¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets ed. by Melissa Castillo-Garsow (review)

¡Manteca! An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets, edited by Melissa Castillo-Garsow, is the first book to explicitly set out to anthologize the work of poets who self-identify as Afro-Latinx. Between its covers, the poetic affirmation of Blackness within the Latinx experience emerges as provocation, as a prompt for alternative genealogies, and as a challenge to simplified accounts of both Latinidad and Blackness. For Castillo-Garsow, and for many of the poets anthologized, a true reckoning of the implications of an Afro-Latinx horizon would lead to a demolition of the “often rigid boundaries between Latin@ and African American Poetry” and would also “center Blackness as an important aspect of Latin@ poetry and Latinidad as crucial to African American poetry” (xxii).

¡Manteca!’s enterprise is grounded on the academic labor of researchers such as Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, both of whom have chiseled a space within the academic discipline of Latinx studies for the Afro-Latinx. In fact, the anthology frames itself as an expansion of Jiménez Román and Flores’s project in The AfroLatin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2010) and, at its most basic level, uses their self-avowed unsatisfactory definition of the term, which emphasizes people “of African descent in the United States whose origins are in Latin America and the Caribbean” (xxi). The volume brings together the work of forty poets defined as such—twenty men and twenty women—among which we find names important to any account of Latinx poetry, such as Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera, Miguel Algarín, Lorenzo Thomas, Willie Perdomo, and Mariposa, as well as younger, up-and-coming talents such as Aja Monet, Bonafide Rojas, Aracelis Grimay, and Río Cortez.

A glance through the poets’ biographies results in numbers that attest to the further diversification of contemporary Latinx literary production: about 37% are affiliated with Puerto Rico or its diasporas; 17% identify mainly as belonging to New York or one of its boroughs; 12% claim the Dominican Republic or its diasporas; another 12% include no reference to biographical origins but to institutional affiliations such as place of study, employment, or residency; 5% are Afro-Mexicans; another 5% claim Panama or its diaspora; and the rest hail from Texas, California, Miami, and Salt Lake City. That said, if the sociological bent of Jiménez Román and Flores’s definition informs an aspect of Castillo-Garsow’s approach to Afro-Latinidad, it does not exhaust it. By turning to the poetry of authors such as Tato Laviera to offer a more thorough definition of Afro-Latinidad, the editor’s excellent introduction manages to make a polysemic horizon of the slippery category.

Surely, the “Afro-Latin@” in the title, as many of the contained poems attest, refers to the nuanced and complicated articulation of an experience, to an irreducible being in the world. But the concept of Afro-Latinidad can also be taken as a heuristic. In fact, one of the valuable uses of an anthology like the one put together by Castillo-Garsow is that it offers the possibility of exploring a wide-ranging corpus of poetry self-curated by authors to represent whatever “an anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets” meant for them during the period of the book’s gestation.

Castillo-Garsow explains that, in her query to potential collaborators, she offered no guidelines or definitions of what she thought the category meant. When asked for instruction, she “purposefully gave none.” She preferred to insist to the poets to “[j]ust send [her] [their] best work, the work that [they] feel represents [them] best as a poet, present and/or past” (xxxiv). When the collaborations began to flow, Castillo-Garsow notes that she “realized that the experiences and poetic expression of Afro-Latinidad were so diverse that [she] wouldn’t and couldn’t begin to...