In 2015, a group calling itself the Undocupoets Campaign launched a petition to get poetry publishers to drop the proof of U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residency requirements for literary contests and grants. The initiative was widely successful, and nearly a decade on, Undocupoets continues as a nonprofit advocacy organization. The group’s forthcoming anthology, Here to Stay (Harper Perennial, Sept.), includes poetry and prose from more than 50 writers who are or have been undocumented, or who belong to mixed-status families. Coeditors Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin spoke with PW about the book’s timeliness and personal resonance.
How did Undocupoets come to be?
MHC: As an undocumented person, it’s
ingrained in you to read the fine print, so
I knew from the time I got serious about writing that many contests barred us from entering. On the eve of finishing my MFA it was like, “Okay, what do I do now?” It was out of anger and disbelief that no one else seemed to know about these exclusions that we [Hernandez Castillo and fellow cofounders Christopher Soto and Javier Zamora] started circulating the petition. From there it snowballed.
What was it like for you to discover Undocupoets?
JJ: I didn’t find out I was undocumented
until my senior year of high school when I started applying for college. There was so much silence about our experience; there was no cultural vocabulary to describe it. When I saw the petition circulating, I reached out to say, “I grew up undocumented too. What can I do to help?”
EL: I cried when I first heard about it. I
genuinely didn’t know there were more undocumented poets out there, enough to make a population. This touched on a part of my identity that had had the biggest impact on my life and was also the most painful, which I spent the most time trying to hide. It felt cathartic to be able to externalize that and think about myself as undocumented and a writer.
Do you see any literary commonalities among the writers in the anthology?
EL: One of the most striking things we found is the rewriting of narratives, of poets trying to reshape their histories and their lives through poems. Very often there was also an exquisite awareness of the reader: there’s a suspicion and fear of the general public, but there’s also this desire to be heard and to reach
out to the reader. It’s a very complicated
relationship.
What does it mean to have this book come out during an election season in which immigration is such a polarizing issue?
EL: If we could be even a small brick against the tide of what I fear is the kind of darkness that may lay ahead of us, especially for immigrants, that would be one of the highest callings.
MHC: The chance of changing someone’s mind is less on my radar than the chance of clarifying our situation for those who have some sort of empathy already. People don’t know how low the bar is in terms of how we’re treated, how prevalent not being documented is, and how it dominates every aspect of your life.
JJ: The very act of this anthology is optimistic. By asking our contributors to write statements of poetics and to write through how their experience matches up, we’re demanding that people take this work seriously. This anthology imagines a future and a literary landscape with us in it. It’s the bottom floor to just ask people to look at us and contend with our humanity. We’re already here and we’re making serious art.
