Loving Forward Anyway

During a time of intensifying carceral peril and state violence in the United States—a time when political rhetoric is distorting, erasing, and dehumanizing many groups of people in order to lay the groundwork for our incarceration and expulsion, a time when ICE is breaking records for deaths in custody—literature still offers us the power to write back, to testify, to offer an alternative version, to leave a different record, to archive our resistance. All of us are threatened when the foundational principles of a livable society are attacked. Literature lets us say no. Lets us say something else entirely.
            When I was a child in Miami, my father never took us to that most iconic of the city’s locations, Miami Beach, where signs that said No Dogs or Cubans still hung in the windows of businesses. I first went there in my thirties alone, after he had died by suicide, after the signs had come down.
            As the new nonfiction editor of Prairie Schooner, a position for which I’m more grateful than I can say, my first act is editing this portfolio of Latinx flash memoir. In a moment when official rhetoric repeatedly, absurdly mischaracterizes Latinx people as criminals (drug dealers, rapists) and economic parasites rather than the hardworking economic motor and vibrant creators of culture that we have always been in this country, it feels urgent to generate and preserve a profusion of new literary counternarratives that document and memorialize the complex truths of Latinx lives. Particularly at a time when terms like Latinx, inclusion,and diversity are being expunged from academic-institutional websites across the country, Prairie Schooner recommits to its long history of platforming all voices.
            This compendium of Latinx flash memoir is built from generosity, intimacy, and risk. Thirty-two established and emerging writers wrote new, true stories that refract the bitter light of this moment through the extraordinary everyday grace and courage that laces our lives, vulnerably revealing the loss and grief—cultural, familial, personal—we carry, the fears we face, the labor we perform, the labors our ancestors performed, the tenderness we feel, the dreams and desires we still harbor, the love we keep dredging up from within a fearscape of pain.
            The authors featured here range from long-time heavyweights in the field like Sandra Cisneros and Luis J. Rodríguez, to award-winning poets and fiction writers, to nonfiction powerhouses, to noted literature scholars publishing personal narratives for the very first time. Distinguished scholars from other fields—historians, a sociologist, a political scientist, and more—craft personal narratives they’ve never shared before.
            Throughout the portfolio, these writers are sustained by the love of nature (a canyon, a geranium), by the enduring love for family, and—when these mainstays fail—by the radical, defiant act of self-love, a love that furiously and relentlessly uncoils to embrace and fuel our whole community.
            Arranging these accounts of lived experience next to one another was a puzzle and a pleasure: seeing how they can shimmer in juxtaposition, how they creak and groan and softly sigh against each other, how—when bound together—they tell a story greater than the sum of our parts.
            As we do.
            The earnest beauty, muscularity, and delicacy of these works—combined with subtle yet sharp political critique—resonate with the portfolio’s extraordinary visual art by Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: gorgeous color, fluid lines, and exquisite technique that reel us in with their lush beauty, only to reveal devastating stories of the long and brutal fallout of colonialism, a colonialism that continues to persist in the fantasies of those who would expunge us from the body politic. Closing the portfolio with more visual art is Ana Menéndez, long known for her dazzling fiction, who tries her hand here at graphic memoir with a keen political edge.
            All of these works humble me, heal me, and teach me. They take my breath—while (paradoxically) giving me the oxygen I need. They let me know I’m not alone.
            The honesty and poetry of these texts generously open the interiorities, imaginaries, and lived histories of these thinkers to our gaze.
            May our gaze be equally generous and gentle, recognizing the privilege it is to look.
            May we be willing to learn from what we see.

Joy Castro is the author of the memoir The Truth Book, the essay collection Island of Bones, the fiction collection How Winter Began, and the literary thrillers Hell or High Water, Nearer Home, Flight Risk, and One Brilliant Flame. Editor of Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, coeditor of Tears and Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West, and founding editor of the book series Machete at the Ohio State University Press, she teaches literature, creative writing, and Latinx studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.