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<\/p>\nEdited by Anjanette Delgado
\nUniversity of Florida Press, 2021
\nHardcover, $25.00, 270 pages<\/p>\n
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\u00bfDe d\u00f3nde eres? Where are you from? It\u2019s a simple question that\u2019s difficult for some of us to answer. A new anthology, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness,<\/em> considers the question and offers responses from Latinx authors who have made the Sunshine State home. Edited by Anjanette Delgado, the collection features original and previously published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by award-winning writers like Jennine Cap\u00f3 Crucet, Jaquira D\u00edaz, and Richard Blanco; luminaries like Judith Ortiz Cofer and Reinaldo Arenas; and other emerging talents. In Home in Florida,<\/em> these writers construct a literary identity\u2014one that simultaneously inhabits and traverses cultural and geographic borders.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Home in Florida<\/em> shares forty-two works from thirty-three writers across the Latin American diaspora who have been uprooted from their homes for personal and political reasons. The anthology is grounded in this concept of \u201cuprootedness,\u201d or the experience of living in an environment that isn\u2019t your own. \u201cAs with so many things,\u201d says Delgado, the term resonates differently in Spanish and English. In Spanish-language literary culture, \u201cla literatura del desarraigo\u201d is prolific; in English, it\u2019s rarely addressed. \u201cEven the word carries inside the tension of seeming to mean one thing in Spanish and something never quite the same in English, the word itself with its dual meaning the very essence of the world in which a Latinx immigrant lives,\u201d she observes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The works in the collection speak to this duality. Though Home in Florida<\/em> is mostly an English-language anthology, it includes Spanish works in translation and texts that switch, sometimes self-consciously, between languages. In Richard Blanco\u2019s poem \u201cTranslation for Mam\u00e1,\u201d the speaker considers what it means to write about his Cuban mother\u2019s experiences in English. When he translates her life into artistic expressions she can\u2019t access, whom is he writing for? What gets lost in translation when an immigrant\u2019s experience becomes art? Blanco embeds Spanish translations of his English verses below each stanza, until the last stanza, where Spanish becomes the primary language and English is the language in translation. \u201cEn ingl\u00e9s \/ has aprendido a adorar tus p\u00e9rdidas igual que yo,\u201d concludes the speaker. These p\u00e9rdidas, or losses, have dual meanings: the mother\u2019s loss of her homeland and the son\u2019s loss of his mother\u2019s tongue. The poem articulates the disconnect felt by two people living in between languages.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That disconnect isn\u2019t just linguistic. It\u2019s cultural, too. In Natalie Scenters-Zapico\u2019s poem \u201cNotes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,\u201d two opposing voices are juxtaposed in parallel texts with offset lines that literally and metaphorically break. \u201cI write my body, as border between \/ this rock & the absence of water,\u201d says the speaker on the left. \u201cWe have some bad hombres here \/ &\u00a0we\u2019re going to get them out,\u201d<\/em> says the speaker on the right. The first speaker\u2019s self-image contradicts the second speaker\u2019s grotesque distortion of her community. Even the punctuation is wonky. Read in tandem, the two voices reveal more than the sum of their parts.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is true, too, of how Delgado curates Home in Florida,<\/em> grouping pieces in suggestive combinations. She contrasts Ra\u00fal Dopico\u2019s essay \u201cMiami Is Cuban,\u201d for instance, with Mia Leonin\u2019s essay \u201cHow to Name a City,\u201d which begins with Barack Obama\u2019s claim that \u201c\u2018[Miami] is a profoundly American city.\u2019\u201d Here, Delgado presents two tales of a city\u2014Dopico\u2019s Miami that \u201cbeats with a decidedly Cuban soul,\u201d and Leonin\u2019s Miami, where \u201cminiature flags from thirteen different islands wave at you from rearview mirrors.\u201d In other places, Delgado\u2019s arrangement illustrates likeness. She pairs Frances Negr\u00f3n-Muntaner\u2019s short story \u201cThe Ugly Dyckling\u201d with Jaquira D\u00edaz\u2019s essay \u201cMonster Story,\u201d for example. Both are fairy tale retellings with a Latinx spin\u2014Negr\u00f3n-Muntaner reimagines a European classic as a queer, Caribbean fable, and D\u00edaz tells an American coming-of-age story inspired by Latin American folklore.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Immigrant narratives intersect in revealing ways throughout Home in Florida.<\/em> In Ana Men\u00e9ndez\u2019s short story \u201cThe Apartment,\u201d the narrator returns to Miami after her apartment tenant dies by suicide. She meets the neighbors to learn his story and hears, instead, their own tales of uprootedness, trauma, and isolation. The haunting stories of these lonely Cuban, Argentinian, Afghan, and Lebanese refugees mirror each other, revealing how often immigrants\u2019 experiences overlap, even when they build imaginary walls to keep each other out. This self-imposed distance is echoed in Caridad Moro-Gronlier\u2019s poem \u201cWet Foot, Dry Foot, 2002,\u201d where the speaker\u2019s Cuban-American family silently watches Haitian refugees arrive in Miami on TV, ignoring how they, too, once sought asylum here. \u201cWe do not speak of travesties,\u201d says the speaker. \u201cOnly human when it comes to our own.\u201d Their stories of uprootedness chart a similar course but end in different destinations thanks to America\u2019s asymmetrical immigration policy, which privileges certain people above others.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Whose humanity do we acknowledge? Whose stories get told? In many ways, Home in Florida<\/em> represents a diverse spectrum of Latinx experience. The book is a rich sancocho of culture\u2014a blend of writers from different national, generational, socioeconomic, and language backgrounds, as well as those who identify as BIPOC and LGTBQ+. The collection\u2019s diversity is deliberate. Delgado includes the work of recent immigrants whose \u201cstories are the ones not often found in English-language anthologies\u201d because too often these \u201cwriters are surviving and not writing.\u201d She takes care to prioritize writers\u2019 lived experiences, choosing to organize the collection \u201cin the same experiential way in which rerootedness might occur, the emotional weight of each piece guiding the way,\u201d instead of chronologically. And she mixes new voices with established writers, creating refreshing and unexpected flavor combinations.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For all Home in Florida<\/em> includes, there are some things left behind. This may be inevitable in an anthology that is the first and only one of its kind. A single vessel can\u2019t possibly hold everyone. While the collection features writers from across the Latin American diaspora, the majority of its contributors are Cuban or Cuban American. The anthology elucidates their lived experiences and history in luminous detail. Stories like Guillermo Rosales\u2019 \u201cThe Halfway House\u201d show what life in Florida was like for Cuban exiles who fled Castro\u2019s regime in the 1970s, while essays like Chantel Acevedo\u2019s \u201cPiercing My Daughter\u2019s Ears in Alabama\u201d reveal how those families have evolved a generation or two later. The space the book gives these stories isn\u2019t equally distributed, though, creating an imbalance that can sometimes feel like an exclusion. In Home in Florida,<\/em> we witness the aftermath of the Mariel boatlift but not Hurricane Maria, for instance.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Curiously, for a book titled Home in Florida,<\/em> not every piece is rooted in Florida. Occasionally the state disappears entirely before re-emerging in the next story. When Florida shows up, it\u2019s drawn sharply and brightly, though, realistically rendered even if it\u2019s magically imagined. Mercifully, the collection is careful to avoid the Disney caricatures of this place and its people that too often sap the popular imagination.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Instead, we get a view of Florida\u2014where more than a quarter of the population is Latinx\u2014that is usually obscured. We savor Liz Balmaseda\u2019s Hialeah, where the distinctive flavors of Cuba refuse \u201cto melt into any damn pot.\u201d We experience the suburban wilderness of Yaddyra Peralta\u2019s Carol City, \u201cthe verdancy of weeds, the bougainvillea overtaking the wobbly chain link fence.\u201d And we see Patricia Engel\u2019s \u201cLa Ciudad M\u00e1gica\u201d sparkle brilliantly\u2014from the manicured avenues of Coral Gables where bejeweled ladies lunch and bemoan their Latinx nannies, to the unnamed streets a few miles south, where you can \u201cfind people selling fruit out of tin shacks\u201d and have \u201ca spell cast by a brujo so you\u2019ll be lucky in money and in love.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The anthology doesn\u2019t illuminate all parts of the Sunshine State with the same clarity, however. Miami shines brightest. So bright its light casts a shadow on the rest of the state. Home in Florida<\/em> rarely ventures outside of Miami-Dade County, and when it does, it\u2019s from a distance. Cities with large Latinx populations like Tampa and Orlando are mentioned only briefly, as the writers speed past on their way to somewhere else. The rest of the state is invisible. In an anthology that is otherwise so clear-eyed and attentive, this silence is loud. Where are the writers who have planted roots in majority-minority, Central Florida suburbs like Kissimmee or Latinx-populous, agricultural towns like Haines City and Belle Glade? What about their experiences?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Representation matters, and yet within the intimate space this anthology imagines, place and culture are less important than the writers\u2019 lived experience of place and culture. Florida is a useful terrain to map out these experiences, but\u2014as the collection repeatedly reminds us\u2014its borders are fluid. In Home in Florida,<\/em> Florida is more a state of mind than an actual state. It is the yearning for home, the hunger of hardship, and, eventually, the hard-earned hope of Nilsa Ada Rivera, who reflects in \u201cI Write to Mami about Florida\u201d: \u201cSlowly, I\u2019m realizing Florida is my home too. Despite all the years of trying to leave, I\u2019m still here, adapting, evolving, and surviving. The fight to survive and the constant evolution are common themes for almost everyone in Florida, a constant reinvention of who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Impermeable identities don\u2019t last long in a place where the tides are always changing. What endures instead are the experiential bonds connecting the people who call, and have called, this place home. This anthology’s writers\u2014and potential readers\u2014may be homesick and heartbroken, but they aren\u2019t alone. From this literary landscape sown with tales of loss, grief, and loneliness, a community blossoms. After all, that\u2019s what a collection is: a place where individual stories can converse, where the odd piece suddenly seems to fit, and where two different idioms understand each other. The book becomes a kind of communal plot, where these writers\u2019 experiences of uprootedness vine together and grow toward the light. In Home in Florida,<\/em> Delgado and the writers of this inventive anthology have cultivated a home of their own making\u2014one that can go anywhere and never lose its roots.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Delgado and the writers of this inventive anthology have cultivated a home of their own making.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":6910,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6909","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n