Home > Portfolios > To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing
To Never Have Risked Our Lives: A Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing

The offer to help document a shared existence that transcends geographic, physical, and spiritual borders felt like a call to action—an opportunity to lift voices, or rather to allow the stories we tell about ourselves to shine brighter. . . . As you will read in these narratives and hear in these interviews, we are never in the margins of our own stories. —Jennifer De Leon
  
Influences from Latin American culture are still present in my family, and we find ways to reconnect with the Mexican part of our identity. . . . This portfolio is, among other things, a way for people like me to better understand the system of diaspora that led our families to move to new countries and form new cultures. —Ben Black
  
While there are pieces centered on cultural loss (the fact that the portfolio was almost entirely written in English is evidence of this), there is a reclamation of identity that takes readers beyond the U.S.–Mexico border and into the mercurial neighborhoods of El Salvador, the mythological underworld of the Aztecs, and the uncertain school grounds of a Panamanian landscape as lush as it is volatile. —Esteban Rodríguez

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Poetry
Poetry
“Inside me there’s a refugee . . .”
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Poetry
“But there is no migrant crisis . . .”
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Poetry
Undulations
Online 2024 Illness Spirituality
Poetry
Triptych
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Poetry
Aránzazu Hears One Final Prayer Before the Monsoon
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Poetry
creation myth: chicana (1999)
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Poetry
CITY OF MEXICO-U.S. BORDER BUREAU OF VITAL STATISTICS
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Poetry
Self-Portrait as Desert
Online 2024 Journeys Loss Translating
Poetry
Disarticulated Map
Online 2024 Travel Home Politics
Poetry
What Femicide
Online 2024 Crime Gender Violence
Poetry
Apocalypses: Scenario #445-220
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Poetry
Homo naledi
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Poetry
Palestine Is Showing Us That Decolonization Is Not Abstract
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Poetry
The Lesson, But Not Yet, Not—
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Poetry
One Rabbit
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Poetry
Ode to Malignancy
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Poetry
American Dirt
Online 2024 On Fiction Violence Publishing
Poetry
Coyote-Girl Bantu
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Poetry
from Infernal Splendor
by Róger Lindo
Translated from the Spanish by Matthew Byrne
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Poetry
“This highway is also yours my daughter”
by Rosa Chávez
Translated from the Spanish by Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez
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Poetry
“Awech at we alaj b’e noya”
by Rosa Chávez
Translated from the Spanish into K'iche' by Wel Raxulew
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Poetry
“Esta carretera también es tuya mija”
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Poetry
The Rain
by Humberto Ak'abal
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Bazzett
Poetry
A Book
by Humberto Ak'abal
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Bazzett
Poetry
I Don’t Know . . .
by Humberto Ak'abal
Translated from the Spanish by Michael Bazzett
Poetry
La Malinche Orders Chipotle
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Poetry
Whenever I Say I’m Mexican
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Poetry
The Unwritten Rules of Animating Speedy Gonzales
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Poetry
Dying Tejano
Online 2024 Nature Ethnicity Relationships
Fiction
Fiction
All the Things We Hid
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Fiction
Mud & Chiffon
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Fiction
The Invented Languages of Adela Arkani
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Fiction
Camilla
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Fiction
Pizzle Flowers
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Fiction
Dichosofui
AGNI 99 Ethnicity Family Crime
Essays
Essays
Bayou City
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Essays
An Epistle for Edenia
AGNI 99 Family Home Ethnicity
Conversations
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