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- Four Latino poets explore what it means to belong to yourself, challenging stereotypes and centering community power and dignity through their work.
- The poets — a teaching artist, educator, cultural leader and gentrification chronicler — discuss autonomy, sovereignty, and poetry’s role in sparking change and healing.
- Join the panel April 19 at the L.A. Times Festival of Books to hear how poetry can bridge communities and reclaim power.
What does it mean to belong to yourself? To be autonomous? To have sovereignty and power?
When curating this poetry series for De Los, I thought of the poets I know who speak most to Latines and their respective autonomies. I reached out to writers who not only I admire but also create work beyond beautiful words.
Audre Lorde once stated that poetry “lays the foundation for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” So, I reached out to some poets I know — who not only do the tremendous work of creating bridges themselves, but giving their readers the power to do the same.
Matthew “Cuban” Hernandez is a teaching artist who works with youth in detention centers throughout Los Angeles, providing them with tools to express themselves in ways that heal. Karla Cordero is a Chicana educator whose work lives in our borderlands and bridges community into artistry by curating open mics and an online poetry journal. Sonia Guiñansaca is a queer Indigenous cultural leader who has been at the forefront of undocumented writers and their celebration and is the editor of an undocumented writers anthology. Then there’s myself, the daughter of Salvadoran refugees, who continuously writes about Los Angeles before and after gentrification.
Our poetry is centered on the people it speaks to — in our unified strength, our dignity, our sovereignty. It challenges with questions like: What makes someone a someone worth caring for? What can we give each other, other than ourselves? What happens when no one goes missing? How can anyone take what is already ours?
My hope is that these poems offer us a collective balm; an anthem; a landing; a new geography; a bullhorn declaring our power, and above all: our determination to belong, to care for each other, today and always, no matter what the future holds.
Editors note: Join Yesika Salgado, Matthew “Cuban” Hernandez, Karla Cordero and Sonia Guiñansaca on Sunday, April 19, at 12:50 p.m. at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The poets will appear in the panel “Poetry, Power & Sovereignty” at the De Los Stage, where they will dive into what it means to be autonomous, to be your own supreme authority, to belong to yourself, the land(s) and people you choose. A poetry reading will follow.
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Yesika Salgado
Blood Right
I used to sell knives door to door
worked a parking garage booth
was a salesperson in a paper goods store
developed 30-minute film
called folks about refinancing their homes
nannied a pair of twins
became head cashier at another drug store
I’d take the bus to each job
all of them out west
in Santa Monica
or Palisades
or Westwood
I used to commute
three to four hours every day
I know this city
the way I know heartache
I can taste it
before I can give it words
I mourned my father on the 704
I got my test results about infertility on the 302
I wrote the first poem in my first book on the 201
broke up with plenty of boyfriends
over the phone at bus stops
made my way to the beach
contemplated walking out into the water
but I always came back on the last bus
counted the purple trees on my block
kissed my mother’s cheek goodnight
gentrification tried to tell me
that what once loved me
can no longer love me back
and I laughed
you can’t take what’s in my blood.
Yesika Salgado is a Los Angeles-born Salvadoran poet who writes about her family, her culture, her city and her fat body. A leading voice in poetry, both in performance and social media, with a readership of over 200,000, Salgado is a two-time National Poetry Slam finalist, a Macondo Workshop fellow and the recipient of the 2020 International Latino Book Award in Poetry. She is an internationally recognized body-positive advocate, as well as a writer of past columns Suelta for Remezcla and Relaciones for R29’s Latine platform Somos. Yesika is also the author of the best-selling poetry collections Corazón (2017), Tesoro (2018) and the award-winning Hermosa (2019).
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Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez
What We Give
Our existence is give and take.
When I give you my name,
I give you the hope of my ancestors.
My mother’s prayers for a better
anything. More of what she was given
for me. She gave some of her magic.
Called it intuition, or a name
best pronounced while laughing.
Giving is all we really have,
all anyone can do without wasting
a life away. Giving time
when nothing else will fill the hole
sorrow carves in the bone.
Giving an ear when someone must be heard
to be healed. Giving appreciation
to your own smile
when the symbol of loneliness looks like a dirty mirror.
We give because someone in power said not to.
Said they’ll ticket us for feeding the house-less.
Fine us for our dance
fine us for our food or how we love
or where we exist. Deport us for our celebrations.
Detain us for our humanity.
illustrators of suffering tying us down
with the same cliches they’ve told would save us.
Tying us down with a debt, increasing
faster than anyone can pay, tying us down
with a justice system often blind
to the word restorative.
Taking,
while with seemingly nothing,
we give.
Yelling
while we give.
Pointing and naming us fools
when they only know take.
Taking
because we would rather throw away
than to give.
Rather sell for money not needed
than to give.
Rather remain
archaic and barbaric
than find a better option to give.
Rather make someone earn it
than to give.
Imagine
if we only watered a rose
when it blooms.
It would only be thorns.
It would only be seen as something that could hurt.
Only an aggressive weed existing to be plucked.
But when we bushel.
When we bouquet.
What a gift we are.
We a beautiful thing
to give.
Matthew “Cuban” Hernandez is a poet, emcee, speaker, actor and performance coach from Jacksonville, Fla. A teaching artist for more than 15 years, Matthew has spent the last 10 years working in youth detention centers across Los Angeles County, currently serving as the director of camp programming for Street Poets Inc. In addition, he is a lead teacher and co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement. Cuban is the author of the poetry collections 3032 (2018) and All Brown Boys Get Trumpets (2024), which recently received honorable mention for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Award at the International Latino Book Awards.
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Karla Cordero
Poem As Sanctuary City Or Let Us Remember
Remember when ice was but the icecream
& icepops our paleteros raised us on.
Remember Icecube’s classic song blasting
out the boombox declaring, Today was a good day!
Remember the Icy Hot spread thick across
our parents’ prideful backs after a twelve hour shift at work.
Remember the iceberg we watched safely from our TV screens,
rooting for Rose & Jack to live because don’t we all want
a little proof we can outlive any tragedy.
Remember the ice rink & the ice skates
that taught us we too can be gods & walk across water.
Before ICE fed the gators of Alcatraz.
Before ICE tried to ice age our bodies into fossil.
Before ICE isolated families from our families.
Take us back when ice only birthed raspados & sweet syrup.
Take us back when icebreakers in classrooms broke
the walls of student silence, turned bridges,
turned spaces into — all are welcome here.
Take us back when the hosewater spilled an ice cold river
down the driveway & wiped out an entire
chalk family from existence & our children knew how to draw
a community back in the shape of rainbows, hopscotch & butterfly.
Take us back when ice was but a cube in the warmth of a child’s hand.
Turn water.
Turn puddle.
Turn vapor.
Then came a good rain.
The only reason to celebrate in carne asada & Bad Bunny
& we dance from sunrise to sunset
& at the end of the day we tuck our loved ones safely
to dream into the night, their heartbeats beating
in unison to the rhyme of Icecube’s Today was a good day!
& no one goes missing.
& no one goes missing.
& no one ever goes missing.
Karla Cordero is a Chicana storyteller, educator and author of the poetry collection, How to Pull Apart the Earth, winner of the San Diego Book Award and an International Latino Book Award finalist. She has received the COURAGE to WRITE grant from the deGroot Foundation and is a California Arts Fellow. Cordero serves as executive director for the arts nonprofit Glassless Minds and teaches creative writing at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College.
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Sonia Guiñansaca
Somebody, my body, home bodies and homelands
What homeland is to us may just be geography to others
1492 the first globe is designed by an explorer
Imagine them molding this spherical object
The cartography mapping out the terrains they want to conquer, discover,
Eat, make commodities, make money
I look at those old globes and I see nothing so unimaginative
I look at my body and I look at my mother and I look at my grandma and I look at my neighbor
And I see mountains, rivers, trains, and buildings
From South Central, to Harlem, to Kañar
The palm trees, the toyon, the eucalyptus
The parrots roaming free through LA and Chimborazo
We are natural earthbound
They can keep the globe displace us from our homelands
But we have our cultures our languages our music our foods
Our bodies will always be homes
this is a home body this is home land this is my body
Our bodies against 740 anti-trans bills Our bodies against prisons and detention centers
They always want to make us unlawful illegal conquerable
What makes a 5 year old illegal?
Is it the drawings done with peeling crayons?
Is it the spiderman backpack?
Is it the dreaming done in languages that are not English?
Is it the difference in bedtimes,
and how some are wishing on stars and
others wishing bombs would stop?
What makes my home not a home to you?
What makes somebody someone and others just
In 1492 they tried to capture earth
Tried to measure my skin, my face, my arms, my lips, my hair
Mount our children, our people, our families, our neighbors into something so basic
They wanted a globe and ended up with nothing
And we kept living
Sonia Guiñansaca is an internationally acclaimed poet, and cultural strategist with over 17 years of experience in movement and cultural organizing. Beginning their career as part of the first wave of young people to publicly come out as undocumented, they helped build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the U.S. and co-founded artistic projects by and for undocumented artists. Their debut self-published poetry book, Nostalgia & Borders (2016), was recently translated into Kichwa and Spanish by Severo Editorial as Nostalgia Y Fronteras (2023). They co-edited the award-winning anthology, Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices On Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings (HarperCollins 2023).
