INTRODUCTION No year in recent memory has been fuller of surprises and uncertainties than this 2020. In a similar way, this year’s Voces Latinas shaped itself without any predetermined genre, topic, or plan. In spite of this, most of the contributions tended to coalesce around three main areas and one of them deserved its own section, as I will soon explain. The first section, “Identities,” comprises introspective texts that reveal any singular, unitary identity as a fiction. Instead, these three poems reveal identity as something that breaks down, divides itself, or multiplies, depending on our interactions with the world and other people. Melissa Tudela’s “Mapa del alma” precisely examines our inner diversity: not only the separation between the one we are and the one others see, but also the gap between who we are and who we want to be, which additionally can be multiple: “Quiero ser muchas cosas; quiero soñar” (“I want to be many things; I want to dream”). We are legion, all of us and always. Evelyn Cordova’s “La soledad” is about the unique solitude of living with somebody who only makes us feel lonelier. If love can complement and enrich our identity, the lack of love can instead break us, make us smaller, make us feel lost and desperate, “como estar en un laberinto sin salida” (“as if I were in a labyrinth without an exit”). Genesis Amaro’s “Identidad/ Identity” explores another fractured inner world, this time not because of differing expectations or lack of love,
but because of the conflicting coexistence of different nationalities, languages, and cultures. Faced with a world that requires her to choose an identity, the speaker defiantly declares in two languages: “I am my own culture, / A culture that speaks both tongues. / A culture that is proud to be a mix.” The second section of this volume, “Love and Family,” sings to that rapturous force that connects us to each other, especially in its strongest and most visceral manifestation: the love between mother and children. Karla Santos’s “Amor de madre” describes that relationship lyrically and also realistically: this love has ups and downs, moments of strain and failure, which do not diminish its beauty at all. Quite the opposite, it is precisely this love’s complexity what transforms it into something “real y puro como el viento” (“real and pure like the wind”). Marisol Rivera’s “Hace 3 años” is about an adolescent mother who suffers fear and uncertainty until she discovers that her pregnancy and motherhood are capable of arousing the solidarity of an entire family and illuminating their existence, to the point that “nuestra vida no podría ser mejor” (“our life could not be better"). Bianca Ventura’s “Qué hermosa es mi madre” is an ode to a single and hardworking mother, who through countless sacrifices, including “sus tres trabajos y sus noches en vela” (“her three jobs and her sleepless nights”), becomes her children’s mother, father, and best friend, in addition to being their “más 6
