In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa remembers conversations among Chicanas where English was spoken as a ‘neutral language’, in which the effects of living in the States on their Spanish would not be exposed. Writers in diaspora, bilingual or not, will understand the irony: the wish not to be perceived to be losing your language prompting you to resort to the language replacing it. On the one hand, the writerly instinct to maintain links with a place left behind or inherited from your mother in its own tongue. On the other, the imposition of English. As Cristina Rivera Garza reminds us, a poet’s choices on the page can wake a language from its dream of dominance. Writing bilingually and drawing on tropes that are unfamiliar to some readers are two of the choices poets in this issue make to trace latinidad in English. Writing being a direct way of participating, they are also ways to discover and form it.

Calling yourself Latinx might be another of those choices. Doing so can engender linguistic creativity as well as resist the gendered Latina/o. In Latinx, Ed Morales attempts a definition for the term. He posits that it enables forms of intersectional resistance and promotes a more inclusive idea of identities, including a broad range of racial, national, and gender-based identifications. According to Morales, the term doesn’t just create a new category between black and white. It also has the potential to reveal the blackness and indigenousness often ignored in Latin America by mixed-raced utopian ideologies. Despite the long history of racial oppression in Latin America, Morales argues that the multilayered space the term creates can help preserve these identities, permits otherness to fade as it becomes part of an internal conversation.

Around 186,500 Latin Americans live here now, meaning that in the case of the British Latinx experience this conversation has been growing. Schemes like Invisible Presence and the Complete Works have drawn attention to Lat- inx poetry in the UK in the last few years. But it is still young. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine at all without the antecedence of Gloria Anzaldua, Francisco Cantú, Javier Zamora, Diego Báez, Ada Limón, Nathalie Diaz, and Juan Felipe Herrera, to name but a few, who have traced la frontera and given us ways to orientate ourselves within English. Nonetheless, the concerns that connect us as British Latinx poets are already nailed down in these pages — among them linguistic freedom, queer love, mestizaje — and while these concerns touch everyone, we find solidarity with Latin American and US Latinx poets especially, having embraced activism as poetry’s physical expression. This issue’s contributors are community arts organisers, activists, lawyers, translators. So these poems form part of a new chapter in a literary tradition of creative protest. So we write con el sol al hombro in this sense.

As editors, we wouldn’t have done our job properly if we hadn’t tried to include work engaging with as many Latin American regions as possible. As part of that effort, we’ve included translations from writers living and writing in Latin America as well as the States. Though we never claimed or aspired to represent all, as Nathalie puts it in her preface the Resistencia issue of Magma, ‘we are not only writing ourselves into existence, but offering new spaces for the rest of Latin American writers across the world.’ So we’re especially grateful to the translators in this issue, who’ve helped us in that attempt. We’re also grateful to our contributors based outside the UK, who’ve chosen to align themselves with us.

Abrazos,
Patrick Romero McCafferty, Leo Boix, Nathalie Teitler, May 2024