Latino Poetry

Editor: Rigoberto González

Publisher: The Library of America (2024)

For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures—a “tremendous continental MIXTURAO,” as the poet Tato Laviera writes. The Latino poetic imagination has flourished in the United States, distinguished by its profound engagement with pasts both historical and mythic; its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity; and its vision of a nation enriched by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants. Now, in an unprecedented anthology edited by the poet and critic Rigoberto González, Library of America brings together more than 180 poets whose works testify to the beauty, inventiveness, and power of this vital and expanding tradition.

The earliest poems here depict encounters—often violent—between European settlers and Indigenous peoples. Selections of Mexican American corridos and other song forms reveal the deep vernacular and musical roots of Latino poetry. As with all the Spanish-language poems in this anthology, the original texts are paired with English translations, many commissioned for this volume. Poems by notable émigrés in the United States stretching back to the nineteenth century—the Puerto Rican revolutionary Lola Rodríguez de Tió, the Cuban national hero José Martí, and later the Mexican modernist José Juan Tablada—show the global outlook of an art form that transcends borders to explore ideas of home and homeland in provocative ways.

Latino poetry’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century is captured in this anthology as never before. The 1960s saw the emergence of the Chicano Movement, whose poets, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Francisco X. Alarcón, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Lorna Dee Cervantes among them, expressed a radical new sense of cultural pride inspired by Indigenous conceptions of origin. Equally important were the Nuyorican poets and the performative works of figures like Pedro Pietri that would anticipate the rise of slam poetry. Influential poems by Judith Ortiz Cofer, Sandra María Esteves, Sandra Cisneros, and Gloria Anzaldúa highlight the distinctive and varied contributions of Latina poets to an evolving feminist movement.

Building on these foundations, a brilliant array of contemporary voices—Javier Zamora, Aracelis Girmay, Natalie Diaz, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, among many others—continues to spin out the tapestry of Latino poetry in daring new directions. Taking the measure of this current renaissance, the anthology culminates with the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first-century Latino poetry yet published.

Volume features include biographies of all the poets and helpful notes that provide additional line translations and illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.