A Conversation With Martín Espada

By ANDREW YUAN ’24

Martín Espada is an award-winning poet, essayist, editor, attorney, and activist committed to social justice and uplifting marginalized immigrant communities. His latest poetry collection, Floaters, won the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry. Espada spoke to the student body during Assembly on Sept. 30th and hosted a luncheon with community members on the same day. The following interview was conducted by staff writer Andrew Yuan.

Q: Growing up in an activist family, you want to narrate the struggle of immigrants and Americans in America. Why did you choose poetry as the medium? Why not prose, journalism or becoming an organizer?

A: Well, the standard answer is that poetry chose me. There’s a certain mystery around that. As you say, I grew up in an activist household. My father, in fact, combined advocacy and art since he was both a community organizer and a documentary photographer who photographed that very same community. I grew up thinking that this was the way you did it. I thought this is how everybody grew up. If I could have been a photographer, I would’ve been a photographer. I never had the capacity to handle the technical aspect of photography, but I learned a great deal from my father as an advocate but also as an artist. It’s not a coincidence perhaps that a political protegé of my father’s by the name of Luis Garden Acosta visited our home one day and handed me an anthology. With the anthology he spoke the words “you are going to be a poet.”

Now, he knew I had made attempts and then given it up. In fact, by that point, I had dropped out of college and was well on my way to becoming a professional dishwasher. So he spoke the words with some gravity and I sneered at him, thinking “how can you predict my future?” But then I looked at the book called Latin American Revolutionary Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology for Monthly Review Press. It was edited by another New York Puerto Rican by the name of Robert Márquez.

When I opened that book, I first saw a poem called “Puerto Rican Obituary” by the New York Puerto Rican poet Pedro Pietri about a world I knew. Then, I turned to a poem called “Zero Hour” by the great poet-priest of Nicaragua, Ernesto Cardenal, about the dictatorship in that country, the resistance to it, and the revolution that arose against it. I turned to the works of Nicolás Guillén, the Afro-Cuban poet.

It was as if this whole world had opened up to me. I realized I was not alone. I was part of a great tradition and a diaspora within that tradition. I was writing in English, but I was writing about the very same subjects from the very same point of view. My primary concern was justice, and I could see that in Guillén, or Cardenal, or Pietri. I saw that you could do that in a poem. This was revelatory. I started writing again and never looked back. I was able to synthesize my father’s influence with the influence of the poets, and here we are.

Q: Thank you. During your luncheon and in your poem, “Letter to My Father,” you spoke of the inspiration of your father, Frank Espada. In what other ways are you honoring your father through poetry?

A: “Letter to My Father” is one of my many poems either written about him or addressed to him. In my previous book called Viva’s to Those Who Have Failed, there is a cycle of 10 poems about him because he had just died in 2014. I wrote poems to him or about him. I wrote poems about the grieving process. I wrote poems about myself and my mother. It was less an attempt to console myself and more an attempt to console others. In any case, I was writing about him again. He has been an enormously important figure in my life. He is also a very important figure in the history of the Puerto Rican community in the United States.

Not surprisingly, he’s being slowly forgotten. This is the course of history. I also write about him because I want to preserve that memory. His photographs do that, too. They are collected in extraordinary places, included in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Histories, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Library of Congress, and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies. But I don’t know that they’re on display, and in most museums, they squirrel away most of what they have. So it comes back full circle to me. I write about him as a hero, but he was also my father. Now as I mature, I am able to look at him and all of his dimensions, to address his flaws as well as his heroic deeds, which make him more real and more human.

Q: Thank you. In poetry, you use symbolism extensively, “Galapagos tortoises,” “the massacre of fireflies,” and “40-watt squints,” to name a few. Where do you draw inspirations for your prolific symbolism?

A: My work, to begin with, is grounded in the image. Of course, when we speak of the image in poetry, we’re not speaking solely of the visual sense, but of all five senses. In order to ground my work in all five senses, I rely upon certain devices. Those devices prominently include metaphor and simile as forms of comparison. I compare the like to the unlike, the familiar to the unfamiliar. I try, therefore, to render vivid the portrait or landscape I may be painting with those words. When you cite language, that’s what you’re citing.

Where does it come from? Sometimes it comes from my imagination. Sometimes it comes from the world around me. Sometimes it comes from the world I’m describing. When I write a narrative poem, when I’m telling a story, there’s a world that surrounds the story. Therefore, I call upon images, metaphors and similes that would be endemic, growing naturally out of those landscapes. Sometimes, I create a metaphor or a simile that is jolting precisely because they have nothing in common with what I’m saying in my narrative. They come from everywhere. A poet is like a bird feathering a nest. You take the language, images, and metaphors wherever you may find them.

Q: Thank you. In your poem, “Floaters,” you wrote that “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” In what ways do you see, similarities and contrast between American interventionism in Vietnam and in Latin America?

A: “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam” was a slogan that arose in response to US intervention in Central America back in the 1980s. I went to University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was there in Madison from 1977 to 1982. That coincided squarely with US intervention in Central America, and especially in El Salvador, at that time. For us, Vietnam was a very fresh memory: the war, but also the resistance to it. The anti-war movement was fresh in our minds. In fact, many of the people at the core of the anti-war movement in the early eighties were themselves experienced in the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. We called upon them for their expertise and their leadership.

Among them, by the way, were Vietnam War veterans who provided a great deal of moral authority to whatever they did politically. As a result, that slogan rose very directly as a response to what was happening, and the will of millions of people in this country not to see another war in Vietnam take place, not to see more bombs being dropped, and millions of people ultimately being killed. Because that’s what happened in Vietnam. We don’t talk about that very much. The way it ended up was that President Reagan devised the strategy of waging proxy wars. While US troops did not go in and bombs were not dropped, the Reagan administration, at one point, was funding the Salvadoran military yo the tune of more than a million dollars a day–a country the size of Massachusetts.

Ultimately, 70,000 people died in that country. That’s what we were protesting. That’s why we were using that language to protest. We wanted to draw a direct line and say, “no more Vietnams.” We weren’t naive enough to suppose that just because you weren’t sending in troops, just because you weren’t dropping bombs, that you weren’t acting as an imperial power, that you weren’t subsidizing the murder of other human beings. That’s what eventually happened in spite of our best efforts. You can argue that the anti-war movement of the time might have prevented something even worse from happening. But we’ll really never know.

There is another connection with the United States’ so-called sphere of influence in Latin America. Ronald Reagan said: “El Salvador is closer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts”. This reflects the mentality that Central America is our “backyard.” This was the kind of rhetoric coming from the right wing. Anti-communism rhetoric was still very strong at that time. We were still fighting the Cold War that we inherited from the 1950s.

All that added up to the slogan: “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” We wanted to make clear with that slogan, which did appear on quite a few bumper stickers, that we got it. We understood, we saw the connections, and we wanted to make it stop.

Q: At the same time, I think that there are people nowadays who remember Vietnam but not what had happened in Central America during the late 1980s. I don’t know if you can call that double standard or people turning a blind eye to the United States’ proxy wars simply because they were not sending in troops or bombing mass populations themselves.

A: It’s a form of amnesia. What is striking to me is how distant we have become from that history. I have friends who served in Vietnam, who were in the military, who turned against the war, and who are still active, writing and speaking out against war. But almost no one listens to them. When I think of them, I think of Cassandra, the mythical figure. I call them Cassandra poets because people don’t listen to them.

Q: And they were right. They predicted everything, they predicted the next war…

A: They did. If you listen to them, they predicted what they saw coming and what they still see coming.. But that generation is turning eighty years old, and in another ten years, maybe they won’t be here anymore. So yes, you’re absolutely right that the resistance to the proxy wars of Central America is now seen as a footnote. I can certainly invoke it in a poem, and I can invoke it in a poem about two Salvadoran migrants who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in “Floaters.” It’s U.S. foreign policy in Central America that destroyed the infrastructure of Central America, that destroyed the economies of Central America, that led to the migration from Central America we see today, crossing the border. It’s not a coincidence.

Q: Their policy right now is nonetheless still inconsiderate. It doesn’t have a purpose. It doesn’t contain any humanitarian concern for Central America or for their past deeds.

A: No. Migration is now seen as a political football. It’s a political problem, but not a human problem, not a humanitarian problem, not a human rights problem. It’s purely political. With the midterms coming up, the Democrats want to retain control of power, so they’ve identified this as an issue they would like to avoid. Therefore, the measures that the Democrats take around immigration and the border are half hearted and sometimes empty headed. Meanwhile, the right wing continues to demonize immigrants. You’re familiar with DeSantis and the now notorious relocation flight of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. This was a heartless political theater. The people of Martha’s Vineyard crossed him up by actually receiving the migrants with some compassion and understanding. This is going to happen again, between Texas governor Abbott and Florida governor Desantis. This is cruel political theater in which they take sadistic pleasure, and it works for their base. We’ll see it again and we’ll prove them wrong again.

Q: Going off on this current political discourse, your book Zapata’s Disciple has been banned in parts of Arizona and Texas as a part of the Mexican American Studies program. What do you feel is the future of literary activism or poetry in general in America where freedom of speech and press are becoming more limited over time?

A: Well, I can answer that in two parts. The first part is just to clarify my own history as a banned poet. The book Zapata’s Disciple was originally published by South End Press. It has since been republished by Northwestern University Press with a new introduction from me explaining the history of the book and the book banning more generally in Arizona. The Mexican American Studies Program in Tucson was enormously successful, academically and culturally. That program was targeted by the state of Arizona. What the state did was to enact a law for that purpose. The law was couched in neutral-sounding language, but the law would wipe out the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson.

The curriculum contained a number of books by the likes of James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau, and Howard Zinn, not to mention the Dominican writer Julia Alvarez and a number of important Mexican American authors like Sandra Cisneros. It was a list I was proud to join, but the authorities were brutal about the confiscation of the books. They came into the classrooms, boxed them up right in front of the teachers and the students. I even heard that there was a Mayan calendar taken off the wall.

This eventually turned into a legal battle that dragged out for a while. Finally, a ruling came back stating it was indeed unconstitutional for the state to target this one particular program, which was, despite the denials, the intent of passing this law. By then, they had managed to scatter the curriculum, the students and the faculty. I don’t know where things stand in Tucson with respect to Mexican American studies now. .

But the lesson was that censorship works. We don’t like to acknowledge that because we live in a country where the principle of free speech is embraced across the political spectrum. It’s embodied in our Bill of Rights. Yet, in practice, censorship works. It works because most of the time we don’t know what’s happening. What sets apart the current wave of censorship in this country is its openness. Most of the time we never see the curtain lifted to reveal the corroded machinery of censorship beneath it. We don’t hear about it. Instead it’s done discreetly, quietly. Now, however, the right wing, in particular, sees an opportunity again to consolidate power by banning certain books. What we can do is to push back against them, to make sure that we buy the books, to make sure that we host events where we read from the books. The only way we can combat censorship in Texas or Arizona is by making sure that we, on the other end of the country, resist by embracing those very same books and authors.

In my case, my work was included on what I considered to be a very distinguished list. Ultimately, however, the publisher of the book, South End Press, went out of existence. The book went out of print and disappeared. An enterprising young editor at Northwestern University Press by the name of Gianna Mosser saw what was going on who offered to reprint the book with a new introduction. That’s why the book is still in print.

We had to be creative when we were resisting censorship. If you are a student, read, read, read the books, and organize readings. If you are a teacher, the opportunity is even greater because you can put those books on your curriculum. You can even engage in exercises that demonstrate how censorship works.

For example, there was a high school teacher in Washington DC who conducted an exercise with her students. She passed out some poems I wrote to the students, and they wrote response papers to the poems. Right on cue, a white man in a suit burst into the room who represented some vague kind of authority. He asked the teacher “Didn’t you get the email? Haven’t you heard that this poet is on the list of banned authors?” Then she would announce to her students that they had no choice but to pass the papers and the poems to the front of the room.

She would collect them all and turn them over to this man in the suit. The range of responses was really striking. Some of the students complied, some of them vocally resisted, and some of them simply hid the papers and the poems away. At the end, after this white man in the suit departed, the teacher explained that this was just an exercise. I was not banned in that classroom, but I was banned in Arizona. She then asked them, “What are we going to do about that?” Her classes then collectively decided to write a letter of protest to The Washington Post, which had not yet covered the story. That’s a brilliant way of resisting censorship. It has to be something where you roll up your sleeves and do some work. It’s not just a matter of saying, “We are against that, that this is not right.” We have to go beyond that. We have to be more creative than they are.

Q: Shifting a little to your choices in poetry: The fourth section of Floaters is named “Morir Soñando.” You interweave the historical social injustice and personal accounts of loss. My question when I read through this section is why? Why did you choose to blend these two sections together?

A: To me, there’s very little separation between the two. I understand that we make a distinction between the personal and the political. If anything, that last section of the book makes the argument that to be Puerto Rican is a political condition in this country. Therefore, even a personal poem has political implications. There’s a spectrum: some of these poems are more intimate and personal, some are more politically charged. But I find that they all fall somewhere along the same spectrum.

You mentioned “Morir Soñando” being the title of the section. It’s a good example of what I mean. If you look at the back of the book, it would tell you that “Morir Soñando” literally means “to die dreaming’’ and it would also tell you the identity of the subject: Luis Garden Acosta, who I mentioned earlier in our conversation. He was a brilliant Puerto Rican and Dominican organizer. He co-founded a community center called El Puente, or The Bridge, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood that needed the services that this multi-service community center would offer. That was the way he dedicated himself, heart and his soul, to that community.

My first visit to El Puente was when it was still an abandoned, hollowed-out church. My friend Luis saw it and envisioned it to be the community center it would become. I couldn’t see it at the time. I was too young. I was going to law school. I was grounded in a different kind of thinking. I was not allowing the visionary in myself to emerge. The poem is an elegy because he had just died when I wrote it. The poem is very personal in that sense, and also personal in a sense that he’s teaching me a lesson about community, about visions of justice, about believing in your dream in this particular case. Finally, when we go off to drink this delicious concoction called “Morir Soñando’’ at the end of the poem, I start to see what he’s trying to say.

In the last stanza, that phrase repeats itself: “Morir Soñando”. When I read that poem, which was too long to read at the Assembly, I actually sing that phrase out because that’s how it feels to me:“Morir Soñando.” This is a good example of what I mean: this is a very personal poem and a very political poem at the same time because my experience with Luis was both very personal and very political. It was quite natural to tell the story that way.

Q: In the same poem, you said that Luis died dreaming of “poets who stank of weed” and the mike he had “electrified for them.” Do you wish to “morir soñando?” In what ways are you electrifying the mike for the generation of overlooked poets?

A: Well, that’s a question that could better be answered by them than by me. I can only speak to what people say to me. You spoke to me at the beginning of our conversation about what my reading meant to you; in that sense, you could answer that question better than I could. I really hope that I’m electrifying the mike for the next generation. I write the best poems I can and then perform them the best way I can. I do make a point of speaking to the next generation. That includes everything from Exeter, where you saw me, to a recent visit I made to The Care Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is an educational program for adolescent mothers who have dropped out of the school system.

I visit and do a reading there every year. They are all writing poems and they put out an annual anthology called Nautilus. So I want to electrify the mike for young people at Exeter, but also I want to expand that spectrum with The Care Center. I do whatever I can. There was a time when I was more active doing other things as well. I’ve always worked as an editor, for example. It’s important work. It’s also extremely labor intensive. Nowadays, permissions to publish previously published work are very expensive. It makes the creation of anthologies, which I enjoyed doing, a much more difficult thing to do. So I try to pass the torch in other ways.

Q: Thank you for your empowerment. In your poem “The Stoplight at the Corner Where Somebody Had to Die,” you described the reluctance of officials to put a stoplight until “somebody has to die.” This poem reminded me of the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. They are a few of the countless Black victims of police brutality. In actions of social injustice such as eviction where death is not the last straw, how do you see changes going forward?

A: I think changes have to begin at the grassroots. They have to begin locally, they have to begin with people organizing themselves, speaking for themselves, and finding their alliances wherever they can. Change, of course, is not linear. We can’t measure it as a straight line of progress. I wish we could but change zig and zags, up and down. We win some ground, we lose it back again, then we have to win it all over. The cycle of history proves this again and again. We have to believe in our impact on that cycle of history, no matter how close or distant we are from the struggle.

Herbert Hill, a professor of mine at University of Wisconsin-Madison and former National Labor Director of the NAACP, used to say that “ideas have consequences.” He meant that, even though you can’t measure your impact on the world, you can’t label it or box it, you have to persist. It’s especially true if you’re a poet. You have to have faith in your ideas going out into the world, becoming part of the atmosphere that we all breathe in.

Sometimes you can see the tangible results of those ideas when someone comes to you and says, “because you wrote that poem, I went ahead and did this.” That happened to me very tangibly. At other times, you have no way of knowing. It matters a great deal to me that people respond in the moment and that they respond emotionally. When I visited Exeter, there were people who informed me that they cried. Some of them were embarrassed to tell me that. I said “No, no, tears are like gold coins to a poet.” That’s the level where we have to engage in order to change the world. First, we had to begin with tears.

Q: You center your poem “I Now Pronounce You Dead” on the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. That trial was heavily influenced by anti-Italian and anti-immigrant sentiments. In the same poem, you describe Charlestown prison as being replaced by a community college full of Dominicans, Cape Verdeans, and Haitians. Italians were once the marginalized communities of European immigrants. Now their descendants are not much different from other white people. Do you think that there’s a possibility that Latin Americans might one day be fully welcomed here?

A: We have to look to history to answer that question. For example, Mexican Americans have been part of this country’s landscape since the mid-19th century. We can look and see the way Mexican Americans are still treated in the Southwest to see that there is still discrimination, that there is still poverty, and that there is still state violence. We can see it in terms of the attitudes towards those across the border if they’re Mexican, or from Central American countries, or from other Latin American countries for that matter. We can see that Puerto Rico has been part of the US since the Spanish American war of 1898, when Puerto Rico was taken as a prize of war along with Cuba and the Philippines by the United States.

The Puerto Rican migration really began in earnest following the Second World War. But consider how much time has passed since then. My father came to this country in 1939. It’s 2022. Look at where Puerto Ricans stand in this country now, in terms of discrimination, in terms of poverty, and in terms of state violence. I won’t say that there hasn’t been progress. The progress has been hard-won, and yet there’s still quite some way to go. Is there a possibility that one day everyone in the society will be fully accepted? Well, that is the goal. It may be Utopian, maybe we will never get there, but we have to keep walking in that direction. We have to keep striving for a more just society, for everybody no matter who they are. Discrimination is not acceptable against anyone, in any form, for any reason. We should all call upon our innate sense of justice. We can trust that instinct.

Q: On the same note, Puerto Rico is a Commonwealth of the United States with virtually no voting representation, and has been offered little to no assistance from the United States during times of its crises. What is your hope for a future of Puerto Rico: statehood, independence, or staying as a Commonwealth?

A: Independence. Independence is a prerequisite for self-government. It is a prerequisite for democracy. Every nation on earth deserves the right to self-government. Every people on earth deserves the right to self-government. There’s no reason why the people who live on that island should be any different from anybody else. It is a disgrace that the United States still has a colony in the Caribbean. It’s a disgrace that the condition of that colony we call Puerto Rico has not fundamentally changed in so many years. Yes, it is called a Commonwealth, which I see as a contradiction in terms. If anything, it has been the site of plunder. It was plundered by the sugar companies in the decades following the Spanish American War and now it’s being plundered by predatory capitalists.

In any event, independence for such a nation would have to be an independence that comes gradually, but also an independence that recognizes the debt this country owes to that country. It’s an independence that should be structured and subsidized so that economically it can work to stand that country back on its own feet and stop the drain of wealth that is taking place right now. And for that matter, it would require, again, a vision, a recognition that it is inherently unjust for one country to own another one, for any country to have what they call territories. That’s what “commonwealth” means. The word itself comes from the British lexicon. That’s my hope for the future. Whether we finally arrive is a matter of what happens next. You would’ve thought that Hurricane Maria in 2017 would have sparked this conversation here, but it didn’t. I think that Puerto Ricans in this country will have to amass enough political power and allies to force the attention of the federal government on this issue at long last. That may take some time.

Q: Related to that, we talked earlier about how immigration has been this political football kicked around by both parties, and frankly, American politicians neglect Puerto Rico. They neglect Latin American immigrants. When you are writing your poems, do you hope that your words, accounts and emotions could be heard by policy makers, by the general American public to raise awareness?

A: I have more faith in the policymakers of the future than I do in the policy makers of the present. I think there are policy makers, especially in the left wing of the Democratic Party, who are doing whatever they can, but I have more faith in the policy makers of the future. My feeling is, if I visit Exeter and I read my poems there, and I answer questions there, I am speaking to the policy makers of the future, not only in the United States, but around the world. I am speaking to future political leaders, future economic leaders, future leaders in education, future leaders in healthcare, future leaders in government, future hell-raisers and activists like my father used to be. I believe that poetry can plant seeds.

I’m not the one who makes the tree grow. I can’t water it. I won’t even be around when the tree finally reaches its fullest height, but I can plant the seeds. That’s what the poems do. That’s why, among other things, I was so gratified by the warmth and the strength of the response I received at Exeter. I was really deeply, deeply gratified. It always feels good to get such a generous response. But to get such a generous response there, among people I know will make a difference in the future and among people I know will take the torch and carry it on, that’s important to me.

Q: Thank you so much. There is hope in the future, and I believe that our generation does sympathize and empathize a lot more than previous generations might have done. I hope at least, in the future, that we might be able to make changes, that people might be able to listen, because if we don’t, it’s going to be too late, too little.

A: You’re right. This is your world now. This is the world you will inherit, and I regret that my generation has not done a better job of guarding and safe keeping that world for you. You’re right that the greatest hope for the future resides in the next generation. It is a more activist generation. It is a more compassionate generation. It is a more aware generation. Therefore, when I engage with you and I engage with that kind of audience, as I did at Exeter, it does give me hope and feeds into this cycle of energy. It enables me to go home and write the next poem.

Q: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I hopefully that this conversation has inspired something in both of us. I know it certainly has inspired me. We look forward to your future poems.

A: Thank you.