3 - Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry

Summary

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing. Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from heritage nationalities to anti-US imperialist ancestors to civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. Latina/o life in the United States, on the cusp of the third decade of this century, is one that accepts the fact that where we are from is more and more an internalized state of being. Bonafide Rojas’s Notes on the Return to the Island reflects a post-transnational diasporic Puerto Rican identity in which contact zones, not nationality, are sovereign. Hugo García Manríquez’s conceptualist book Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement offers radical experimentation in both aesthetics and geopolitics. Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her is rooted in the borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Aragón’s “To Madrid” examines the touristic shame of a Latina/o visiting an ancestral place. Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection Teeth (2007) situates further aspects of the complexity of touristic experience into a range of locales. The work of Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres embodies a latinxfuturism speculating on what it will mean to be Latina/o.