Roy G. Guzmán (they/them) was born in Honduras, grew up in Miami, lives in Minnesota, and last year, Graywolf Press put out Catrachos, their first book of poems. In February, the book was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards in the poetry category, alongside Ray González, Danez Smith, and Torrin A. Greathouse. Roy debuted with authority, potency, rebelliousness, and nonconformity, but also with pain and sensitivity, with empathy and nostalgia and tenderness, with admiration. Catrachos is filled with references to their childhood in Miami and how it was for them, a poor Central American person, to grow up in a hostile environment. In a country that considered them, in their own words, “an afterthought” and “a second-class citizen.” Catrachos, in a way, serves as a testimony for the experience of the Central American diaspora in the United States. But it’s more. Mucho más.
In Roy’s poems we find, yes, family traditions, but also violence, resistance, what it was like for them to grow up as a queer kid. Catrachos is a beautiful and soothing portrait, not devoid of harsh and urgent criticism toward imperialism and racial violence. Roy, in their debut, speaks with curiosity and tenderness, while acknowledging the devastation caused by colonialism. Trailblazing, the gringos might say.
Last year, Roy and I spoke about all this. About Catrachos, their memories of Honduras, their family, their identity, about considering themselves “the other.” We spoke about Rubén Darío, X-Men, and the Pulse massacre—the basis of a poem they wrote called “Restored Mural for Orlando.” We spoke about being a poet, about being queer, Latinx, mestizx, mulatx, indigenous in the United States and in Honduras.
–José García Escobar
José García Escobar (JGE): First, I wanted to ask you about leaving Honduras and growing up in the U.S. I’m curious about the Central American communities in the U.S. You reference your childhood much in Catrachos, but I feel like it’s often indoors. Were there many Hondurans where you lived?
Roy G. Guzmán (RGG): Miami often gets talked about as this cosmopolitan city, as sort of Mecca of Latin America, right? The Miami that I grew up in was very different than sort of what you see in Texas, what you see in California, where there’s much more solidarity not only among Central Americans but also between Mexicans and Chicanxs people. That’s something that I did not grew up with in Miami. Miami, at least in the nineties, it was much more Caribbean. I grew up with a lot of Dominicans and Cubans. And I think that when it came to the Central American diaspora, many more Nicaraguans. We saw many more Nicaraguans because they were considered political refugees. This is important. There were many Cubans, and they were seen as political refugees. There were Nicaraguans, and they were also seen as political refugees. Then there was us. We were basically seen as immigrants that had made this transition because of economic instability, and so I felt like a second-class citizen. I was less desirable than the political refuge. The other thing was that many Hondurans I grew up with were undocumented. Add that to the equation. This means that our communities were very disconnected. So, I grew up in a place that treated me as an afterthought. It wasn’t until I left Miami and I moved to Chicago, for my undergrad, that I was exposed to a very different kind of resilient. There are conversations that I never had in Miami and suddenly I had, the minute I left. And off course years later when I ended up coming back to Miami, after my master’s, to teach, I was incredibly aware of the power dynamics, the imbalance, the issues with, not just representation, but visibility and invisibility. I was able to understand shame, internalized racism. I was able to understand things like white privilege. I was able to understand anti-Central American discrimination.
JGE: You arrived to Miami in the mid-nineties, right? This was before Hurricane Mitch devastated a large part of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua as well. After Mitch, did you see more Central Americans arriving to your community?
RGG: Not as many. But I did live the impact of the hurricane. My family, obviously, as part of the diaspora, one of the things that we do as Central Americans in the U.S. is we send money back to our families. So, after the hurricane we had to make sure that our family had a consistent form of funding, so they could get by. Our family would also tell us that they would see bodies left and right, bodies floating in the rivers, or people’s businesses completely destroyed.
JGE: Did you have access to Honduran literature growing up or when you first started writing?
RGG: No. I talk about this a lot, that the main Central American writer I grew up reading was Rubén Darío. He had a huge influence in me, even when I was in undergrad. I had to write a thesis, so I wrote it based on his work. I found myself translating his work. I think that translating him really helped me understand many things about my own culture. Another person that I grew up with—she’s sort of a muse in my life—is Rigoberta Menchú. But Rigoberta Menchú, unfortunately, as you know, in the U.S., because of her leftist views, was labeled as a communist and treated as the enemy. Even today. So, her book was one that I would go to in my secret places.
JGE: But you did have access to a lot of Honduran storytelling and oral tradition, right?
RGG: Absolutely. I give nods to oral tradition in my book. Oral tradition is something that in my academic work I definitely do a lot more of. Mythmaking, curanderismo, etc. My great-grandmother was a (. . .) well, she was a witch [laughs]. She was not a bruja, but she was a spiritual healer and a community healer, and that is very tied to oral traditions. In Miami that was very much the case too. The oral traditions were very much at the heart of how you would exchange information, how you would learn about people’s backgrounds. That’s how my ancestors, my parents would share stories about the wars, about exploitation. So, for me, they’re invaluable.
JGE: Was that also how you interacted and became aware of your past and Honduras?
RGG: I came to the U.S. when I was nine, so people often go, “So that means that you have all these memories from Honduras.” And no. My earliest memories go back when I was four. Five years of memories is not a lot. I don’t remember much. I did come to the U.S. with a pretty solid take of Spanish, and my mom made sure that I didn’t forget Spanish when I was in Miami. So, she made sure that I would write it, she made sure that I would speak it, she made sure that every single conversation I had with my family was in Spanish. So, I would say that because my mom made sure that I kept my Spanish, I had access to all of these stories and traditions and recipes. She made sure I had access to Honduras. My mother, she has such an impeccable memory. She’s able to build family trees, and to tell me where people live, and their personalities and family dynamics; so, to me that’s been a beautiful gift, to have someone like that by my side. Also, I must mention that I have a stack of pictures that were taken just days before I left Honduras. They move me. I haven’t had a chance to really to sit down and write about them. But I do find that looking at them, they open up a lot of memory.
JGE: Did you always write about Honduras?
RGG: I didn’t write about Honduras until I was in my twenties, and I think that was only until I went back to Miami. I started to teach, and I started thinking about writing as place of healing. But primarily as a way to access memories that didn’t come naturally to me, as a way to access things that felt like I had suppressed. But what also happened was that you’re constantly told that your stories don’t matter. People flat out will tell you these kinds of things, you know. The literary market, films, music, everything tells you, in some way, that no one’s interested in your voice, in your stories, and in your culture. So, you end up suppressing a lot. And I think that’s part of a project of assimilation, you know, and Americanization—to Americanize us. They want you to suppress those things, the things that make you vulnerable and tender in order to aspire to this “ideal” that it’s completely toxic and unnatural. As a kid, I thought that my life as a poor Latinx person, as a poor Honduran had no value. That it wasn’t interesting. Writing about Honduras was something that I wouldn’t bring to the table. I grew up with my mother and my stepdad. He’s Cuban. He was incredibly toxic and he would always tell me that Cuban culture had value, Cuban culture had finesse, that it was refined, and that my culture was the indio culture, and that the indios had no seat at the table.
JGE: So, when you started writing, what did you write about?
RGG: In some of my early poems, I knew I wanted to write about my mom, because she’s such a complicated figure for me. And I knew I wanted to write about growing up in Miami and about being queer. I knew I wanted to write about those things because I was interested in figuring out questions of shame. Then, when I started teaching, it was almost like students were mirrors to me. I met an Ecuadorian who was too ashamed to say that she was from Ecuador, because she felt like—again—no one wanted to hear about Ecuador. I would meet the students from Central America who were working different jobs, or were eighteen and had kids already, and they also felt like their stories, their communities, didn’t matter. So, I think that with my early poems, I was basically writing from a place, “Where did it all go wrong?” I think soon it became a process of recuperation. That’s when a lot of things started to make more sense to me.
JGE: Going back to what your stepdad told you, about how he thought Honduran culture was indio culture. There are a few references to indigenous culture and tradition, to your indigenous background in the book. Are you in touch with your indigenous background?
RGG: That’s a very complicated question [laughs]. I also identify as mestizx. I find that so many of what we call “mestizo” is really indigenous. The other thing too is that in Honduras—and you see this in Guatemala, too—that the minute you learn how to speak Spanish, that was your ticket out of the “Indian, native, indigenous identity.” One thing that’s very different in Honduras is that our culture has been highly influenced by blackness. I always had questions about being black, questions of being mulato, being trigueño. It’s not just about being Indian or being Spanish, it’s also about being mulato, being black, being caribeño, being from the city. Growing up in Honduras I was clearly told that we had sangre indígena, but we didn’t really talk about it. We never talked about Lencas, for example. We talked about them as “they’re extinct” or “they were taken by aliens,” which is weird because when you went to el centro, they were there! I know that I’m part indigenous. But I also know that we carry around this idea of mestizaje, which continues to put the European culture above indigenous cultures. El ser indígena, to be indigenous, to claim indigeneity, is very weird because after years of having been separated from that part of my identity, I realize that we must also acknowledge the poverty, displacement, and marginalization that affects indigenous communities. And for me, to claim to be indigenous, we must also question how and why we start claiming whiteness, Europeanness, as “the ideal.”
JGE: Was it ever addressed in your house, the fact that you were part indigenous?
RGG: It was addressed because my maternal great-grandmother was indígena, the one who was a spiritual leader. That’s part of my mother’s past as well. It was a something that we grew up with.
One of my uncles married a woman whose background is also indígena and claims indigeneity. So, I grew up in a household that knew these things but didn’t really do much else. Like celebrating things, we didn’t do that. Also, my cousins, they are the kids of a Black woman. So, again, being indigenous, ser mulata, ser negra, was always part of the family, but we never really did things about it or to honor it.
JGE: And when you write about this in Catrachos, it’s not told explicitly. I picked it up because the references are familiar to me, because Honduras and Guatemala share a lot. When you were writing it, weaving indigeneity in Catrachos, did you mean to not be explicit about it?
RGG: One of the poems in Catrachos took me several drafts or several revisions before I understood indigeneity as a source of strength, rather than shame. It’s the poem about my great-grandmother, Rita. There are other references where it seems like I contend with it. But I’m thinking of doing a little bit more with that as I prepare to work on memoir-based essays.
JGE: Now that we’re talking more about Catrachos. I wanted to talk about “Restored Mural for Orlando.” How did the attack affect you personally?
RGG: It was very difficult. To me, writing about it is similar to writing about Hurricane Mitch. I was in Minnesota when it happened, the massacre, and I had—I still have—friends in Miami who lost friends there. I was also surprised to know people here in Minnesota also had friends that died at Pulse. It was very difficult. The older I get, the more I can reconcile with this idea that I’m going to access my past and my culture through death, like the photos I mentioned earlier. I’ve had to reconcile with that. Had I made peace with that? No. I had to reconcile with that because my academic work and poetic work deals so much with queer-trans violence. And yet when something like Pulse happens, you almost . . . You know, I’m not desensitized. It affected me. I cried a lot. It was very difficult because the night before, something like that, I had been to a club. And the idea of associating that much violence with a space where you have fun, where you go to flirt, where you try to look your best, you know—a place of possibilities and to see those possibilities suddenly just vanish, that is something that fundamentally has changed me. I don’t think that I necessarily recuperated from that. Many people continue to grieve this. One challenge that I have in grieving the victims of Pulse has been that—this to me is a sentiment of capitalism—the notion that death happens, you write about it, and you have to move on. And for me that is so disrespectful to death and to the victims. Los muertos siguen, you know? They’re still here. Whereas, in this capitalist vision, we must move on to the next topic, move on to the next crisis, move on to the next massacre. This takes me back to what I said earlier, why some stories deserved to be told while others don’t. Why can’t we tell our stories? This is one of the problems of invisibility: essentially telling communities that they don’t matter and that their stories don’t matter.
JGE: You don’t address the actual shooting. You address it tangentially. The shooting frames your personal history. You start with “seconds before the shooter sprays bullets on my brothers & sisters’ bodies” and then soon move to your childhood in Miami. Was that also part of grieving for you?
RGG: Yes, absolutely. Especially with something so public as the Pulse massacre. In the process of writing the poem, I had to ask myself, “What is my position in all of this? Am I trying to exploit this tragedy? Am I trying to, you know, trivialize the tragedy? What exactly am I trying to do with it?” At the end I had to ask myself, “What is this poem ultimately about?” And for me it was really about how do we bring witness to the people, and the spaces around us, and people we call “families,” that are constantly being extinguished by the State. That to me that was a very important thing to address. So that’s why I had to go to my own past. One of the things that came up as I was writing this was the idea of outing people who were in the closet. Aside from the physical violence, you know, the shooting, this is also a violent act. I was not in the closet when this happened, but my parents didn’t really know about me. So, I thought, “When the book comes out, my family is going to know about this, my mom is going to know about this. What do I want them to know about this?” I wanted her and people to know just how tenuous and how delicate life becomes for someone who’s trans and queer.
Seconds before the shooter sprays bullets on my brothers & sisters’
bodies / the DJ stops the record from spinning / & I am interestedin that brief dazzle of pink light / how it spreads on iron-pressed
shirts until they turn purple / how a gun is a heart that has forgottento sing. The rapture in a stranger’s eyes / a candid take on resurrection.
You visit Orlando to fantasize about the childhood you didn’t have /even though I grew up in Florida the trip was a luxury because I grew
up poor & when I finally could afford it I took my parents to UniversalStudios /
(Fragment of Restored Mural for Orlando)
JGE: As I said, I’m familiar with a lot of the references in Catrachos. Even the title itself. I didn’t know what it meant until I read your book, but I imagine it’s a new word for the average English reader. You also mention torrejas and Cantinflas, pulperías, and so on. But I was wondering about the “Note on the title” and the other notes. Were they your idea or was it your editor’s idea?
RGG: They were my idea. It started with the title, which I came up with after I had written some of the poems in the book. I wanted the readers to understand that despite the fact that this book goes into a lot of personal experiences, the larger question is, “How does a queer person, a queer person of color, a queer Central American survive in a world that is constantly being monitored and surveilled by U.S. imperialism?” I wanted to hold the U.S. accountable for causing so much harm, and I needed to put that in the title. I didn’t want to put the “Note on the title” at the beginning because I wanted readers to read the book and then think, in retrospect, what they had read, with that new information. And then I wrote the other notes because I wanted readers to explore the different kinds of influences that are on the book. One thing that I really appreciated about working with Graywolf is that they reminded me—and I reminded myself—that my job with this book wasn’t to translate culture to an American audience. My job was to, in many ways, either invite or to hold accountable, with my audience. So, I thought that the note section would be interesting for people to engage with history, art, music, and movies, and all kinds of things that went into the formation of this book.
An unabridged version of this interviewed was published in Spanish by Revista Impronta.
Roy G. Guzmán was born in Honduras and raised in Miami. Their work has been featured in Kenyon Review, Verse of April, and The Best American Poetry blog. Guzmán has earned degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the Honors College at Miami Dade College. They are the recipient of a 2016–2017 Minnesota State Arts Board grant, the 2016 Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry, two Pushcart prize nominations, four Best of the Net nominations, and a 2015 Gesell Award honorable mention in fiction. In 2017, Guzmán was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Guzmán lives in Minneapolis, where they are pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota.
José García Escobar is a journalist, fiction writer, translator, and former Fulbright scholar from Guatemala. He got his MFA in creative writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in The Evergreen Review, Guernica, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region.
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