Not Your American Dream: Moncho Alvarado Interviews Willy Palomo

Moncho Alvarado interviews Willy Palomo, author of the Foreword Poetry Prize Winner, Wake the Others (Kalina Press/Glass Spider Publishing; 2023). The interview is part of a series with Latino Latinx authors.

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Alvarado: What themes or emotions resonated most deeply with you throughout the collection, and why? What changed over time in the writing of the collection?  

Palomo: When I was writing the book, I still had a lot of inner turmoil about intergenerational trauma. I was lucky enough to meet Anushka Sen during this time, and she clued me into the ways homeland readers frequently side-eye diaspora writers for their heartbroken sentimentality, the fog of nostalgia through which we see the homeland and only see mangos and sacrifice and more mangos. I realized through conversations with her and through reading more diasporic writers that a lot of my feelings, which felt so raw and personal to me, were in fact pretty much universal to diasporic writers from across the globe. Because of her, the collection challenges some of these cliched diasporic tropes: my mother inevitably becomes symbolic of El Salvador, but I cross out the word “land” in the subtitle and challenge that reading in poems like “Nine with a Knapsack” and “Things i will never tell my mother.”  I finished writing this book when I was 25, and it wasn’t published until I was 30. Since then, the rawness of my feelings has cooled. I know how I feel about what happened to my family and where I stand politically and historically. There’s a tender stoicism I view my heritage with now. Now, it feels more like a source of power than a wound. Since then, I also married that woman.

Alvarado: What is some advice that stuck with you in the writing of the collection?

Palomo: At some point while writing Wake the Others, I was talking to Javier Zamora, and I asked something stupid like “How do I make sure I do right by my mother’s stories?” Javi was like “dude, just talk to her.” My hand wringing makes me laugh now. So many of us live in a state of emotional cowardice. I was anxious about having my family read these poems when of course that was the whole point of the project: to prompt conversations about the war, migration, what we inherited, what we want to keep, and what we need to leave behind.

It’s our duty as writers to preserve our stories, to protect them against erasure or political misuse to the best of our abilities.

Willy Palomo

Alvarado: What poem or poems were the hardest for you to write and why?

Palomo: When the maternal side of my family learned I was writing a book about the war, they all told me I needed to talk to my Tia Tere, as it was understood that she had undoubtedly suffered the most during the war. I would argue that Tia Tere is the most joyful and spunky of all my tias, yet her life is nearly impossible to narrate without making it seem like one long fucked up story about trauma and injustice. Wake the Others includes my first attempts at writing about my Tia Tere, including a series of poems about how she survived a military abduction, a gangrape, and more during the Salvadoran Civil War. It’s impossible to do justice to that sort of experience through poetry. I felt like I would be doing a greater injustice in erasing her story, though. So what’s in the book is my best shot. I mythologized Tia Tere as Cipactli, a Mexica goddess torn apart to create the world. Cipactli’s story felt like the only myth I could find that could hold the magnitude of the crimes Tia Tere survived.  I realized later I got some factual elements of the story wrong, but I left them in the poems, partially because this fragmentation, this re-interpretation and misreading is part of the grapevine that happens from generation to generation and partially because I knew I would write about Tia Tere again someday. I have the completed draft of a novel about Tia Tere’s life now and a handful of fiction acceptances. Maybe one day you will read it. I don’t think it’s possible to “do justice” to experiences of such magnitudes. However, I also think it’s our duty as writers to preserve our stories, to protect them against erasure or political misuse to the best of our abilities. 

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Alvarado: Were there any specific poems or lines that lingered with you? What about them made an impact?

Palomo: Throughout the collection, I include epigraphs from “Sobre el mito de Santa Tecla” by Elena Salamanca and “I’ve Been Told That Without You, I’d Be Nothing” by Karina Alma. It was important for me to put myself in conversation with Salvadoran writers from the homeland and the diaspora. I grew up with teachers, poets, and scholars telling me whether through their words or their silence that my people did not have a meaningful literary history. Like many diasporic writers, my first encounters with writers I identified with shook me to my core. 

Salamanca’s poem deftly tells the story of an unconquerable woman. I was fascinated with the dismemberment in the poem and its parallels to the story of Cipactli. The man in the poem wants to possess the woman, to turn her into a sort of Cipactli. The woman staunchly refuses. Just like Cipactli, however, the woman in the poem is indomitable. I first encountered this poem in Teatro bajo mi piel / Theatre Under my Skin by Editorial Kalina. 

Alma’s poem repudiates the claim that the US “saved us.” I wanted to make clear that my mother and my family don’t owe the US anything. We wouldn’t even be in this country if it wasn’t for US interventions in Central America and the global war they have waged against working people and the promises of socialism. Even so, readers and reviewers keep trying to make Wake the Others about “The American Dream,” which is nothing more than an attempt to assimilate my mother’s story into one about the exceptionalism of the US empire. I first encountered Alma’s poem in The Wandering Song by Tia Chucha Press.  

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