, but for their children’s.

Regarding Lytton Regalado’s feminist position “La cachiporrista” criticizes how in

Salvadoran society girls are made to desire being marching band leaders, yet this position means being placed in overly sexualized costumes that echoe that fact that few will have their voices heard on the national scene, namely in terms of their reproductive rights. For instance, women in El

Salvador today can be jailed for up to thirty years if accused of abortion, whereby, in the most

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unfortunate cases, women are serving jailtime because of miscarriages. This lack of control over female sociopolitical voice in national politics and the sexualization of her body is evidenced in this piece. Aesthetically, female enclosure within patriarchal society is expressed through the protagonist’s position, whereby the cheerleader is enclosed in a roadside garden. Meanwhile, her lack of means is understood by the improvised majorette skirt she wears made of strips of newsprint and her broom-stick baton. Enclosed within the garden, she is also enclosed by the wire fence by which a man in a chop shop watches her with “hooded eyes” (9). The chop shop simultaneously acts as representation of the political dismemberment and objectification of the female body in the Salvadoran national imaginary. Though the poem is a clear denunciation of patriarchy, the girl is also trapped in Lytton Regalado’s gaze, a speaker who highlights her own failure of “true” representationof this teenage girl because of her positioning from the bullet-proof truck, a positioning that makes the reader wonder if the full scope of the protagonist’s situation has been presented. This issue brings up the limits of the documentary poem. It shows what is there, but it is still only a half-truth, like some would argue about all literature. However, these images do say something about women’s positionalities in the isthmus. It does say something about poverty and violence that is translatable through the image but can never fully capture her precarity without the voice of the one who lives in it and comes from it. This failure to fully capture what is precarious in the livelihood of the other is the main topic of Butler’s Precarious Life and a central question that underlines the sociopolitical nature of Matria.

In a continuance of the documental style meant to shed light on the social situations of women other than herself, Lytton Regalado also writes about how women in El Salvador often engage in paid labor and unpaid labor simultaneously. In “La enfermera” the poetic speaker highlights the struggles of a teenage mother who sells mangos while caring for her child. The last few detailed and sweet images embody her struggle as she labors in the Salvadoran streets:

On the other side

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Of the trees’ thick trunk a teenage girl sits on the curb selling peeled mangos. I keep vigil; cars whisk by lifting the ruffles of her pink apron. The girl props her drowsing head, leans over the bulge of her emptied womb, extending the bag of fruit, eyes closed, willing anyone: take it. Take it all (12).

Figure 3: A photography of a Salvadoran woman street vendor and a girl street vendor by Alexandra Lytton-Regalado. Found in the “Through_the_Bulletproof_Glass.” Instagram, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/through_the_bulletproof_glass/?hl=en, Accessed 28 Mar. 2020.

Poems such as these like “La moneda,” “La Jarra,” and “La pupusera” document the intersectional struggles of women in El Salvador because of class, gender, and race. Above all, they are representations of Lytton Regalado’s interpolation into their struggles that have come about because of her motherhood and her diasporic movement back to the ancestral homeland, in which she needed to understand how to survive amid the violence. Like the poetas comprometidos, she poeticizes her solidarity with the Salvadoran female subject of low socioeconomic standings.

Nonetheless, unlike what I have demonstrated regarding poesía comprometida, she admits that she

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is an observer, whose experience as an upper-class woman will forever mark a difference between the life she lives, and the lives of the women she watches from the bulletproof glass.

From another perspective of women’s socioeconomic intersectional struggles in El Salvador and

Guatemala, other poets of this contemporary collective under study turn to the ways in which women and girls encounter patriarchal violence in the home, and within their most intimate circles.

In “A morning in la Casa de mi Abuelo” from Cenizas, Guardado writes of how patriarchy affects her own family dynamics. In a conversational tone, she writes without any other adornment than the acrimonious truth:

My mother cleans her father’s toilet ……………………………………………. he’ll tell her she will not inherit this house or the land around it. Tomorrow it will be her birthday; he’ll say he has to think of his sons before his daughters, an afterthought like abuela who always waited for his return like Hera pomegranate in hand This frontal and detailed critique of patriarchy characterized by its fearless enunciations that evidence continuances of unequal power-relationships between men and women is something that one rarely sees in the poetas comprometidos that have been investigated in this dissertation. Even more, the reference to the abuela, who was also an “afterthought” for the abuelo marks how patriarchal attitudes and systems are passed down through the generations without significant transformation. In further poems dealing with the hostland space and the violence that is exercised against woman, especially irregular or diasporic women, is even more combative in Guardado’s

Endeavor

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Turning now to Zamora, he employs transnational-obstinate memories to travel back in time to his mother’s experiences in El Salvador as a young woman; whose expressions of sexuality, desire, and educational aspirations are violently oppressed by her right-winged military father. Like

Dalton, and other poetas comprometidos he uses the person poem to elucidate her female experience with a conversational tone. The diction of this text entitled “Mom Responds to Her

Shaming” undermine how women are taught to speak in a manner that is lady-like in patriarchal society, or, better yet remain quiet. The poetic speaker criticizes the grandfather for chasing her out of the house because she became impregnated before marriage. She also denounces the father of the baby for not using a condom; shattering her hopes for furthering her education. Her response falls into the tradition of feminist responses from other Latin American and Spanish texts such as

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in La respuesta and La pastora Marcela’s speech on beauty and freedom in

Don Quijote. At the end of the text, the poetic speaker predicts her own diaspora, a literal fleeing from female repression and homelessness. Speaking to the unfaithful father of the baby she asserts

“I’m the one that caught you with La Salivosa, / no one believes me. I wish you knew/what it’s like to hide from my dad/and wait for him to pass out so I can hold/my sons’ cheeks as I try to explain--

/ I can’t stay here” (50). This poem demonstrates how women’s repression may very well lie at the heart of female diaspora from the region and not only the violence and wars that were raging on in

El Salvador during that time. The closest portrayal of this expression of female anger regarding her position as a pond within the cruel game of patriarchy is Alegría’s “La prisionera” (See Chapter II).

Nevertheless, for a poet like Debravo rather than Alegría, “Mom Responds to her Shaming” evidences a very sharp discontinuity with his approach to femininity. This is because many of the female protagonists presented in Debravo’s work survive and deal with difficult situations related to maternity and poverty but are portrayed as very docile and weak when it comes to how they are described namely, in relation to their male lovers. Female experiences in Debravo’s poetry—though

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admirable for the time-period in which they were written— almost always caste female voice. experience, and sociopolitical struggle in the shadow of a masculine positionality and gaze.

Considering the ways in which Oliva Corado represents the feminist struggles of women of low socioeconomic classes from the diaspora, one might notice how she paints Guatemalan rural and proletariat women as strong, empowered, and working together as a community in order to survive, whereby many of her poems about life in Guatemala depict the strength of the peasant woman, or those women who have care for children, search for firewood, and work in the city selling comestibles or in the fields as farmers. Through these illustrations of working Guatemalan women struggles in which one must consider race, class, and gender, the reader is introduced to what Oliva-Corado sees as the inherent character of the arrabalera (slum-dweller) or, what Oliva-

Corado calls las arrechas.:

…….. vigor viveza carácter temple talante. ………………………….. Honradez consciencia y consecuencia Así son las mujeres arrechas: autónomas (“Arrechas,” Nostalgia, 38-39)

Here, the power and intelligence of these women, rather than their struggle, is front and center.

However, her texts that center on Guatemalan women, as I have already indicated in this investigation’s section on metaphoricity, don’t side-step the sexual and physical abuses they face.

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For instance, her testimonial of rural pregnancy is highlighted in her ode to her hometown,

“Comapa amada” from Desarraigo,

las veo torteando frente al comal temblando de frío en las noches cerradas trancando las puertas con chuzo arreando las gallinas deseando ir a estudiar las veo preñadas y paridas siguen siendo niñas aldeanas carentes de oportunidad (52)

Here, the reference to teen pregnancy of rural adolescents and lack of access to better opportunities is depicted as a grim reality of contemporary Guatemala, especially among rural girls. According to

Telesur, Guatemala has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in Latin America, a situation that continues each young mother’s cycle of poverty. Linda Forsell, photojournalist of the collection

Children having Children, a project about mothers under the age of 15 in Guatemala, writes that girls who become pregnant are often banned from schools, have trouble finding partners, and usually become single mothers.

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Figure 5: Linda Forsell, Village girl and her baby. “Children who have children: Guatemala’s Teen Pregnancy Problems in Pictures,” The Telegraph, Nov. 12 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/guatemala-children-who-have-children/, Accessed Apr. 17 2020

Despite these situations, one will not encounter in Oliva Corado’s poems, a female subject who gives up, even when she is conscious that her acts of resistance— rather migrating clandestinely or joining a rebellion during the era of the Guatemalan violencia— will most likely result in death. In

“A mi compañera” Oliva Corado pays her respects to those women who encounter injustices

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because of their sexual orientation, their illiteracy, their psychological problems, their dissident political views, and their semi-forced diaspora:

…A la fusilada que la historia olvidó. A la guerrillera que se entregó a la insurrección. A la desaparecida que me observa desde un zanjón. …………………………………………………………………. A la de acorazado encanto que a mi poesía hace escribir en noche fría, en la agonía de un candil. (Nostalgia 19-20) The last two stanzas demonstrate that the diasporic speaking voice is empowered by the women of the past and present; by the women who suffer persecution and work on low wages; yet don’t give up; by the women who engage in diaspora and those who fought in the war. These feminine subjects seem to nourish the poetic’s speakers own physical and psychological survival as an

“undocumented” woman in an often unforgiving and unwelcoming U.S. hostland. From this point of view, it could be said that she has deterritorialized their character of the Guatemalan women’s survival to her U.S. diasporic poetic space.

I will now turn to how this corpus of poets depict the often-precarious situation of Central

American diasporic women in route to the United States and their livelihoods in the post-frontera.

This aspect of their poetry presents a large breach with poetas comprometidos because of their centering on violence, feminicide, and struggles of women against patriarchal systems and exploitation in the hostland, something that is minimally exemplified in this dissertation’s textual corpus of poesía comprometida. Written by Guardado, “My mother’s story” begins in the

Salvadoran Civil War era, whereby the speaker relates her migration story from El Salvador to the United States. Told from the point of view of a mother who is speaking with her daughter, it is separated in three extensive prose-like stanzas In stanza I, the diasporic woman is torn between homeland and hostland. Though she has already migrated to the United States, she misses her

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mother back home, but needs to stay put to take care of her daughters in the United States.

However, it is impossible for her to travel because she has not received refugee status. Unable to find stability nor safeness in either nation, this stanza shows the poetic speaker’s sense of responsibility for the well-being of others on both sides of the border. This foreshadows how almost every decision that she makes in the diaspora is for others.

Torn between responsibility and nostalgia for home, her family’s states of in-betweenness is the main topic of stanza II. The United States is in between the war against the Salvadoran insurgents and the government; the mother and father are in-between refugee and irregular status; the mother is in-between English and Spanish; and a “white man” has come between the mother and father’s love because he is seen as the only way that the diasporic woman can better attend to her transnational “patriarchally established” duties to care for everyone but herself.

Whereas, her work as a house maid indicates the exploited labor of contemporary diasporic communities, with a focus in low-paid women’s housework. In this respect, the poetic voice expresses a powerful simile of her feelings of cultural invisibility and dehumanization as a maid and an irregular migrant in the United States: “We were ilegales, and I cleaned houses in

Spanish—my words clung to ceiling fans, particles of dust I only noticed” (2017, p. 97)

All this in-between business centered on the woman, demonstrates the intersection between war trauma, migration, and subjugation of the woman in external society and within her own family; three common elements of Guardado’s expression of women-centered diasporic consciousness in this text. The poem’s structure itself plays on the message that the matriarch of the family is bearing the weight of everything in silence and resignation at home and abroad; a display of the poetic speaker being caught between past patriarchy in the home country and present patriarchy in the hostland. This situation is a continuum of male domination and female

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subjugation that diaspora to a more “liberal” country never stopped, a reflection of Anzaldúa’s theorization that family can serve as a site of repression and pride for borderland women (1987).

The last stanza reveals the results of her negotiation; acceptance of sexual abuse by the man that she eventually marries for legal documentation in order to ensure her families’ transnationality and stability. Revelations of women-centered diasporic consciousness in the poem strikes a turbulent flame that illuminates silenced experiences of Central American diasporic women caught between violent patriarchal pasts and futures (Clifford). In retrospect, the poem’s title itself points to the fact that Guardado herself, the author of the text, continues to feel the pain of her mother’s trauma as a diasporic Salvadoran woman, whose existence is one result of the sacrifices that her mother had to make as a result of forced displacement, U.S. foreign and migratory policy, and right-winged violence in El Salvador. It makes one curious about how much sacrifice, valor, and strength one might find in a mother’s silenced endeavors, especially in the life of a mother who had to abandon her country because of violence, only to encounter more violence, invisibility, and economic instability in a new country. This poem’s expressions of women centered diasporic consciousness urges second-generation migrants to explore not only their father’s stories, but their mother’s stories, the ones that are most-often silenced in the media, in the history books, and often, in the family circles themselves.

Though this narration of a Central American mothers’ story of irregular diaspora expands on diasporic women’s experiences, not all women of the irregular Central American diaspora have kids or are married. What might some of their struggles look like in this corpus of poetry? Which aggressions do they face? What difficult decisions must they make? In “Alma deportada,” Oliva

Corado offers one painful possibility as related to the negative side of diasporic consciousness. That is, in the irregular diasporic woman’s search for anyone willing to offer her employment, she may accept exploitation or even abuse, an abuse that the author describes as a reincarnation of slavery.

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In short, the poetic enunciations in this person poem subverts the idea that slavery and subjugation of human bodies have ceased to exist in the twenty-first century. In contrast, it has only been shifted to a new group of people, the “undocumented” peoples of today’s diasporas. According to

Sascha and O Becker, they are over 66 million persons of semi-forced diaspora in the world today.

Aesthetically, “Alma deportada” shows the many ways in which the diasporic female laborer’s body is symbolically severed into different parts in accordance with their function in the exploitative labor system that she is subjugated to. While, her eyes, as windows to her very soul are ignored and obliterated. What keeps this (post) colonial system afloat? The poem suggests that irregular diasporic subjects are disposable commodities. Thus when an “undocumented” diasporic female doesn’t conform to the exploitation, the low-wages, or any physical, mental, or verbal abuse, another is on deck ready to accept abuse if that means feeding her family, sending remesas, or escaping gang-violence. “Alma deportada” is a fitting name for this text because it denounces the commodification of female bodies and the emergence of certain forms of modern day-slavery when it comes to the low-paid work of diasporic subjects who will toil—like slaves—on a land that they can never call their own (Stanza VI). The name, “Alma deportada’ presents the profound elements of the diasporic femenine self that their exploiters—as shown in the poem— do not want to see because that would mean that their exploitation is indeed unjust. What they do want to hear, as signaled in the text, is “Yes sir/No sir.” What they do want to see, is the smiling yet quiet migrant, not the one who brings pain, trauma, or a sense of pride or rebellion.

Regarding visions of women’s struggle in the United States, these poets do not only focus on the struggles of migrant or Central American women but consider those of other races and ethnic groups of women in the United States. In “Waiting for a Greyhound Bus at the Los Angeles Station”

Guardado considers the differences between African American and Central American women’s struggles; and between single women and women who are mothers to show that they must band together to fight systematic patriarchy. Like Brah suggests in Cartographies of Diaspora, this poem

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demonstrates that the enactment of global feminism functions best when women of different races and backgrounds accept their differences so that new solidarities that will ensure that women

“have greater economic independence and political control might be built (85). Narrated in her signature story-centered form, Guardado’s poetic speaker (a Latina) offers to a help a single African

American woman at the Greyhound Bus Station with her children. The tension between them is made obvious: the mother’s face is described as “serious” during this first encounter. Nonetheless, when the white bus driver asks the mother to pay for another ticket—because only two children ride free—, the poetic voice again offers her help, but the mother still does not trust her. Though these two women share the space as passengers on the Greyhound, a cheap way of travel in the

United State, their racial difference still separates them. This makes it impossible for them to help one another in the battle against patriarchy and racism as represented by the white-male driver. In this respect, an important act that turns the tide of the poem occurs:

Another woman stands and says the child is with her and then another woman stands and says the child is with her. After, the poetic voice again intervenes to admire the importance of this mini-revolution in which women don’t let race or even class separate them any longer. They stand in solidarity because they are all women against one man

Something beautiful is happening here, and the driver can no longer fight our unity or the energy within us. ( 44) This poem presents a discontinuity with the poetas comprometidos because of its open call for women’s solidarity regardless of race and class. Whereas, its specific discontinuity with Cardenal,

Dalton, del Valle, and González, is that its focus isn’t only big revolutionary movements apt to derrocar un gobierno o dictador, but on the everyday acts of resistance that can begin to chip away at today’s patriarchal and colonial systems day by day. As this poem, and many other’s by Guardado demonstrate, these acts of resistance will function best when new solidarities between difference

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races and classes of people are fostered. This stance is very crucial in the context of Los Angeles from which she writes since this state has been known for racial tensions (especially those related to gang-violence) between Latinos and African Americans. Thinking of the possible outcomes of a greater solidarity between peoples of color in the United States, the poem provokes one to wonder of the consequences of a greater unification of marginalized races in one unified fight against classicism, racism, and patriarchy. What would happen if they learned to trust each other enough to engage in one small revolutionary act a day? The answer might be found in the Black Lives Matter

Movement, as a result of the televise police brutality, that led to the murder of another unarmed black man, George Floyd that has caused all races, including whites, to stand up against racism worldwide. Guardado’s poetry, through a women-centered perspective revives the element of prophecy of poesía comrprometida in the sense that it called for and noticed a greater solidarity between races that was already brewing the United States two years before it occurred in the most globally felt expression of the Black Lives Matter in the twenty first century. .

One of the other ways that these poets’ approach global feminist issues is by highlighting how women resisted during the Central American Civil wars and how they behaved, much like I have already presented in Zamora’s “Mom Responds to her Shaming.” In Matria, Lytton Regalado writes “La vecina,” a piece that might be described as a creative testimonial because it is appropriated from a living testimonial subject yet poeticized in a creative fashion in a similar form of several testimonial poems by Alegría and Dalton. The premise of this piece is that a female testigo recalls the time of the Salvadoran armed conflict of the mid 1970s through the 1980s. This witness poem logically fits in this time period because of the mention of Father Tavo, or Octavio Ortíz, a

Salvadoran diocesan priest. Originally from Morazán, he was assassinated on January 20th, 1979 when national guardsmen entered El despertar retreat in San Antonio Abad, San Salvador. Four other youths were killed with him, while 46 others were arrested. Though no complete

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investigation was undertaken, Father Tavo was allegedly involved in communist activity, encouraging peasants to take up arms against the Salvadoran right-winged military.65

About the historicity of this poem, this testimonial serves as a reminder to the readers that in El Salvador, Catholicism was once political. This piece breaks her silence on Liberation Theology, that poses a discontinuity with Cardenal and Debravo’s approach to this topic, because it does not attempt to construct an expression of full Liberation Theology ideology. The focus is on the forms and causes of violence in twentieth century El Salvador, as embodied in the testimony of women who lived through this era, whereby the retelling of a Salvadoran war story from a femenine perspective portrays the valor of women during this time, and the important, even heroic roles they played. As the text makes clear, the Salvadoran armed conflict and its causalities infiltrated the home, not only the battlefield. In a continuity with Alegría, “La vecina” illustrates how the private and the public tend to merge in Central American poetry written by women, a merging that tends to be quite sociopolitical. At the end of the day, it has also infiltrated Salvadoran collective memory, and as exemplified by the work of those diasporic poets who spent most of their youth in the hostland, it becomes a way for them to understand their country and its present state.

Another portrayal of women in wartimes and the power of their testimonies, is Guardado’s

“This Burning Earth,” a poem that again uses the archive and repertoire. Found in section I of

Endeavor, the text recalls Salvadoran collective memory through the use of a female centered documental poem that expresses politically charged boundary maintenance. In the process, the text demonstrates one way that U.S. diasporic Salvadorans stand both outside and inside the hostland national time and space, as they remember home in diverse ways (Gilroy). Making use of the Salvadoran Civil War archive, the poetic speaker’s expression of women-centered

65 See the documentary, The Last Journey of Monseñor Romero, A Year of Reckoning, Poets and Prophets of Resistance)

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diasporic consciousness fragments the notion of U.S. homogenous national time, as this critical facet of Salvadoran collective memory repeats in a contemporary poem written in English and

Spanish. Structurally, it is the only in its section specifically set outside of the United States and outside of the twenty-first century, in which one of the largest right-wing-led civilian massacres took place. This historicized poem stands out in this section of Endeavor, because it implicates one consequence of U.S. funding of right-wing Salvadoran military during that time, in an effort to control any “communist activities.” The poem’s archival quality written in the text’s epigraph

“dedicated to Rufina Amaya—December 11, 1981,” invites the reader to critically explore or revisit this often-silenced history in U.S. history books and recent news coverages of the Central

American caravans. Its traumatic action incurs the sheer terror of what happened in El Salvador, as one result of the U.S’s financial involvement, through the dramatic gestures and flashbacks of the poem’s protagonist Rufina Amaya, the sole survivor of El Mozote Massacre (Brewer;

Guardado 27). The framing of Amaya’s testimonial, however, is more than a wartime memory.

Rather, it is a testament to women’s empowerment because the poem emphasizes that Rufina continued to testify about her whole town being massacred, including her husband and her children, despite the fact that her testimony was openly questioned by U.S. and Salvadoran officials. It was not until 1992 that the massacre was verified, upon exhumation of the victim’s skeletal remains. This back-story in itself is an illustration of Amaya’s feminist resilience in that she did not let fear drive her into silence, as she ceaselessly testified to what she had seen “for the rest of her life” (Guardado, 2017, p. 28). The use of this civil-war archive that centers on women’s resistance and testimony demonstrates the ways in which expressions of Central

American women-centered diasporic consciousness emphasizes war trauma, echoing Jean

Fisher’s idea in her powerful article “Diaspora, Trauma, and the Poetics of Remembrance,” that

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diasporic artists often use language to express generational trauma due to genocide or cultural dispossessions, as they reconstruct a body to be mourned when these disturbing historical acts have been largely muted in national discourse (192). From this perspective, Guardado’s poem recreates those 900 peasant bodies murdered in Mozote, so that they may be remembered and

(re)mourned in the twenty-first century.

From another theoretical perspective, this poem’s women-centered expression of diasporic consciousness is an example of Gilroy’s syncopated time. This is because the past is recounted as a way to remember the traumatic experiences that drive forced displacement.

(1993). This past can also be tied to the present injustices and marginalization that Central

Americans in the United States continue to encounter. Syncopated time in “This Burning Earth” is enunciated at the linguistic level with the use of present tense; a structure that shows the persistence of Salvadoran collective memories of war violence. From a diasporic point of view, it points to the ways that their civil war continues to mold the sociopolitical subjectivities of first and second generation Central American migrants in the United States. As such, the earth is not

“burnt” after the massacre, it is “burning”; the poem’s protagonist doesn’t close the eyes of the dead, she “closes eyes”; and the bombs don’t land, they are “landing” (28) In this “present-past,” the Mozote Massacre “prophetically restarts,” to borrow a phrase from Gilroy, with a focus on how a woman continues to bear witness. The endlessness of her testimony is signaled at the syntactic level by the lack of periods, in which the power of female testimony is embodied in the imagery of “bones beneath her feet/ spreading roots/still reaching/ like a child’s fingers…” (28).

Via metaphor Amaya’s testimony is linked with the spread of awareness about the silenced horrors of the Salvadoran Civil War. This connection is established through that likening of

Amaya’s testimonial to the “roots” that reach”; an openness quite distinct from how many

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diasporic Central Americans in the United States, who migrated during war-time or not long after, have tried to distance themselves from traumatic memories, and blend in with non-refugee

Latin American migrants or established dominant Latina/o groups (Arias). The notion that the memory is carried on within the child’s fingers, then, reflects the idea that it should and, most likely, will be carried on through Central American youth, even those who grow up in the diaspora, and have acquired new languages and cultures.

Considering feminism the “spreading of roots” functions as a metaphor for the diffusion of women’s testimony. This focus on the female Central American voice connects Guardado to the ways in which other millennial U.S. Central American diasporic writers are specifically using women’s stories to break the silence of this bloody past; a reflection that via expressions of diasporic consciousness effaced stories are retold, and new futures are imagined (Gilroy).

Though implicit in the poem, it seems as if one future imagined is that women’s stories and their heroic actions during the civil war will become points of reference for diasporic U.S. Central

Americans, displacing males as the central revolutionary and war-time heroes. So, when placed in context with other feminist poems of section I, such as “How Women Grieve” and “Your

Daughter Under the Weight of a Man,” the use of this female testimonial recounted in the present points to a larger narrative (p. 19; p. 21). As emphasized in the title, it stresses that injustices against women continue to scorch contemporary society. In this light, the poem urges women themselves, like Amaya did and the many poetic speakers of Endeavor do, to ceaselessly protest and bear witness to these injustices for a change to come in the now, and for those female bodies who continually fall victim to crimes of passion, sexual abuse, xenophobia, and senseless war crimes, to not only be (re)mourned, but to be afforded the justice that they deserve. In this sense, the present tense in this women-centered text shows that systematical societal injustice

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against women’s lives will continue to exist, and women themselves, can and must lean on other women’s experiences, stories, histories, traumas, and grief to gain strength to face their own endeavors as female subjects. As such, the line “only you can love you like this” in Guardado’s opening poem “How Women Grieve,” shows itself as the common thread of women -centered diasporic consciousness in Endeavor.

The last element of the gendering of diasporic consciousness that I will treat in this this chapter is how at the linguistic level, notions of patriarchy is undone. Last winter, I asked Lytton

Regalado to read me a poem so that I might hear its true sound. Perhaps its tradition, but I still believe that to know a poem’s true rhythm, is to hear it read aloud by the poet. After absenting for a few moments to retrieve the book, without a due, she began reading “La caña.” I wasn’t thrilled because it hadn’t been one of my favorites. For me, it didn’t seem to mean anything. It didn’t seem to have a “sociopolitical” message. Nevertheless, I was grateful to hear her read. Today, as I return to her poetry with a focus on diasporic language, I can almost kick myself for how wrong I had been.

How had I not known that the intricacies of language are where Lytton Regalado’s “sociopolitical message,” or at least the main one is found? The message is women in their struggles and in glories.

(“El Chandelier” 1). The message are those secrets of women’s survival of the chaos and sweetness that is motherhood (“Chabelita Clears the Table” 45). The message is how women are subjected to pain to bring life (“La Sandía” 66). The message are the emotional and physical ways that they cultivate life, whether their own, or the lives of their children (“La enfermera” 12; “La Moneda” 21;

“La Cachiporrista” 9). The message is how women can shape a landscape but never get painted on the canvas (“La ventana” 58). The message is how women or even la madre tierra may be metaphorically burned by the flames of patriarchy like a sugar cane field but continue to speak, even from the ashes, saying:

search the ashes, I am here, press my flesh,

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I stood aflame, cut me to the heart, until my veins run clear, sweet is my strength, grip my burnt stalks, throw me to the ground. I’ll never be yours. (“La caña,” 18) This message, nevertheless, is best captured at the level of language that can be characterized by its prose-like melodiousness, and delicate yet pungent diction laden with metaphor and detail. This language is used to tell stories about historical, mythical, dark-skinned, fair skinned, indigenous, young, diasporic, underprivileged, and “over-privileged” women and girls who all are connected to or live in El Salvador. Using these women-centered stories, and poems about other topics scattered about, Lytton-Regalado uses her diasporic language to undo notions of patriarchy buried within the

Spanish language itself through a strong sense of translation. To demonstrate this, I will focus on one poem “El Chandelier.” Beginning interlingually (Spanish and English occurring in the same semantic phrase) the poet presents an image of male domination upon female bodies: “We’re chained to El/chandelier” (1). Whereas “chandelier” isn’t written in italics, “El” is. This is a representation of the foreignness of male expectations for women’s behavior and women’s experiences. Whereas “chandelier” as an elegant object of adornment represents the limited role of women within this patriarchal framework. She is simply an adornment to the room, an object that emits light but is not expected to speak. After, Lytton Regalado adds to this enclosed vision of women, another symbol of the foreignness of this vision provided by male society, “ella, aquella— extra syllable…/the rib pulled from Él and Aquel.” This use of language begins to deconstruct a very

Christian vision of women’s creation that suggests that the woman was created from the male and that she must obey and be a helpmate (see “Genesis” of the New American Standard Bible). Closing in on her take on the Salvadoran woman, the next stanza considers the collective pains mothers face, despite their differences in race, whereby the bilingual nature of the piece posits English and

Spanish on the same plane:

hasta la coronilla de rubias

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and the singular trigueña birthing strings of pearls from our splayed legs (1) Here, arises a discontinuity with poems about women’s experiences in twentieth century Central

American poesía comprometida because of the provocativeness of the image of the woman’s spread legs. That is, birth isn’t only portrayed like in Debravo’s Milagro abierto, but an in-your-face image of pain that connects Salvadoran women of all colors. In stanza III, diasporic movement back to the homeland comes into play, as the poet presents images of Salvadoran marketplaces that buzz with

“roadside flies” that are “no deterrent to bears, moose, and deer/the woodland creatures of our new North” (1). The “New North” represents the diasporic speaker’s movement back to the homeland to which she has maintained her father’s English tongue but now explores elements of her mother’s tongue in relation to female experiences and identities. Stanza IV turns to an intimate image of the home and religious figures erected therein to protect women from “chingalavista demons of the second tier” (1). Here, “chingalavista,” is a play on words that creates a singular semantic word out of a Spanish derogatory phrase. Thus, in a similar way to Guardado’s attacks against men who violate women, the language is dirty and provocative, a far cry from the way that women are supposed to express themselves.66 In stanza V, the poetic voice turns to images of

Salvadoran violence and the state of the Central American economy that she connects to the image of the chandelier; a symbol that the New Salvadoran woman or, perhaps, Salvadoran women throughout history, have never been delicate objects because they have always had to deal with violence and imperialism.

In Carabela de Colon sails across the ceiling, the chandelier’s first lights, glinting off Glocks the color of coqui

66 See “To All the Women You Say You Love” (20) and “Your Daughter Beneath the Weight of a Man” (21).

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and quetzal, lapis lazuli (1) Using quetzal and Colón, she represents Guatemalan currency and Salvadoran currency (now replaced with the U.S. dollar) and alludes to Spanish colonialism, an illustration that women in El

Salvador must grapple with the broken economy and the violence. In stanza VI, she returns to her translation of the Spanish language itself which she posits as a form of linguistic women’s repression. However, she does not only attack the words at their semantic value, but the sounds that they make when pronounced, a metaphor of expected societal roles of women:

Even the neuter objects prefer the male “O”: esto, eso, aquello, ello—knotted brows, thrusted lips pushed the air out—not the “A” of ella that pulls back, the first note of pain (1) Hence the sound of the masculine-feminine changes inherent in the Spanish language seems to push men into the public sphere and relegate women to the private sphere, one that is as painful as it is estranging. In stanza VII, she employs time-lapse to demonstrate that this language brought to

Central America by the conquistadores is riddled with racism that began to create in the “darker ones,” a slave mentality in which they began to hate themselves and long for sameness with the

“pale-faced conquerors of corn-silk hair.” Thus, La Malinche, Hernan Cortez’s translator, is shown as the one who let in domination via the translation, making way for the generation of a backward attitude of self-hate and rejection of the indigenous self. To represent this colonial mentality, Lytton

Regalado employs radical bilingualism (an excerpt that demands a bilingual reader) in italics, a metaphor of this intrusive thinking that continues to stain Central American racial thought:

mothers sway like palms over their golden cradles, malinchistas, ¿mi bebe? mire pues, es lindo, blanquito, y parece que, en cierta luz, sus ojos se ven azules (2)

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This stanza attacks those women who put whiteness on a pedestal due to continued colonial thinking. In stanza’s VIII and IX, the poem takes a turn linguistically when she refers to those feminine words that break the rules:

And regarding el tema on how El is to end in “O”, La is to end in “A” there is this… el drama—some have broken the rules

el problema is that these crossed over— el día, el aroma, el agua, el poema. el idioma— el chandelier’s edge of lake, mineral smell of still water. (2) Here, word choice in Spanish is crucial. The poet uses oppositional words, and then words that are necessary for human existence such as, the water, the day, and language—a nod to the centrality of women in society. These words function as metaphors of those liminal spaces of womanhood that that make up chandelier’s border. In stanza IX, Lytton Regalado again turns to the intricacies of the patriarchal language “rule-breakers” to represent women’s leadership in society and their leadership during migration, that simultaneously begets human life and leads Central American diaspora:

And because the “A” stood at the front with a glint in her eye el águila el ala also sailed across the border— even el alma (2) This stanza demonstrates that even within the language of the conquerors –which seems to solidify women’s repression and submission to patriarchy— one can find room for change. One can find, with careful translation, those who break the rules through movement across borders or

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metaphysical movement within the soul. This represents the poets’ women-centered diasporic consciousness, as I signaled in analysis of “La 222lluvia.”

In the last stanzas, XIV and XV, the poet uses multilingualism and translation to present some ways in which Salvadoran women can begin to change this seemingly unmovable repression found in the very language that they speak. As such, she presents linguistic rule breakers as symbols of women’s writing and solidarity among feminine subjects—two methods of women’s liberation from el chandelier:

But, O, O, O, la mano is a raised hand— eagle-eyed, her words sweep across the white page: when there is more than one La we reclaim las aguas, las alas, las almas (2-3) At the linguistic level, “La” isn’t italicized. This LA represents the writing woman, the woman with voice and agency, the woman who no longer accepts containment in the box of patriarchy.

Furthermore, this LA is a call for female solidarity and the multiplication of voices who will redefine what it means to be a woman and a Central American woman in the twenty first century. Only in this way, the poem suggests, will women in El Salvador begin to squash colonialism and semi- forced diaspora (las aguas), break into new position is society (las alas), and become more than mere adornments (las almas).

Though poetas comprometidos who spoke of female experiences like Alegría and Dalton were beginning to use hybrid language to talk about femininity and feminism, neither was quite as linguistically radical and thematically provocative as Lytton Regalado is here. In part, this is due to her diasporic condition as one who speaks with both her U.S. American father’s tongue and her

Salvadoran American mother’s tongue; as one who has returned to the Matria after growing up in

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the hostland; and as a new mestiza woman who has begun to translate women’s experiences in the homeland via a hybrid cultural lens that is transtemporal and transnational. This poem, then, might be seen at code to break the others and an exemplification of the politized implications of her diasporic language as it related to femininity, feminism, and women-centered experiences in

Central America and perhaps beyond.

In another take on feminized language of the diaspora, we can recall an earlier poem by

Oliva Corado cited in chapter III, whereby the poet has called irregular migrants “los del siempre yes sir, los del siempre yes ma’am.” However, a closer look at her diasporic language evidence quite the contrary. This is because the poetic voice who speaks in the homeland language demonstrates that each irregular migrant, especially women, are depicted as intellectual beings who have something important to say; and they bring their cultures, ideologies, trauma, language, and identities to the hostland; a contribution that should be valued whether they have legal documentation or not. In this way, her diasporic language is a language of (re)humanization of the irregular migrant women via illustrations of their nostalgia, their intellect, and their pain

Nosotras, las que nos fuimos de las verdes montañas en los enlodados caminos las que dejamos más que un sollozo el perpetuo silencio ahogado en un pozo aquel profundo abismo del adiós (“Las que no fuimos” Destierro 81). The focus on the centrality of women’s experiences in diasporic poetry in this section is one of the most prolific discontinuities with this investigation’s sampling of poesía comprometida so far. Even more, this analysis of the poems contained in this chapter demonstrates each poet’s desire to not only reconstruct women’s experience in the diaspora from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, but their need to delineate the roots of their very displacement and show the intricacies of

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their social struggles and glories, whereby their poems reverberate over and again what Guardado writes after her poetic voice reveals that she is unable to have children:

I will not procreate. I am not here for what you say I’ve come here for but there are others willing to carry the burden of our survival. (103)

Like all the poems explored here, demarginalize the woman, and at the same time shows that her significance in humanity goes beyond procreation. Curiously, this focus on women in this collective of diasporic poets of Central American descent echoes the fundamental role of women in Central

American indigenous symbology, from which was created many systems of measurement, verification, and direction used to understand the world; a Morales-Santos “Un rostro 171). In this light, one might not think of their gendering of women’s experiences as a progressive move forward, but a revalorization of native thought.

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Chapter VI Conclusions

¿Cuál country? Cualquiera. Call Mama my motherland because no land ever been matria to me. I am citizen of her hearth. If they ask what I got in my bag, know it’s a hunger hotter than your sauce. Mama once ate a country built by gods. ¿Wanna find out what I can fit in my mouth?

- Willy Palomo, Manuscript, Wake the Others: A Biography of my Motherland

Based on this dissertation’s original hypothesis and the analysis conducted in previous chapters, I can conclude that the diasporic conditions of the main corpus of poets under study greatly influence their revival of Central American poesía comprometida written between the 1940s and 1980s. As such, diaspora and hybridity impact the continuities and discontinuities between their poetic production and that of the previous generations of poetas comprometidos who are also considered here. However, the continuities and discontinuities illustrated in this dissertation are also affected by other factors, such as the differences in historical times between them, the familiarity of the poets with the writers of the previous generation, the personal attitudes of the writers, and the general differences and similarities between the sociopolitical conditions, ideologies, and cultures of the homeland and the hostland. Whereas the impact of the diverse diasporic conditions of the main corpus of writers on their sociopolitically engaged poetry is highly evidenced and identifiable through the diasporic hybridity method of analysis employed in this investigation. Whereas, the impact of diaspora and hybridity on the continuities and discontinuities

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between the poetry of the main corpus and that of the previous generation are less stable as it is influenced by other factors.

In the case of Cynthia Guardado, her diasporic condition as a second-generation Salvadoran born in the United States affects her poetry in many ways. Because of her bi-nationality and frequent travel from the hostland to the homeland, her poetry touches on both U.S. and Salvadoran sociopolitical issues such as race relations, violence against women, Salvadoran history, U.S. history, and the present and past sociopolitical state of both countries. As a diasporic subject, she is also concerned with physical and psychological borders, the memories of her ancestors, and the triangular relationships between El Salvador, the United States, and the self. Through time lapse, her poetic voice demonstrates the continued effects of colonialism on race relations in the United

States and the continuance of violence in El Salvador. To aesthetically express time lapse, she often employs the archive and the repertoire, with documentary, witness, and conversational poems.

Furthermore, via the notion of the new mestiza consciousness and la facultad her poetic voice lets the reader accompany her on her many journeys to reconnect with her indigenous and Salvadoran roots. Throughout her quest for identity rooting, she identifies, critiques, and outrightly denounces those roots that are still very much connected with ideologies of patriarchy and colonialism. This search for and embrace of certain facets of indigeneity in Guardado’s work, also demonstrate multi- temporal heterogeneity in El Salvador today.

This investigation has also considered the poet’s gendering of the diasporic experience that focuses on the trauma and hope involved with Salvadoran women’s migration from El Salvador to the United States as a result of the Civil War; their livelihoods and behaviors during this war; and politicized facets of their diaspora in the receiving country. In this way, as time-traveler’s, the author’s poetic voices go back in time to demonstrate the negotiations her mother and female ancestors have had to make regarding diaspora from Central America. Of irregular migrant women experiences in the United States, her poetry suggests that “undocumented” women are often

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afforded less judicial protection because of their migrant status and their being women. Likewise, she reiterates the otherness that irregular migrant women face in the work force as low paid laborers.

This dissertation has also analyzed how Guardado’s poetic language is affected by her diasporic condition. In Guardado’s poetry of the diaspora, one encounters a writer whose diasporic language is influenced by the point of enunciation of the poetic speaker. In this way, those poems written mostly from the perspective of El Salvador, employ more Spanish and expressions of bilingualism; center more on Salvadoran sociopolitical issues; and present the communication between diasporic subjects like her poetic speaker (who has been raised abroad)— and those who never left the country. Likewise, those poems in Endeavor, written from the U.S. perspective, focus more on U.S. sociopolitical problems. Nonetheless, El Salvador and the Salvadoran people presence themselves, albeit with less frequency. As a diasporic writer born in the United States, but strongly connected to her Salvadoran roots, her poetry expresses a contrapuntal vision. Unlike traditional contrapuntal vision, the old ways of life and expressions in the new environment occur with and not always against the memory of the old. All these elements merge to form her dynamic diasporic consciousness, which concerns itself more so with the roots of her homeland’s people than with their migratory routes since she seems to always be engaged in a search for a deeper rooting in El

Salvador, but not without a critique of the patriarchal systems that continue to exist there.

For Alexandra Lytton Regalado, a writer who lived in the homeland until she was four, moved to Miami, Florida, grew up there, and then returned to El Salvador to raise a family, this investigation has revealed the many ways that this diasporic condition affects her poetry. For instance, going back to the homeland and becoming a mother at the same time represented a change in her poetry from the apolitical to the sociopolitical with a focus on women, motherhood, violence, history, and language. Though many of her poems focus on El Salvador, there is also a going back to the U.S. space, especially when speaking about her memories as a youth and as a girl

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who faced ostracism because of her indigenous features. Despite this “going back” to memories of the hostland, Matria is more about the choque of the diasporic subject— who has been living away for many years in a rather peaceful environment—with the violence and women’s oppression in El

Salvador. However, she returned to her ancestral homeland with both her father’s (English) and her mother’s tongue (Spanish), causing her implementation of both languages, which each carry their own ideologies and expressive forms to translate her homeland again as an adult who has been thrust into the sociopolitical via the birth of her first child that sent her “searing into her gender.”

This change in her sociopolitical consciousness causes her to turn towards the Salvadoran women of the homeland who help her survive the newness of it all, both within her own body and in her exterior environment. In sum, due to her diasporic condition Matria is a collection of shock and awe, of feeling both like and unlike one’s ethnic compatriots. This difference suggests that

Salvadoran women of the diaspora and the homeland should begin to unite and learn from each other despite their socioeconomic and racial differences. This, for Lytton Regalado, represents the unification of the relationship between those who have gone and those who have stayed. In this regard, she writes lovingly: “O Salvadoran woman, who is me/ and yet not me, /we travel/beneath a mantel of white” (Lytton Regalado, “Oda a la Matria” 86).

Theoretically, I have treated the ways in which her poems use time lapse to trump the discourse that in El Salvador neoliberal development has brought peace to the region. Her time lapse, however, questions itself in the act of representation because of her socioeconomic distance from the violence via notions of precarity. I have also emphasized her use of the archive to create some of her poems that directly relate to violence and her appropriation of testimonies of real women to produce creative testimonials that are underpinned by present and past sociopolitical

Salvadoran realities. Moreover, this investigation has found many expressions of the new mestiza consciousness in her work in that she employs indigenism to explore issues of identity, reconstruct patriarchal visions of womanhood to feminist visions, and express the many consequences of

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colonialism on Salvadoran sociopolitical realities of the past and present. Next, I illustrated how her poetic vision of third space and borderlands- la frontera demonstrates that her poems don’t usually claim to witness border crossing but demonstrate her diasporic consciousness of clandestine

Salvadoran diaspora. In this way, in otherwise joyous poems such as “La mano” and “La Lluvia” the perilous journey that diasporic Salvadorans often engage in today and the reasons that they migrate interrupt them, whereby poems like these mark the dichotomy between pain and pleasure of Lytton Regalado’s’ revival of poesía comprometida in which she repeatedly admits that she is a privileged member of high class society, but one who also wants to reach out to the people, especially underprivileged women and girls because she cares about their struggles and learns how to survive in El Salvador as a mother through them. The other important element about Lytton

Regalado’s poetry is her diasporic language which can be characterized as a minimally multilingual

(English/Spanish) language that attempts to unfasten images, notions, and conceptualizations of womanhood and girlhood through the use of a linguistic woman-centered poetics that attacks the patriarchal elements of the Spanish language itself that she perceives as rooted in colonialism.

As a homeland returnee, her diasporic consciousness represents a solidarity with the femenine struggles of Salvadoran women who must grapple with the economic crisis, political, sexual, and gang violence; lack of political voice; semi-forced diaspora; and the joys and crisis that come with motherhood. It also represents a shock and awe of the ideologies and actualities of a homeland country which touts two seasons of “thrive and survive” (“Oda a la matria ”86).

Throughout the collection, this investigation has illustrated that Lytton-Regalado attempts to translate this “thrive or survive”, “trauma-hope,” “violence-peace,” atmosphere in which she finds herself feeling like, but not quite like her compatriots. Nevertheless, her poetic voice is portrayed to walk alongside them, aunque sea de una forma invisible (“Oda a la Matria” 86). Because this collection often illustrates the poet’s desire to (re)ground herself in the homeland as a diasporic subject via observation, the sociopolitical focus is more on roots than on routes of contemporary

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Salvadoran life, politics, and cultures in which she revives the confessional, experimental, and collage style of the poetas comprometidos with a focus on linking the personal with the political as

Alegría did.

About Ilka Oliva Corado’s diasporic condition and its effect on her sociopolitical poetry, this investigation has emphasized that her status as an irregular adult female migrant from Guatemala is of great influence. Her poetry centers on the pains of deterritorialization, the nostalgia she feels for the homeland, and some positive aspects of her reterritorialization within the U.S. hostland.

However, because she grew up between the rural environment of La Comapa, Jutiapa and the urban environment of Peronia with very little economic resources, the nostalgia contained in her poetic production includes the pains of the urban workers, campesinos, and child laborers of the homeland. I have used diasporic-hybridity theories such as third-space and borderlands-la frontera to portray and analyze her focus on semi-forced diasporic movements from Central America and beyond, as a reflection of the ways in which her poetry demonstrates that diasporic consciousness grounded in begins before travel.

Specifically regarding the theories of third-space and borderlands-la frontera, this investigation has demonstrated the ways in which her poetry witnesses several third spaces of diaspora such as the Sonora-Arizona desert and La bestia which testifies and documents the violence and uncertainty that migrants face in route which, in turn, commence another developmental phase of their diasporic consciousness, whereby they begin to note their dehumanization as a result of their subjection— in route to the hostland—to a web of clandestine and governmental power structures and individuals that involves coyotes, drug smugglers, white vigilantes, and Border Patrol. The actions of these groups and individuals toward migrants illustrate Oliva Corado’s recurrent notions of the silenced war of the deserts, in which the migrant is stripped of voice, humanity, and even life itself; a war that is by no means unique to Central

America.

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Next, in connection to third space/ borderlands-la frontera, her poems attest to the tense and sentimental relationships that occur within the diaspora space post-frontera, such as those that transpire between those who have left the homeland and those who stayed, and between the migrants and those subjects who consider themselves native to a region. As a consequence, her poetry describes elements of the life of the migrant after he/she crosses the border and begins anew in the hostland, a place she describes as unwelcoming to and exploitative of the migrant’s precarious sociopolitical positioning. Her descriptions, critiques, and denouncement of irregular migrant life in the diaspora do not end there. As this investigation has demonstrated through the way she embodies the notion of metaphoricity through a telluric centered style, like González did, to illustrate the beauty of the Guatemalan landscape and the pains of the regions most marginalized subjects that remain alive in the diasporic subject’s consciousness long after she has left home. This reflective remembering fuses with the trauma of the bloodied borderlands which she describes as a place of ghosts and corrupt powerful men and women who often act violently and exploitatively as they mediate the movements of Central American men, women, and children.

Furthermore, this investigation has analyzed her gendering of the femenine diasporic experience via her many poems that deal with the sexual abuse and femicide of women in route and the pains that these senseless deaths exercise on the women who stayed in the homeland. It also elucidates the pain of those mothers who leave their children behind to migrate. In relation to this, her poetry describes the emptiness that the disappearances of female migrants in route or their absence from the homeland have on their mothers and other female family members in the homeland. Likewise, this study considered the ways in which migrant women cope with exploitation and even abuse by their employers in the hostland, an abuse that the author connects to a resurgence of the colonial system of slavery in the United States through time-lapse. Another facet of this investigation regarding Oliva Corado’s diasporic condition, is her diasporic language.

Written in Spanish, I have emphasized how it remains connected to a Spanish speaking audience, a

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characteristic that allows her poetry to dialogue with the homeland from the hostland and other

Spanish speaking migrants in the U.S. diaspora. I also have discussed the ways in which it reflects on its purpose and the people it speaks for and about, a marked continuity between her poetry and the meta-poetic writing of the poetas comprometidos of the previous generation. Moreover, I have reiterated its political character in the U.S. context because it demonstrates that Spanish is a language of creation and intellectual thought rather than simply a language of labor belonging to the dispossessed, in which its political revival of poesía comprometida because it calls for a stop to the violence against migrants in route and their exploitation in the hostland. In this way, via her diasporic language, one can trace diasporic routes and roots with a centering on the pains of deterritorialization and the gains of reterritorialization, as a diasporic subject who left home, already deeply rooted in her sense of Guatemalan identity. As a result of this focus on routes, her poetry often revives similar styles of the poetas comprometidos of this investigation, such as the documental, testimonial confessional, and person poem. Her poetry borders traditional verse in its recurrent employment of melodic rhyme patterns and musical lyricism, in which her work embodies Lemke’s notion of diasporic aesthetic as it takes the reader’s gaze on several diasporic routes via the use of a plurality of poetic voices. Through this dissertation’s diasporic hybridity methodological approach to Oliva Corado’s poetry, one finds that diasporic consciousness isn’t stable, but is always in the process of renewal and transformation

Javier Zamora’s work is also focused on routes. As a once unaccompanied minor who passed nineteen years in the United States as an irregular migrant, his poetic production offers a window into his diasporic consciousness. This consciousness centers on the pains of leaving the country that he loved behind, only to be faced with a life very different than the one he had dreamed about.

His pains of uprooting were only doubled because he could not return and felt isolated because of culture shock and the trauma that he was subjected to during his clandestine migratory route. As a result, his poetry illustrates feelings of emotional distance from his parents and those counselors

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who tried to help him overcome his agony of losing his language, a close relationship with his grandma, and the comfort of El Salvador. Regarding diasporic hybridity, this investigatory analysis of his work has focused on time lapse, syncopated time, third-space/borderland-la frontera, diasporist art aesthetic, metaphoricity, and the gendering of diasporic women’s experience and memory.

Via time lapse, this investigation has emphasized how his work subverts the master narrative of peace in El Salvador. Whereas with syncopated time, his poetic temporality stops and restarts in the Salvadoran Civil War to better understand the present state of the region which he continues to characterize as a war zone that keeps Salvadorans on the move. To do this, he creates poetry, not so much as from the archive, but via from his family members. Osuna has called this passing down of war time and migratory memories from Central American/Mexican parents to their children “obstinate transnational memories” (77). It is during the instances of syncopated time that repeat and recreate war time experiences that reflect women’s repressions under patriarchal ideologies and male domination via person poems. He also writes about women’s valor during this same period and the normalcy of disappearances and massacres that occurred during the twentieth century isthmian history. His approach to the Salvadoran Civil War via memories, histories, and oral testimonies also indicates the tensions between family members who had different political affiliations. One last vital element to his syncopated poetics of the Salvadoran

Civil War is how he revives a notion of Central American poetic exteriorism to name the people involved. In this naming, he (re)criminalizes both the right-wing political parties of El Salvador and those U.S. presidents and organizations that supported the war such as the School of the Americas in a way that revives Cardenal’s notion of exteriorism. This is important because it connects to

Zamora’s belief that the remnants of this war drive clandestine Salvadoran diaspora. In this way, his revival of poesía comprometida presents many similarities with the poetas comprometidos because he wants to raise awareness about it and demonstrate who he perceives as the bad guys.

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Nevertheless, his focus is on women’s experiences during the era, the diaspora it created, and not the grand narratives of renowned political figures, but on everyday heroes who never made it to the pages of history. This focus represents a break with los poetas comprometidos that I have studied here.

About metaphoricity, this investigation has delineated the ways in which Zamora’s poetic voice, that like Alegría’s is inextricable connected to the real writer, carries pleasant memories of the homeland in and through the hostland language. Via this language, it has been observed that these memories are mostly pleasant because of his age when he left. That is, he was too young to have been fully conscious of the country’s sociopolitical ailments. This investigation has also discussed how his poetry expresses metaphoricity to deconstruct the notion of the resplendent U.S. nation, replacing it with elements of migration such as work-permits and passports (From

DissemiNation”). At this point, the reader might recall Zamora’s opening poem in which he expresses “pressing roses into fake passports/ for each year” he hasn’t been able “to climb marañon trees”; an illustration of his revival of poesía comprometida that disrupts the horizontal idea of the

U.S. nation because of the presence of irregular migrants who contribute to the nation, but still live in fear of deportation, face political anti-immigrant backlash, live on low-wages, and are denied the right to vote or have any political say (“to abuelita Neli” 3). In this light, the sense of doubled writing in his diasporic poetry illustrates that the nation as narrated from a diasporic position tends to be vertical and heterogenous rather than homogenous and stable “creating evidences of the liminality of cultural modernity and the overall temporal quality of nationalism” (From

DissemiNation”). In sum, Zamora’s uses of metaphoricity transits between cultural formation and sociopolitical processes in the United States and El Salvador without a centered logic, whereby his work concerns itself with the scattering of the Salvadoran peoples in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a reflection of Kitaj’s principal characteristic of diasporist art. Zamora’s revival of poesía

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comprometida presents continuities and discontinuities with poetas comprometidos because of its focus on semi-forced diaspora and the historical and present reasoning behind this diaspora.

Regarding borderlands/la-frontera, Zamora’s poetic voice witnesses the trauma involved in irregular migration of children and alludes to sexual and physical violence along the way.

Furthermore, via exteriorism he humanizes those migrants that the poetic voice encounters in route to the United States by calling them by their names and telling their stories in a manner that is often irreverent and crude. Furthermore, the implications of diasporic routes in his poems indicate negative aspects of deterritorialization such as the loss of language that begins to distance the poetic voice from those in the diaspora space who have stayed behind and other monolingual ethnic kin. They also portray positive aspects, such as the reunion with his mother and other family members in the hostland. Via his revival of the collage, the confessional , the testimonial, the documental, and the exteriorist poem often employed by this investigation corpus of poetas comprometidos, Zamora’s poetry of the diaspora sends each reader’s gaze in route via a riotous and irreverent poetic language that is interlingual and multilingual with a few instances of radical bilingualism. In this way, the many aesthetic continuities between Zamora’s’ work and Daltons’ illustrate that his revival of this poetic movement isn’t only casual but meditated. Regarding his rage against U.S. immigration politics and the losses caused by the Civil War, his language is irreverent and provocative and uses many Spanish words and phrases with a centering on exteriorism and testimonial. Whereas the hostland language he uses to transpose the memories of home via metaphoricity are very symbolic and aesthetically pleasing. By extension, his reflections on homeland language acquisition and loss tend to point to the pains of deterritorialization. Via the diasporic hybridity methodology, this investigation gathered many observations that point to the ways in which Zamora’s diasporic conditions impacts the nuances of his sociopolitically engaged revival of poesía comprometida

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Overall for this corpus of diasporic poets, the notion and practice of witness and testimony continue to be as important for them as it was for the writers of poesía comprometida during the

1940s to the 1980s. Like the poetas comprometidos, their poems of witness and testimony come from oral histories, the archive (newspapers, history books, and other forms of official media), and from firsthand-experiences, such as Zamora’s and Oliva-Corado’s poeticized testimonies of their routes to the United States. Nevertheless, because of the shift from Central American twentieth century war-related violence and politics to twenty-first century post-war , gang-related violence

(that some have characterized as remnants of the war) and semi-forced displacement, the contemporary corpus’s witness and testimonial poems lean more towards these issues. Despite this difference between these two groups, one still cannot call this a blunt discontinuity because as noted in chapter II, writers like Dalton and González were already beginning to write about semi- forced diaspora from Central America but with a greater focus on the consequences of exile.

By contrast, a continuity between each groups’ approach to testimonial or witness poetry, is that they both write about the destruction and loss of human life as a result of revolutions, wars, and genocide. But because of their diasporic condition and place in time, the testimonies written by the diasporic poets of Central American descent normally derive from the history books and the oral, written, and visual testimonies of their family members and others who have lived it in the flesh with some evidence of lived experiences of Post-War conditions like I analyzed in Lytton-

Regalado’s “Hombres de maíz: Variations on a Mayan Creation Story.” Likewise, their testimonial and witness poems of war center more so on women’s experiences with a focus on the unsung heroes and witnesses rather than on specific revolutionary figures and heroes such as Sandino.

Regarding other sociopolitical themes, many of them remain the same while others are starkly different because of the impacts of diaspora and hybridity. Regarding class-consciousness, both corpuses emphasize solidarity with the exploited laborers and the campesinos; the displaced or exiled; and the peoples about the world who face inequalities because of their race or class. Like the

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poetas comprometidos, they do this via person, documental, conversational, lyrical, experimental, and exteriorist poems. Whereas some of the authors of the previous generation, especially del Valle,

Debravo, and González, also relied on traditional structures such as the sonnet and other poems of structured rhyme and syllabic numbering. As noticeable in the poems of the contemporary corpus analyzed here, this traditional approach to poetic verse has notably decreased although the notion of the epic poem has remained, especially in documental or testimonial poems about migration.

In another perspective of testimonial poetry, the contemporary collectives’ poems, especially those by Guardado, evidence an increased expression of contrapuntal awareness or, as

Dubois would say, a double consciousness that generates a deeper focus on the sociopolitical issues that continue to plague the United States. Though writers like Alegría and González were beginning to point out U.S. racism and socioeconomic class disparities, as well as physical violence against underprivileged and people of color in the United States and in other parts of the world, this was not their focus.67 For instance, Guardado’s increased focused on the U.S.’s sociopolitical woes with a focus on racism and classism is more highlighted than in the work of the poetas comprometidos who seemed to focus more on the U.S’s capitalistic or imperialistic power and its consequences in the isthmus.

In terms of feminism, the poetry of the diasporic corpus demonstrates continuities with the poetas comprometidos I have investigated because of their enunciations of women’s paid and unpaid labor, their interest in women’s roles in society as leaders, their critique of sexual exploitation of women and, as in the case of Alegría, their centering on the nuances of motherhood and women’s intellectualism that tend to link the personal and political via the confessional poem approach. Of the latter, Despite these continuities, the diasporic poets that I have investigated present more combative femenine poetic speakers who stand up to patriarchy via irreverent

67 See González’s “Negro Johnson” translated by Rachel Laughridge and revisit Alegrías “American Way of Death,” found in Chapter II of this dissertation.

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language and speak openly of the pains women and girls encounter in the homeland and the hostland because of sexual violence and economic instabilities that obligate them to make tough decisions about tradition and family. For instance, in Guardado’s poem directed towards sexual abusers of any woman she writes in a conversational tone,

…You’ll get close enough for her to feel your misogynist breath, you’ll whisper in her ear how you’d like to fuck her. She is your mother, forced open by the crown of your head. You enter the world like this: soaked in love and blood (20). Feminist poems such as these represent a far cry from what the poetas comprometidos were doing, regarding their writings of femenine experiences and feminism. In terms of feminism and female experiences, another difference between these two groups of dynamic poets is that the diasporic corpus focuses more on the nuances of women’s diasporic movement, their pains of displacement, and how they must negotiate systems of patriarchy in the hostland, in the homeland, and in route.

About indigenism, the poems of the diasporic poets also express continuities and discontinuities with the textual corpus of poesía comprometida. Beginning with the discontinuities, their poetry, especially those that arise because of notions of the new mestiza consciousness, tends to expresses indigeneity within. By this, I mean that they seek to trace the indigenous roots within themselves rather than openly denounce the exploitation of the indigenist subject. This is because as diasporic subjects concerned with roots, they see indigenist ideology as a part of their homeland identity. I have most noted this pattern via poetic analysis of Lytton Regalado and Guardado that expresses their self-assumption of indigenist ancestry within the self as one strategy to fully realize themselves as Central American women. In contrast, Oliva Corado’s approach to indigeneity is implied in her poetic language. Therefore, when she speaks of indigenist exploitation, struggle, and resistance, it is usually implied by her use of the word campesinos, figures that she connects with

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indigenous identity. Nevertheless, if one approaches indigeneity from the perspective of Mariátegui, one can deduce a subtler sense of indigeneity in the poetry of all these diasporic voices as heavily noted in the work of Jorge Debravo. These indigenists sentiments are underpinned by sociopolitical messages that illustrate the entanglement of splendor of the Central American land and the hideousness of its sociopolitical violence that are expressed in many poems of Alegría, González, del Valle, and Debravo. In a further, and more stable continuity with the diasporic poetry of poetas comprometidos such as González, Dalton, and del Valle, this investigation has found that the poets of the contemporary corpus deterritorialized the indigenist sentiment of earthly veneration to the hostland. 68

Considering anti-imperialism, the discontinuities between both corpora are more pronounced and heavily impacted by diaspora and hybridity, whereby in the diasporic poems, there is very little direct denouncement of imperialism. Notions of anti- imperialism are presented subtly in poems like Guardado’s “My mother’s story” and several of Zamora’s and Lytton-Regalado’s poems that refer to the presence of U.S. economic imperialism in El Salvador. Aesthetically, many of these poems that hint at U.S. imperialism employ the exteriorist, documental, person, or collage poem. In contrast to these subtle representations, Oliva Corado turns the tables on imperialism via her diasporic poetry of routes, in which her poetry demonstrates how the migrant is dehumanized as capital that can be exploited by the interests of U.S. companies and employers once in the hostland, whereby U.S. imperialism is shown to exercise its unmatched power on the migrant body, while forcing them to live all other aspects of their lives in the shadows. From this standpoint, diasporic poetry allows one to notice how U.S. imperialism isn’t only enacted outside of the United

States, but inside the region and on the backs of migrant labor. Lastly, about subtle anti-imperialist perspectives, the diasporic poets studied in this investigation symbolically demonstrate a rejection

68 See del Valle’s Nostalgia y belleza del amor.

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of imperialism at the level of language itself. Though radical bilingualism –in which neither language is shown to dominate the other—, their poetry seems to suggest anti-imperialism at the linguistic level. For Oliva Corado, her monolingual writings denounces U.S. anti-immigrant sentiment and humanizes the irregular migrant experience. At the same time, it rejects imperialism by the outright lack of desire by the author for acceptance by U.S. cultural mediums or literary circles, resulting in her many self-publishing endeavors. that communicate the true experiences one faces as an irregular migrant, a with the homeland that deconstructs the notion of the American

Dream.

Considering Liberation Theology, this investigation has noted a lack thereof in the diasporic poets of this corpus aside from the poetry of Guardado that suggests using Jesus’s life as an example so that one might protest the police violence against men and women of color in the United States.

Nonetheless, apart from Guardado, this corpus of diasporic poets doesn’t seem to attest to the notion that via Christianity sociopolitical transformation can and should occur. Nevertheless, these poets present in their poetry and in their lives other ways to fight injustice. Despite the lack of notions of Liberation Theology studies in chapter II, Oliva Corado and Zamora use religion to characterize the identity of the migrants and show that they carry their faith with them as they embark on the perilous migrant journey. In a similar vein, Lytton Regalado demonstrates in her creative testimonials that many Salvadoran women find strength to survive the normalcy of violence and economic struggles through their faith, whereby Christian ideologies are portrayed poetically as inherent tools of the Salvadoran people’s fight to survive and “to not long for the things of this world” (“Oda a la matria”86).

Regarding diaspora, hybridity, and notions of travel, the diasporic corpus of poets has a more developed hybrid language than noticeable in the poetry of Alegría, Cardenal, and Dalton because in the case of Guardado, Lytton Regalado, and Zamora, their diasporic condition has permitted them to be bilingual. Furthermore, their bilingualism is rooted in a deeper contrapuntal

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awareness by which they can use elements of each language with equally to point out sociopolitical realities of two countries at once. Another contrast in their poetry with that of poetas comprometidos like Dalton and Del Valle as a result of their diasporic conditions, is that their poetry doesn’t only concern itself with travel but with settling in a new country or (re)settling in the homeland. In this way, their poetry presents both the pains and gains related to settling and living in the diaspora such as, the loss of the homeland language; the acquisition of the hostland language; the tense and sentimental relationships with those subjects who share their diaspora space; and the modification or forfeiture of cultural traditions with a focus on women. Likewise, their poetry tends to express, like I analyzed in Alegría’s “Aquí también nací,” that their settling in the hostland doesn’t necessarily signify the complete loss of homeland cultural identity. Rather, it often takes on a sense of celebratory heterogeneity that manifests itself via metaphoricity and the new mestiza consciousness. Like Alegría, these diasporic poets may have been separated from the homeland, but their verdes se quedaron. In other words, their memories and constant remembrance of the homeland’s culture, ideologies, histories, environment, and their continuing concern for its sociopolitical conditions have not disappeared. These memories of home continually qualify them, as Safran would point out, as members of the diaspora. However, the heterogeneity or hybrid identities and awareness that they gain in the hostland and mix with those of the ancestral homeland, don’t remove them from the diaspora, but demonstrate how they are recreating notions of home while abroad. These differences are found in their diasporic language itself that emits either linguistic or thematic expressions of hybridity that consistently point to the culture, identity, and sociopolitical circumstances of two or more countries at once.

Considering poetic acts of going beyond issues of Central America and the United States, the poets of the diasporic corpora tend to focus on Central America and the United States in their sociopolitically engaged poetry. Unlike the poetas comprometidos, most of the contemporary poets investigated focus solely on sociopolitical issues of the present and past of Central America and the

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United States without any notion of political histories or figures elsewhere. By contrast, the work of

Oliva Corado does go beyond because of her diasporic condition, through poems that expresses solidarity with irregular migrants in Europe and in the Dominican Republic. But, like the other poets, there are very minimal references to revolutionary movements or leaders outside of Central

America or the United States, or other sociopolitical experiences therein. I think this discontinuity is impacted by their diasporic conditions in that one of the main struggles of the diasporic subject is to resist full assimilation to the hostland or the forgetting of the homeland (Clifford 255). Therefore, their interest is remembering their homeland’s histories and worrying about its present state in relation to “roots” and “routes.” In the process, their diasporic identity is hybridized as they acquire other sociopolitical concerns and cultural identities from the hostland such as Oliva Corado’s concern with U.S. homelessness in Invierno. Aesthetically, many poems of the diasporic collective that remember the homeland histories while elucidating social issues of the hostland use the collage poem, lyric poem, documental, and the confessional poem.

In terms of revolutionary ideology, the diasporic poets are not calling for armed revolution.

The closest affirmations to revolutionary action or sociopolitical protest is Oliva Corado’s poem that prophecies a coming rebellion among marginalized youth in Guatemala and in Guardado’s text that suggests that the poetic speaker must stand in solidarity with those who suffer police violence even if it costs her, her life. Still, this lack of poems that call to sociopolitical action via armed revolution against dictators, protests; or the development of Christian organizations who fight for the poor and conscientize rural people about their rights, does not mean that these contemporary poets aren’t engaging in important sociopolitical actions via their poetry and their unique modes of activism that often related to their diasporic conditions. Even without a call to revolution, their actions and writings are just as sociopolitically grounded as the poetic sampling of los poetas comprometidos.

About this, I would indicate Guardado’s consistent spoken word performances and talks in the Los

Angeles community that attempt to historicize the Central American experience and the reasons

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that people continue to migrate from there; Ilka Oliva Corado’s open blog Crónicas de una inquilina that presents essays about Central American irregular migrant experiences, racism, sexism, as well as poverty in Central America and beyond; Lytton-Regalado’s work at Kalina Press as an editor and translator who tries to publish more Salvadoran writers of the host and the homeland; and

Zamora’s transnational participation in the UndocuPoets and Our Parents’ Bones campaigns and the sharing of his work with other child migrants.69 Furthermore, this corpus should be deemed sociopolitically engaged poets because the very metaphoricity found in their work that attests to the pains and histories of the Central American diaspora, via a poetic creation that invites the reader to see the face of the other and to better understand the historical and contemporary causes of their precariousness. Regarding migration, their texts invite the reader to have mercy on Central

American diasporic subjects via a fuller understanding of their “roots” and their “routes.” Lastly, it shows itself to be a transnational and hybrid poetry, as it opens itself up to the sociopolitical realities of the hostland and the homeland in its endeavors to express the struggles of borders, feminism, class, race, and humanity.

This section of Central Americans in Movement has made clear that the diasporic condition of these poets plays an undeniable role in the content and aesthetic found in their sociopolitically engaged poetry and their dynamic revival of poesía comprometida. Although this investigation has delineated both continuities and discontinuities between this corpus of diasporic poets and the poetas comprometidos, I understand that many of these aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities could very well be connected to the differences of the times in which they are

69Undocupoets is a campaign to remove the stipulation of U.S. citizenship in U.S. based full-length poetry competition. The group has had successfully of eradicated many of these stipulations. For more information on Undocupoets see, https://www.siblingrivalrypress.com/undocupoets-fellowship/.Our Parent’s Bones is an international campaign to find the remains of the Disappeared in El Salvador. This campaign is led by Salvadoran- Americans who have survived the forced disappearance of a mother, a father, or both during El Salvador's civil war. For more information on Our Parents’ Bones, see http://www.ourparentsbones.org/es/.

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written and via other literary influences. Even though Zamora and Lytton Regalado clearly document their connection with Dalton and Alegría, it is also known that many other poets have influenced them. Whereas with Guardado and Oliva Corado, it isn’t as easy to know of their familiarity with the poetas comprometidos investigated here. As such, I cannot say with surety if the connections that I have noticed between them have come naturally or was searched out by the poets themselves. Furthermore, it could also be suggested that what has occurred here is an actual deterritorialization of Central American culture itself that is manifesting in the authors’ approach to sociopolitically engaged poetry. Nonetheless, I think this is an issue better answered by scholars of sociology or popular culture not by a specialist in literature like me. Despite my acceptance of these possibilities that may have influenced this diasporic revival of poesía comprometida, my aim here was to delineate the aesthetic and thematic nature of this contemporary corpus’ revival of poesía comprometida and the impact diaspora and hybridity has had on it. I can say with relative surety that this aim has been accomplished.

Suggestions for Further Study

Though I am satisfied with the outcomes of this study, there are so many issues that I would have liked to expound upon, but they unfortunately lie outside of this investigation’s theoretical scope and focus. For instance, Ilka Oliva-Corado has also written short stories, testimonials, and lyrical poetry such as the migration testimonial, Historia de una indocumentada travesía en el desierto Sonora-Arizona (2014). She has also authored the testimonial Post Frontera (2014), a text that I believe can be considered a social theory book because of its elucidation of the social and political underpinnings of twenty-first century semi-forced migration from Guatemala and its impacts on the homeland and the hostland. She has also written lyrical poetry books, such as Luz de

Faro (2015), En la melodía de un fonema (2016), Agosto (2016), and Ocre (2016), all texts that are worthy of linguistic and literary study. Oliva-Corado has also written the short story collections,

Niña de arrabal (2016), Transgredidas (2017), and Norte (2019). These texts, and others, should

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also be researched by scholars of diaspora, literature, migration, linguistics, and U.S. Central

American cultural production. Regarding Guardado, scholars of poetry and literature should investigate her love poetry found in Endeavor because of how it intersects with alcoholism and psychological abuse. Also, I think that literary scholars would be interested in studying her poems regarding systems and structures of poverty in the United States and her poems that treat the tense relationships between women of color in the United States. Of the full collection of Cenizas, that is currently under review for publication, I believe that if and when it is published, literary scholars of U.S. Central American cultural production should jump at the chance to investigate the ways in which she approaches more sociopolitical issues of postwar El Salvador and the diasporic language that she chooses to do it in. If the manuscript is not published, someone should publish it.

Also, any literary critic who is interested in slam poetry should follow her readings and investigate their reception. Of Zamora, he is beginning to write essays more often, so those should be investigated, as well as his biography if it is released. These suggested studies will contribute to U.S.

Central American literary studies because they continue to shed led on the nuances of U.S. Central

American writing with its emphasis on diaspora, racism, memories of war, and feminism, characteristics that demonstrate their evolving identity politics that tend to differentiate their writings from other predominant Latino/a groups in U.S. Studies and that, as such, evidence the need for separate and equal study of transisthmian Central American historical, literary, and political studies in United States educational system and beyond.

Considering diasporic expressions of their work, there is also so much more to be studied.

For example, how is their poetry being received, if at all, in the homeland? Likewise, how is it being received by diasporic Central American peoples and U.S. citizens? Following Feroza Jussawalla’s book chapter” Hybridity and Cultural Rights,” in which ways does hybridity fail to defend the cultural rights of the Central American diasporic community? (116) For instance, though many irregular migrants speak English and Spanish, they still are negated any type of political say. In a

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similar vein, how does their poetry express the “peculiar, dialectal relationships between the homeland and the hostland?” (Paranjape 231). For example, what are the diasporic poets of Central

America learning from contemporary poets of the isthmus and vice-versa. How do they unite? In what ways to their sociopolitical attitudes about the homeland differ? Lastly, why do diasporic poets of the U.S. diaspora tend to see their homelands in Central America as the motherland and not the fatherland, and how does this relate to feminism such as in the poem cited in the epigraph?

Does this change in perspective connect to the increase in women’s migration from the isthmus? By better understanding these diasporic issues , U.S. Central American scholars can better contextualize and analyze the gendered facets in U.S. Central American literature (in light in increased diaspora from the region) and problematize—as the concept of the transisthmian and the notion of Trans-Central American Literature suggest— the sociopolitical issues that arise when more scholars begin to understand this literature as anchored in the “growing reality of a region in motion that needs to be understood as existing both inside and beyond its territorial frontiers” (1

Espinoza; Rosales emphasis is mine).

With these investigatory foundations at hand, scholars can better approach the literary implications of increased dialogue between the isthmus and the diaspora; the increased literary production of Central Americans of different diasporic conditions (especially irregular migrants) in the United States and beyond; and the silenced histories of war, trauma, and migration that they often express. The bettering of these approaches towards the study of U.S. Central American literature is vital to approach, contextualize, and analyze the global relationships maintained and broken in today’s Central American diaspora space and their sociopolitical consequences in the homeland, the hostland(s), and on the individuals themselves. It also will provide a sociohistorical perspective as to the ways in which hostland literary canons are thematically and linguistically transformed by Central American bilingual and multilingual writing and vice- versa.

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About U.S. Central American cultural production, I believe more studies should be done on the aesthetic and thematic differences and similarities between this investigation’s corpus and other U.S. Central American diasporic poets to find continuities and discontinuities to how they express diaspora and hybridity and to better understand the nuances of their identity politics via literature. For example, this section’s epigraph cites Willy Palomo, a second-generation migrant of

Salvadoran descent whose poetry has similar sociopolitical content to the writers investigated here, but uses a poetic language highly influenced by hip-hop that embodies a slam-poetry style. In this same vein, which sociopolitical issues does the diasporic poetry of writers from Honduras, Panama,

Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize address? Does the poetry of those countries with larger populations of blacks speak more about race? Do the poets of those countries that didn’t experience civil war address armed conflict in Central America? Do Nicaraguan poets of the diaspora address the current sociopolitical state of Nicaragua?70 How does their diasporic language and approach to hybridity, feminism, class consciousness, and indigenism present similarities and differences with the contemporary and previous corpora investigated here? Does their work also illustrate similarities and differences with the poetas comprometidos I have studied and analyzed? This suggested path of study will help U.S. Central American scholars better analyze how Central

Americans today are grappling with contemporary sociopolitical issues in the isthmus and in the

United States, the ways in which it is underpinned by theories of diaspora and hybridity such as the ones delineated here, and how they are connected with past historical isthmian events and cultural and political ideologies. At the same time, it will lead scholars of U.S. Central American literary production to begin to reconnect their writings to past literary movements in the isthmus such as

70 For instance, in today’s Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega’s (elected in 2007) has been accused of abuses against critics and opponents of his government with impunity. Thus, he is perceived as a dictator by many of his non-supporters. For example, in 2018, 2,000 were injured and 300 were dead after a military crackdown by National police and armed government authorities. This situation continues to cause student protesters into self- exile in Costa Rica and elsewhere. Since 2007, Ortega’s government has destroyed all checks on his political power via violence towards all political opposition “Nicaragua: Events of 2018.”

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poesía comprometida, a literary movement that is attractive to diasporic writers of Central

Americans in the United States given the politically charged atmosphere towards isthmian migrants in regards to their often precarious diasporic journeys, their plea for asylum, the increase of unaccompanied minors, and the questions of what should happen to them when they arrive to the

U.S. hostland, and the continued effect of U.S. intervention in Central American twentieth century politics. Likewise, studies such as the one I have undertaken can help Central American scholars to continue a quest towards a more complete understanding of the ways in which contemporary

Central America is expressed in the literature of its diaspora, namely via the creative and oral testimonial that, as evident in the present study, delineate some of the most pressing sociopolitical issues of women, natives, and the economically underprivileged in the isthmus and in the diaspora.

Since this study has also demonstrated various approaches to indigenism, it proves valuable to scholars of Central American indigeneity because it demonstrates how diasporic poets of Central

American descent are beginning to delve deeper into their indigenous roots, whereby indigenous ideologies often displace the centrality of Christianity and put women’s issues on the forefront.

Continuing to observe how Central American writers are approaching indigenous identity and worldviews, scholars might be able to better understand how the indigenist movement is transforming in the twenty-first century and what that will mean for today’s indigenist movements in the isthmus, Latin America, and beyond.

Turning back to diaspora, this study leads to an important question about the scope of the theory used to support my hypothesis. It is, could the diasporic hybridity method of analyzing diasporic poetry employed in this dissertation be used to study other diasporic poets of different ethnicities, and nations if it is tweaked to fit them? If so, what would their diasporic poetics look like when analyzed under this framework? How is their diasporic language different based on their ethnicity? How different would their sociopolitical outlook be if they are speaking from Spain, Italy,

Germany? What do their border journeys look like? and what previous generation of writers can

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they be compared with? In today’s world in which an estimated 65 million people have been displaced from their home regions due to interstate wars, civil conflicts, and natural disasters, which have consequences for host populations, migrants themselves, and for the populations of origin, academia will need more hybrid scholars who understand at least two or more cultures, two or more languages, two or more historical time-periods, or two or more academic disciplines to better study these writings that seem to look back to the histories, ideologies, and cultures of the homeland to understand, embody, and express the sociopolitical positioning of not only themselves, but their families, and the collective of migrants in their respective hostland or vice- versa. Likewise, as this investigation has demonstrated, because of the connection of diaspora to hybridity and the creation of a sense of home-abroad that many contemporary diasporic writers are making, literary studies are also in need of hybrid scholars who understand the sociopolitical nuances, concepts, and definitions of hybridity in relation to diasporic aesthetic, identity, consciousness, and, above all, language. This means that diaspora and hybridity can no longer be seen as separate entities, but concepts that intertwine and cross in their unpredictable movement that parallel the complex character of diasporic life. (Kitaj).

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Appendix

Cynthia Guardado Interview

About Endeavor: Experiences of Trauma and Hope

Introduction

Cynthia Guardado’s collection Endeavor bares wounds and hidden scars of women and migrants.

Clad in Californian skin, beneath which lies Salvadoran blood, the poetic voice passes down traumatic and hopeful Central American (American) stories onto the paper. This duality permits the author a way to voyage beyond the “I” to the collective experiences of grievance and mourning that cross political, mental, gendered, and genetic borders in a manner that is non-lineal; perhaps the only effective way to map out the rugged landscape of pain; without a clear answer, without a beaten path.

Interview

[Tiffanie Clark]: How did you begin writing poetry and why?

[Cynthia Guardado]: I guess I was just interested in writing. I was a lit. major at UC Santa Cruz, but I ended up with an emphasis in poetry because I was looking for a way to combat a white-male literature program where we were made to read mostly old dead white people that I couldn’t identify with. So, that is what first kind of led me down the path of creative writing because it allowed me to just take classes that I was interested in and not just be attached to Modern Lit, or

Victorian, or British which were really my only options at the time. So, I always say that my undergraduate degree was a time when I was trying to be a poet, but bot really being a poet because I wasn’t allowing myself to be vulnerable. I was spending a lot of time not writing about stuff that was directly related to me or my family.

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Another thing that I would say led me to becoming the poet that I am now was when I moved to

Washington D.C. to live with one of my aunts whose husband was an alcoholic. When I arrived, he had surgery and within three weeks he died in the house with her. So, as my way of processing his death, I tried to write about him when I realized I was just writing a poem about my grandfather in

El Salvador because he has been an alcoholic my whole life and he is still currently alive. So that freak situation, and alcoholism is sort of what led me to start writing about my family because I was very resistant to do that. Then, I started to ask myself, “What else do I want to write about, what else do I have to say?” In the beginning, I started to focus on my grandparents who were in El

Salvador and never immigrated here.

{TC] You are a professor at Fullerton College. Does that give you enough time to write? Do you feel that you would like to dedicate yourself fully to poetry?

[CG]: I would say that it doesn’t really overlap for me because I mostly teach composition. However,

I do teach courses in creative writing and I run the literary magazine on campus. Since I teach that class, I do challenge myself to do some of the free-writes that I assign them. I would say that aside from those assignments that I do with the students, I do not write too much during the semester unless I go out of town. So, I normally leave writings for my breaks and summer. I do revise and edit during the semester, but I don’t do any drafts because that takes a different energy and emotional space. I have been revising Cenizas, a collection I have been working on for nine years that is all about El Salvador. Individual poems from that collection have been published in Mexico, but I still haven’t found a publisher for the whole thing,

[TC]: So, you talked about how mourning played a role in your early formation as a “real” poet. In direct relation to that, you wrote a poem in Endeavor titled, “How Women Grieve” in which you suggest that women have a distinct grieving process than men. If this grief is in fact gendered, is it imposed by society, by culture, or by oneself?

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[CG]: Can I say all three? [laughs] I think Latina women, LatinX women, Salvadoran women, or any woman that has ancestrally and historically come from colonization carry this ancestral- generational trauma. When I wrote that poem, I was thinking of the weight of the things that we carry; and I am not only thinking of the science of genetic trauma that has been researched in recent years, but also the way that we pass down our grief and trauma to other women; like the stories that my abuela shared with me. So, over the years the women in our family carry the weight of those stories. I am not sure if this same dynamic is true in all families, but I do think that that it has a parallel in Latino culture in that when major traumatic events happen, women carry the burden of holding everyone together. So, our levels of grief are different because it is inside of us. In that way, a lot of the sections focus on sexual assault and violence against women like when I talk about my cousin’s murder. So, it also an argument about the grief that I carry in that all these societal pressures that are going around are a part of a women’s experience.

One thing that I think that the poem does is use the shower scene as a place where you are the most naked, bare, and the mot alone; it becomes the only safe space where you can face your grief because you are so vulnerable and trying to cleanse yourself of the grief you are carrying.

Obviously, it comes from a very literal place for me because I spend so much time trying to be strong and I am so emotional; I am a poet for a reason [laughs]. Sometimes, it is only when I am alone when I can have this emotional breakdown that I wanted to have but couldn’t. And that last line is so important “only you can love you like this.” Because only other woman can support you the way that you need to be supported because we are not going to be able to get that love and tenderness from someone else.

[TC]: In part V of that same collection, you speak candidly about migrant experience. I was very taken aback by the poem “My mother’s story” where you highlight the violence and vulnerability of your mother’s migrant experience. Could you talk about how the negative side of your parent’s stories as migrants affects what you choose to write about as a diasporic poet? Do you feel that you

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have a unique vision of North America because you have been able to experience first-hand the dark side of migration?

[CG]: I think that I’m super hypercritical of The United States; that’s where my work overlaps with my poetry. In my classes I teach critical race theory and different ways of looking at the government. We look at how these structures continue to oppress people. We look at border patrol and all kinds of things so, I’m hypercritical of the United States and I know I wouldn’t have that lens to look at the world in if my parents hadn’t taken me to El Salvador. My parents were even taking us to El Salvador when we were kids and the war was still happening. They knew that war was still happening, and they were still determined to take us to meet our grandparents and to know where we were from.

The first time I went was in 1988, so I was only four years old. I don’t know what every immigrant’s experience is, but I hear that for many second-generation Salvadorans, their parents don’t take them to El Salvador often because of economic reasons. But we went pretty much every year until my grandma died. Then, we stopped going for a while. I started going again in undergrad and since then I’ve been going every year or every other year. When I started writing about El Salvador, I would stay there even longer. And so all of those experience have led me to not focus on the fact that yes there is a lot of opportunity here (The United States), but mostly look at the reasons why people do immigrate, what those journeys look like, and what type of oppressions they face when they arrive. So that connection that I have totally influences how I look at The United States and what I choose to write about. And I am not surprised that I constantly do it [criticize The United

States] because the U.S. media and education have done all its work in keeping the masses ignorant about what really happens and about what the U.S. really does! But I know I’m always trying to create awareness about the U. S’s involvement in the war in El Salvador and their continued involvement because of the currency being the dollar. It’s an endless cycle. Immigrants from El

Salvador don’t usually tell their stories. For example, I got “My mother’s story” from talking to my

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mom when I was in high school. She told me that she had to get married to another man and I was like, “What!” And she was telling me that she had to do it for papers. Obviously, it’s a poem so some things are embellished, but it is such a real experience for many people. I haven’t written about some of these things, but she had to fight off a sexual assault by a coyote when she was coming here.

Women have talked about this, but it is not super well-known that this is occurring because no one wants to talk about those things. Even when my mom does talk about those things, she still gets emotional… even after forty years.

[TC]: One ideal that you really focus on in your work is that of people living between trauma and hope. Are you referring to a specific community or group when whose experience centers on a constant balance between trauma and hope, or does it tie together those experiences of women,

Latinas, LatinX people of the diaspora, migrants, and other oppressed persons you focus on throughout the collection?

[CG]: Well, I would say that those people are living between that. From the perspective that I am often writing from, I am mostly focusing on immigrants living in the United States, especially second and third generation immigrants, or those who are made to feel that they are not 100% apart of this country regardless of their status. I write about it because I feel that it is a real perspective for my parent and for me, though my world is a little different. Obviously, I was born here, and I have lighter skin privilege which I understand impacts the way that people interact with me. And I know that if I was a dark-skinned woman those interactions that I have with people would be different. So, when I am talking about those in-between experience I am coming identifying as a woman of color, and the daughter of immigrants, and I am also identifying as a

Salvadoran. There is so much that goes on right there; where people who are born and raised in El

Salvador are going to say that you are not Salvadoran, and those who live here aren’t going to call you an American. You don’t get that label as a LatinX person. I grew up in McArthur Park (the same place where “My Mother’s Story” takes place) which people call little El Salvi because there are a lot

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of Salvadorans and Central Americans live there, so I was interacting with Salvadorans all the time.

When I told people that I wasn’t born there, they would say that you’re not Salvadoran, so I just started to say, “Well all the blood in me is Salvadoran, so I don’t know what you want me to call myself.” Some experiences of this trauma in my poetry has a lot to do with being able to go back to

El Salvador after so many years of not retuning because of economical struggles which I talk more about in my first manuscript Cenizas is so many of the deaths in our family. When my grandma died my mom dressed my grandmother and put make-up on her face. When my uncle who had lived in the United States his whole life and ended up being deported because of alcoholism died six months later upon his return to El Salvador, I was sleeping in the room in tía’s house, and on the other side of the wall was my uncle’s body. In El Salvador, the body comes home with you, so it is a very different experience. Because, I got to experience all those things with my family there, it ended up taking a huge space in Cenizas. I guess the point of all that (like why I always tell the story about my uncle dying when I arrived to D.C.) is to say that all of those stages and processes of grief in my family are what truly allowed me to write the things that I write. My writing gives the sorrow a name, a face, a meaning, and a tangibility. I wouldn’t have sanity if I hadn’t written them.

[TC]: Is the fact that you can name it and talk about it instead of carrying it around is where the hope aspect takes its place?

[CG]: This is where the title of Endeavor becomes so important, because it signifies that you have made it to whatever side you were trying to make it too, and though you carried all this sorrow and grief you’re still standing. So, my hope for the people that read this book that they can process their levels of grief, even though they are not exactly the same. In that way, I ask the reader to join me in my endeavor.

Questionnaire: Alexandra Regalado, On Hybridity, Language, and Diaspora

Introduction

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This written interview was conducted to better under the poet’s homeland desire, homeland orientation, diasporic identity, diasporic language, inscription/non-inscription to Pan Central

American Identity, and the effect of diaspora on her poetic production. I have not modified any of the poet’s responses.

Interview Responses

1. Do you feel Central American, North American, or both and why?

If I’m going to identify with a place, I’d rather be very specific or extremely broad: resident of my body or citizen of the world. Look at the results of my 23 and Me ancestry and that’s the only real response I can give. If you press me to answer, then I can say I feel Salv-ameri-doran, or

SalvaMiamian. I will forever be straddling El Salvador and the United States though I’m about to reach the midway point where I’ve lived equal amounts of time in each country but my way of thinking and being—language, perspective, approaches—is liquid and I constantly dip back and forth into each identity.

2. In what ways do you resist assimilation to U.S. cultural identity?

The US is in my blood. My father’s father is American of Irish descent, born blue-eyed and with blond hair, in a very small town in southern Illinois. Recently, I traveled to Brookport and saw the streets lined with small clapboard houses where my grandfather grew up, the bridge that arches over Ohio River and connects with Paducah, Kentucky, a bridge that he and other self-taught engineers built when he came back from fighting WW2 in the Navy. I don’t feel a sense of resistance to the US cultural identity, but do I observe it with a careful curiosity.

3. What role does Spanish play in your poetry? What role does English play?

About 90% of all the poems in my book Matria have titles in Spanish and the book’s title itself is a slant of the Spanish word, patria, except matria points to motherland. I used Spanish titles so that

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the English-language readers would have to discover their meanings in the body of the poem in the same way players of the Loteria game have to solve riddles to guess the next bingo card. The poems question what stands true in Spanish and what stands true in English. My newer poems post-Matria depart from concerns about cultural identity and instead center on the body and impermanence and the limitations of language. I am interested in relationships or lack thereof (one of my topics of investigation is hermitage). Here, I turn more towards communication, broken and mended ties and while I still use some words in Spanish (when it is untranslatable) in this new manuscript I focus more on line and form to reflect a blend of voices and echoes, overlaps, corrections and choruses, ruptures and seams.

4. What do your most long for in Central America while you are in the United States and vice versa?

Vaya, the most obvious: El Salvador has the tropical fruits, frijolitos and pupusas, the volcanoes, lake Coatepeque and El Tamarindo beach, my extended family and the good friends I’ve made in the last 20 years that I’ve lived here. In the US is my immediate family: my mom, grandmother, my brother and sisters. There is my childhood home and my friends from elementary and high school with whom I still maintain close relationships. And, well, in the US there is greater variety in museums and cultural events, new restaurants—all the bright lights and big city—and that of course includes shopping. I get giddy in bookstores and in art supply shops.

5. Do you ascribe to a Pan Central American identity or moreso to your specific nation of origin and why?

I feel more Salvadoran that Pan Central American because this is where I trace back my family history, our traditions and customs, the myths and legends we learned about as children, the foods we love.

6. Do you feel unaccepted in Central America or the U.S. because of your identity or your diasporic condition?

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Growing up in Miami, Spanglish was the language of choice and all of my friends were Latino with the exception of one American friend who loved to refer to herself as La Gringa. The rest of our círculo was Cuban, Colombian, Chilean, Spanish. I know Miami is a very special case, unlike other places in the US where Latinos are the minority. It wasn’t until I went to study in Oregon for my

MFA that I began to understand what other Latinos upbringing must’ve been like. For the first time

I was the only Latina in the program that spoke Spanish. The others, and there were only about three or four, had not been allowed to learn their parents mother tongue for fear of discrimination.

It was a wakeup call.

When I visited El Salvador as a young woman I sometimes felt out of place because I did not listen to the same kind of music, I did not know the slang, and my point of view was more open-minded.

Later, when I moved to El Salvador and wanted to connect with the local literary community I had to learn a whole new literary canon. Through Kalina press and our bilingual publications of prose and poetry anthologies my business partner Lucia and I worked hard to connect the Salvadoran and

Salvadoran-American writing communities. Now I identify with the bridge, that point of transition, rather on one specific place.

7. What Central American cultural traditions do you disagree with? Which ones empower you?

Machismo, to start, and the domestic violence, sexual assault, and feminicides that are a result of that culture that is sometimes accepted, tolerated or even perpetuated by women themselves. Even though I was brought up a Catholic I am pro-choice. In El Salvador we still need to develop more consciousness about environmentalism and sustainability. I also hate advertising in El Salvador of billboards in English showcasing blonde-haired actors offering status symbol products. I feel sad seeing the growing amount of North American restaurant chains and stores rather than seeing local businesses flourish. Only until recently has there been an interest in local design and product development.

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8. Which U.S. cultural traditions do you agree with and why? Which ones give you a sense of empowerment?

Freedom of speech, respect/tolerance for diversity of cultures, beliefs, values, and traditions, and the option to be pro-choice. I like that in the US you can write a brief and direct business letter without having to do the roundabout, small-talk salutation and closing that is customary in a

Salvadoran exchange. I feel I am more assertive when I speak English.

9. Do you think that you would be poet if you or your parents did not migrate?

It was my parents and not my country that opened up the world of books for me. Our walls were lined with bookshelves and both my mother and father set an example; they spent afternoons reading and encouraged us to do the same. Every night we were tucked in with a story. My mother celebrated my essays since I was in elementary school and never said no when I wanted to buy a book. She has been my greatest fan, my first editor, and my most trusted advisor when it comes to my poetry.

Ilka Oliva-Corado Questionnaire: On Hybridity, Language, and Diaspora

Introduction

This written interview was conducted to better under the poet’s homeland desire, homeland orientation, diasporic identity, diasporic language, inscription/non-inscription to Pan Central

American Identity, and the effect of diaspora on her poetic production. I have not modified any of the poet’s responses.

Entrevista

1. ¿Usted se siente centroamericano/a/estadounidense o los dos? ¿Por qué?

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Centro Americana, llegué adulta a Estados Unidos, de 23 años, ya con la raíz profunda arraigada en

Guatemala.

2. ¿En cuáles maneras resistes asimilación a la identidad estadounidense?

El idioma, la cultura, las costumbres. Se trata de vivir de forma práctica en el sentido común, pero después de 16 años viviendo aquí las diferencias siguen siendo las mismas.

3. ¿Cuál es el rol que toca el español en su poesia? ¿Cuál rol toca el inglés?

No escribo en inglés, mi poesía es en español. No sé si logre escribir en inglés un día, porque aún en mi día a día hablando en inglés primero lo pienso en español.

4. ¿Qué anhela más cuando usted esté en Centroamérica y viceversa?

Todo, la comida, el clima, las conversaciones, el olor a café, el pan fresco. Lo extraño todo porque en

16 años no he logrado ir.

5. ¿Atribuye a una identidad pancentroamericana o más a su nación de origen? ¿Por qué?

A mi país Guatemala, aunque hay varias similitudes entre los países centroamericanos, la identidad es única e incluso me sentí extraña dentro del país al ir a otras regiones, debido a las distintas etnias. Yo digo Guatemala, pero mi región, con lo que me ubico, es Comapa, Jutiapa donde nací y

Ciudad Peronia donde crecí.

6. ¿Se siente no aceptada en Centroamérica o los estados Unidos por su identidad o condición diaspórica?

Sí, por supuesto. Y en las grandes urbes donde ocurre el caos cultural de la multitud de migrantes de todas partes del mundo. No hay lugar dónde ubicarse. Pero en el campo me he sentido más rechaza aún, me han hecho sentir como intrusa.

7. ¿Cuáles tradiciones centroamericanas no te agraden? ¿Cuáles te empoderan?

260

Las patriarcales y racistas, que no precisamente son centroamericanas son mundiales. No me agrada todo lo que es sistemático y discrimine, minimice o señale por género, color, etnia, lugar de origen o grado de escolaridad. Me agrada todo lo que une, abraza, llama a la conciliación, a la resistencia, al cuestionamiento, a la transformación.

8. ¿Cuáles tradiciones estadounidenses no te agraden? ¿Cuáles te empoderan?

Lo mismo, sería. No me agrada todo lo que solape el patriarcado, el racismo, la discriminación, la homofobia, la xenofobia. Me agradan todas las que acompañen al ser humano tal cual es.

Interview Fragment: About Matria With Alexandra Lytton-Regalado

Introduction

This is a small fragment of an interview, perhaps the most important, of a long conversation that I had With Lytton-Regalado last February. Unfortunately, the recorded interview was lost due to a technical difficulty before I had a chance to transcribe it in its entirety. I have added this small piece because it is used in this dissertation

Interview

[Tiffanie Clark.]: What role has your being Salvadoran and North American had on your collection,

Matria?

[Alexandra Lytton-Regalado]: My father is an American. I have uncles named Skeeter … and grandfathers who are war vets. So, I feel like patria is my connection with a very American, hard- working spirit that’s very masculine and stoic... Matria was my obsession with women. I recently moved back to El Salvador with my husband, a Salvadoran man, who, like me, grew up in the United States … About a year and a half later I was pregnant, and I didn't have my mother nearby, so I had to look around for examples of other women, other mothers to understand how to

261

do this… So, that's where I got most of the testimonies and all of the experiences that lead to this tapestry (Matria) of what it means to be a woman in El Salvador.

[T.C.]: What is it like living in El Salvador today and how do you see the people there?

[L.R.]: A jungle place of beauty. Ask a Salvadoran how they are doing, she says, they will answer,

“Siempre en la lucha.”

262

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