Latina/o Poets Roundtable (Poetry Society of America)

This conversation is amazing. I've already printed it out and I will be spending a lot of time with it.

Francisco Aragón:
...Spanish is often used to unwittingly render us as Other in the country many of us were born, raised, and educated in. "You speak English really well," she said. Or: "I love it when you read your poems in Spanish: you should do that more often," he said, not realizing the unintended message: English doesn't really belong to you.

Maria Melendez:
...we U.S. Latino poets are called to keep on keepin' on. Que sigue la lucha. When I (or any Latino poet) am tempted to erase or downplay any of my human complexities in my poetry, in order to appear more closely related to some kind of accessible center, I risk relinquishing my own unique powers of perception.

Roberto Tejada:
I still stand by what I argued: that university presses and other publishers were creating a space for Latino/a visibility, but only so long as it conformed to scripted realms of selfhood and accepted notions of rhetorical conduct.

elena minor:
Being identified as a Latina writer/poet never chafes: as a writer I am not apart from who I am. So as a Latina, everything I write is Latin@ literature, even if the content of the particular work doesn't speak to what are presumed to be "matters Latin@".