Rosa Chávez is La Poeta here, but she defies definition. The Mayan artist and writer has walked a variegation of paths and left her indelible mark on scores of people and places, ensuring that her legacy will be a monument to curiosity, surprise, and multiplicity. In the following profile, Editor-at-Large José García Escobar speaks to the Guatemalan La Poeta and her ever-widening world of poetics, which trespass the page—and language—to take on other numinous forms.
La Poeta walks towards a small table. She lays a sonaja, a tiny drum, some colorful ronrones, and a few whistles made of clay upon it, as the electric sounds of a turntable fill the room. Soon, from the speakers, the voice of Berta Cáceres comes: “We are fighting to protect the rights of indigenous people,” and her speech echoes across the small room of a school in rural El Salvador. “We have struggled for more than five hundred years,” Berta goes on. “We have always lived as a community,” steps in the voice of the indigenous leader Lolita Chávez, “and our community includes mankind, but also plants, birds, fish too, and all the animals.” Wearing a shirt and a pair of small glasses, the DJ turns the knobs to move the musical landscape, which carries the activists’ voices.
“I remember that children had decorated the classroom using bits of paper, mimicking the lush fields outside, the green mountains,” says Rosa Chávez, La Poeta.
La Poeta takes then the microphone.
“Pick it up. Take what’s yours,” she says, she recites, she conjures. “Take it. It’s yours. Don’t let them take it from you. Pick it up. Leave it under the sun. Let it dry. Pick the weevils off it,” La Poeta says, and a tiny whistle and a pair of soft cymbals hiss across the room. “One by one, remove the kernels. Look how it shines: red, yellow, white, black. Undo its body. Grind its body. Cook its body. Don’t toss it aside, though. Don’t give it a bad look. Never forget to grow more.”
That’s how one of Selva y Cerror’s first shows occurred—August of 2017, during the Festival Mundial de Poesía Cien Voces, in El Salvador; the song I’m describing is called La Abuela y el Maíz. Selva y Cerro is a Guatemalan musical duo consisting of DJ and producer Teko (Andrés Azmitia)—best known as Sonido Quilete—and Rosa Chávez. It is also the latest project of Chávez, out of her wide-ranging roles as poet, mother, performer, actress, teacher, artisan, cultural manager, screenwriter, filmmaker, bisexual, Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel.
Rosa contains multitudes. She insists, however, that she’s a poet—an interesting fact considering that she never sought publication. She says that even today when she writes, she’s not thinking of “putting together a book,” despite having published five. Urges move her, motivate her. The multitudes inside Rosa talk to each other. Poetry took her to performance. Performance to the theatre. Theatre to community work and human rights. Poetry is the thread that weaved, and still today weaves, the urges of Rosa’s career. For Rosa Chávez, poetry has no end.
Quevedo, Cervantes
Rosa María Chávez Juárez was born in San Andrés Iztapa, Chimaltenango, on August 9, 1980. Her father was K’iche’ and a lawyer, her mother is Kaqchikel and worked as a nurse.
I was born from midwife
nine days
after my birth
my grandfather went to the jungle
he carried my navel in his bag
dry as a cob
he hung it on an avocado tree
the strength of my spirit
and the confidence of my steps comes from that walk.trans. José García Escobar
She grew up, however, in Santa Cruz del Quiché, where her parents worked. Quiché was also one of the most affected cities during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996); at least 262 massacres were committed there, most by the Guatemalan Army.
“I was thinking about how I became interested in poetry,” Rosa says. “It, for me, represents an arrival and my answer to an internal urge.”
Rosa’s parents were also involved in the arts, though she learned this only after. Her mother did community theatre; her father played the mandolin and was in a band. There were many cassettes and books of poetry and short story collections lying around the house, sadly an exception for most of Santa Cruz del Quiché, where there is no library to this day. However, Rosa’s teachers did share books by Quevedo, Cervantes, and Lope de la Vega with her, and soon Rosa started writing her own poems. First, she composed sonnets, spending hours to ensure the rhymes worked and the syllable count matched the structure. Then, as a teenager, she started writing about more “sensitive” subjects, like the death of her father and a poem about menstruation, which she called Cíclica—Cyclical.
“During that time, I became more interested in the poems’ aesthetics,” she says.
In 1996, sixteen-year-old Rosa moved to Guatemala City to finish school—something she couldn’t do in Quiché. She lived downtown, at a place often referred to as the Historical Center, or El Centro. Rosa remembers the memorable art exchange that happened there. She went to rock shows, hip hop shows; she visited bookstores. She says El Centro made a mark on her, inspired her, shook her. Later, in 2000—and in an attempt to follow her father’s footsteps—she enrolled in Universidad de San Carlos (USAC) and became a law student. One day, walking on campus, she found a flyer advertising a poetry workshop with renowned poet Enrique Noriega—who went on to win the prestigious Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 2010.
“Naturally, I wanted to share my poems,” says Rosa. “But I also wanted to face the fears I had of entering a new place, an unfamiliar place, a place where I thought I didn’t belong. I was afraid of being discriminated against, for whatever reason.”
That first workshop lasted only a day, and was the first time Rosa shared her poems with other aspiring writers. With their help, she edited Cíclica, which has since been included in anthologies across Latin America and the US, and was first translated into English by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, a professor at the University of California.
I write with red
red is my condition;
[as a] blessing
this color paints my canvas
captured in each moon
female and clandestine
overflows pleasure.trans. Gloria Elizabeth Chacón
“El Centro is one of my hometowns”
Guatemala City. 2000. October. La Poeta and her sister walk into a bar. They find a table. They order a cappuccino, and they wait. A poet suddenly takes the microphone and starts reading. It was Simón Pedroza. No, Alejandro Marré. Pablo Bromo.
“It was one of them,” Rosa laughs. “Maybe it was Regina (José Galindo). For one whole month, artists performed across the city.” Organizers called this arts festival oktubreazul, held to commemorate the anniversary of the Guatemalan Revolution (October 20, 1944). Rosa saw poets, musicians, performers, and rock bands perform out on the streets, in museums, parks, bars, and even inside the National Museum of History. “oktubreazul blew my mind,” Rosa goes on, and her hands tense up as if holding a small explosion. “I saw all that I said, ‘I want to do this, I want to be with those people.’”
The festival was such a success that local authorities granted its organizers the right to occupy an old building in El Centro and fill it with art. Theatre companies, Caja Lúdica (an arts organization focused on taking art and education to less privileged communities), and other groups filled the building. One notable and unique resident was Folio 114, a literary group founded by poet Simón Pedroza and Colombian cultural manager Dorián Bedoya.
“Anyone could come,” says Simón Pedroza. “We got together on Saturdays. You’d come with a bunch of poems and share them with us.”
Rosa walking alongside Comparsa Chitik in Guatemala City.
There, Rosa met poets such as Leonel Juracán, Manuel Tzoc, Alejandra Solórzano, artist Regina José Galindo, Pedro Chavajay, Alejandra Hidalgo, and even Kunti Shaw—who’s now a famous rapper. The group quickly gained momentum. When Simón received an old printer, they started printing books, but they also took poetry off the page and into the streets.
“We did this to overcome our own fear,” says Dorian Bedoya. “After the workshop, we would walk around El Centro, pick a spot, and simply start reading.”
“We didn’t plan these readings,” says Manuel Tzoc. “At the end of the day, someone would say, ‘What do we do now?’ and someone else would reply, ‘Let’s hand out poems to people on buses,’ and we would.”
They read in bars, parks, mercados, and with the help of organizations, they also went to hospitals, nursing homes, jails, and mental hospitals. “I remember that on the National Day against Forced Disappearance, we read at the Parque Central,” Rosa says. “Some poets laid on the ground, while others drew their outline using chalk.”
“And at the same time, some other poets stood aside and read poems,” Simón says.
“People wanted to know what we were doing,” Rosa says, “and some also laid on the ground as well and asked to be drawn.”
The eyes of the disappeared
look inward
and can’t close, bound by time
their names float in the wind
like a flag that belongs to no one
they say goodbye waiting to return.trans. Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez
“Soon, these actions became one of my main sources of power and inspiration,” says Rosa. “I loved being there, and it wasn’t limited to the fact that I was reading a poem, but to state: ‘I am an indigenous woman and I’m here to raise my voice, to read publicly and say what’s on my mind.’ That was the most important thing to me. Remember what I told you about ‘new places’? I didn’t know if I, a woman, an indigenous woman, was going to be accepted there.”
Rosa admits that while she never shared her feelings, she didn’t hide them; it just wasn’t a topic of conversation, even if there were other Maya poets in the group.
“Perhaps we were too young back then,” says Manuel Tzoc, who is K’iche’. “I knew about my ethnic identity, and my sexual identity as well. But perhaps I wasn’t mature enough to talk about it.”
“I think that when we talked, we talked as artists, as people who were very passionate about life,” Rosa says. “My identity as a Maya woman has always been part of my creative process. You can see it in my work. But any analysis I might’ve had, I had it on my own.”
Casa solitaria
2005. Guatemala City. El Poeta goes up the stairs. He’s looking for office 114; he knows that’s where the poets get together on Saturdays. People go past him. He opens a door. He sees La Poeta and goes straight to talk to her.
Hey, you, he says. You’re Rosa, right?
I am, Rosa says, smiling
Listen, my name is Marco Antonio Flores. I own an indie press, and I’m a writer.
“I knew who he was,” Rosa tells me, “I hadn’t read Los compañeros, and hadn’t been to any of his workshops, but I knew him.”
I read your poems, someone showed them to me, and I want to publish you. Only if you want to.
Yes, yes, I want to, she says. Of course, I want to.
El Poeta and La Poeta started working together. They put together a collection and called it Casa solitaria, and Rosa’s debut came out in December 2005. In Casa solitaria, the poems concern internal displacement, internalized racism, discrimination, loss of identity. We see decadent landscapes and images that reflect anxiety, desperation, claustrophobia, all enhanced by Rosa’s swift and impactful poetry. Particularly memorable are her texts of urban settings, rife with poverty and even corruption: “City of small thieves and gods made of chalk (. . .) cigarettes, chewing gum, glue, tiny houses made of asphalt and black cloud, the singing of caged birds.” Casa solitaria is also defiant. In thirty-five pages, we go from existential dread to historical memory, from deep sensibility to sharp criticism. Additionally, in this book, Rosa establishes one of the prominent motifs of her work: femininity, addressed through identity, eroticism, intimacy, sexuality, mystery and curiosity, violence, empowerment.
Sofía dances
over the sea
tiny fish tickle her pubis
mangroves lace her nipples
Sofía is hopeful
she sells turquoise miracles
at crystal corners
Sofía precocious lover
barefoot naked wet
mother of her hours.trans. José García Escobar
To give back (or have fun and play to change the world)
In 2001, the newly formed arts organization Caja Lúdica started working to “bring art into classrooms, families, and communities, and thus prevent violence.” Many artists joined. In 2005, when its founders secured more funding, they gave out grants to the artists.
Rosa was part of Caja Lúdica’s first generation (she graduated in 2008), and remembers it as was the most formative and transformative experience of her career, that prepared her for all she did after. There she learned how to play percussion, took theatre workshops, tell stories live. She did yoga, puppetry, learned about historical memory, visual arts, dance, bodily expression, juggling, and even learned how to walk using stilts.
With Caja Lúdica, Rosa took music, art, parades, circus shows, stage plays, and ongoing courses based on human rights to less privileged neighborhoods and remote villages around the country. Folio 114 also collaborated with Caja Lúdica; both groups did a reading in Rabinal to commemorate the victims of the Pacux Massacre (March 4, 1980). Another seminal moment was when Caja Lúdica’s artists performed a play called Contrahuella in Quiché.
Contrahuella. La Senda de los Ancestros is a play written by Colombian director Juan Carlos Moyano Ortiz, inspired by two ancient Maya texts: the Popol Wuj and Rabinal Achí. The play, incorporating both music and dance, is told through two narrative lines of the mythological and the contemporary, showing the aggression, persecution, and massacres the Guatemalan Army committed towards indigenous communities during the Civil War. “I became an expert in stopping people’s breaths, in breaking their necks, an expert in beheading, in ripping out guts, with complete disregard for people’s age or their name,” says one of the characters, a military man.
Rosa during a performance of “Contrahuella.” Credit by: Manuel Morillo.
Caja Lúdica presented Contrahuella in a village called Chiché, six miles from where Rosa grew up and where, according to the final report of the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI), the army committed five massacres between 1979 and 1982. REMHI’s report also estimates that at least 262 massacres were committed in Quiché between 1978 and 1985; 86% of all massacres registered during that time.
A day before the presentation, the group, led by artist Julia Escobar, went to a local school, lit a fire, and summoned spiritual energies through a prayer. One of the village’s spiritual leaders, Tata Tzunum Balam, arrived soon after, cleansed everyone using incense, and permitted them to perform the play in Chiché. The next day everyone got up early in the morning, and together they built the stage: two arches decorated with feathers, set on opposite ends of the street. In between the arches, they built a carpet made with sawdust in the shape of a huipil, where the actors walked and performed.
“Until then, I didn’t know how to explain to my grandparents what I did for a living,” says Rosa.
Her grandparents sat on the front row. They saw Rosa interacting with the audience. They saw her play different characters. They heard her sing. They saw Rosa wearing her traditional Maya clothing. They saw her shaking a sonaja, then suddenly wearing military boots and a black vest. They saw her and the other actors from the play marching down the carpet/huipil, stomping. They saw them kicking the carpet. Throwing up on the carpet. Ruining the carpet. Tossing the sawdust to the audience. They heard Rosa growling, laughing, perhaps as the military men did in Chiché back in May of 1979, or in May of 1981, 1982, 1985, again, again, and again.
“It was painful to know that my grandparents were watching,” Rosa says. “But I also wanted to perform that play there. It was important for me to give back a part of history to a place where the harms made by the war are still visible on people’s bodies. It was important for me, and us, to name those atrocities.”
Xul; Selva y Cerro
La Poeta walks through a small crowd. She walks with a bag on her shoulder. She kneels on the ground, and from the bags, she takes out a small whistle made of clay, a xul, and brings it to her mouth. La Poeta blows the xul. People stare at La Poeta. La Poeta stares at her audience. Some take pictures. Others record the scene. La Poeta then takes out colorful ronrones from her bag.
“That was the first time I experimented with sound,” Rosa says. “I wanted to create a powerful and collective landscape made with sound.”
La Poeta leaves her bag, now empty and flat, aside. La Poeta stands in the middle of the street and recites:
Animals that sing from our mouth
sounds in the memory of time
vibrations that travel the threads of life and death
we are the voice that reclaims its song, its shriek, its spit
La Poeta pulls the string of a small ronrón, and it creaks as though annoyed. She shows it to her audience. She spins the ronrón. It cries.
we are the voice that reclaims its song, its shriek, its spit
La Poeta takes another xul and blows it. Suddenly a bearded man picks a xul and blows it. A woman follows suit. Then a kid. Another woman After a little while, there aren’t any more xules on the ground. Together, with man, woman, and child, they form a loud orchestra, a powerful and collective landscape made with sound.
After Casa solitaria Rosa Chávez published five other books: Piedra Ab’aj (2009, Editorial Cultura Guatemala), En el corazón de la piedra (2010, Monta Ávila, Venezuela), quitapenas (2010, Editorial Catafixia, Guatemala), AWAS (2014, Editorial Catafixia, Guatemala), and Abya Yala (2017, Sincronía Editorial, Guatemala). In them, Rosa revisits the themes first explored in her debut: tradition, migration, mythology, modern history, rural and urban settings. She writes about permanence, family, and her forefathers and foremothers. We also find a deeper interest in femininity, women’s bodies, sexuality, and eroticism. “I stay as a lady-animal (. . .) I am me and my mother my grandmother and I am all and none,” she writes in Piedra Ab’aj. “Burn dry vagina, expired clitoris, foamy saliva, calculated wailings every minute,” she writes in quitapenas. There is pain in her work: “Nobody knows the amount of salt that our body stores (. . .) so many stalactite tears and stalagmite tears in the depths of our memory.” Nostalgia: “To remember takes us back to the sacred time.” Intimacy: “Wake me up early, when I’m about to fall asleep so that I can love you with my domesticated tongue.” Violence: “The driver didn’t want to stop, and when I tried to get off the bus, he stepped on the gas, Hurry, you stupid india, he told me, and I fell and scraped my knees; people couldn’t stop laughing.”
“I was immediately taken by her visceral imagery,” says poet and translator Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, who has been translating Rosa’s work into English since 2018. “When I came across Rosa’s writing back in 2014. I was impressed by her expansive treatment of the feminine. Her work defies expectations and stereotypes about Maya women, and more broadly asserts the right of women to speak, to live, and experience their bodies fully.”
Rosa’s poetry has traveled across the continent, across the world. She has been invited to festivals such as Colombia’s Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, Guatemala’s Festival Internacional de Poesía de Quetzaltenango, Argentina’s Festival Internacional de Poesía Rosario, and Norway’s Riddu Riđđu Festival. Her work has been translated into K’iche’, English, French, German, and Norwegian. In February of 2017, Rosa presented Xul during Guatemala’s third Festival Internacional de Performance “Forma y Sustancia,” which marked the beginning of the following and current chapter of Rosa’s career: Selva y Cerro, which she founded alongside the DJ and producer Teko. They define the project as a “duo based on electronic music, poetry, and sounds produced by handmade instruments.”
A photo of Rosa’s performance called Ja’, which she performed in Norway’s Riddu Riđđu Festival.
Guatemala. November 2021. La Poeta opens the door, and a tiny dog welcomes us. Rosa’s wearing a red blouse and black skirt. Inside her house, there are many plants: a huge branch serves as a coat rack by the door, there are cactus down the hall, corn on the wall and a small grove on the terrace. In the middle of Rosa’s house, we find Selva y Cerro’s studio, and inside are Rosa’s instruments (whistles, sonajas, drums, flutes, rainsticks) next to Teko’s computer and turntable.
“Teko makes these,” Rosa says, touching a sonaja made of clay.
Some of Rosa’s instruments are tiny as a toy car. Others are larger, like one whistle in the shape of a skull that’s as big as an apple.
“Ever since we started talking about doing something together, I told Teko that I didn’t want just to write the lyrics,” Rosa says. “I wanted to play instruments. I wanted to make music.”
Rosa, La Poeta, the musician, constantly innovating. Poetry, however, is what gave her life. “I’ve said this many times, and I affirm it: poetry is my spine,” says Rosa. “Poetry has given me—gives me—the possibility to play with other art forms. I have explored countless creative, aesthetic, spiritual, emancipatory, and political possibilities through poetry. It walks hand in hand with politics for me. Moving in and out of other art forms is part of my political stance; to create, claim places, and place my body with strength and dignity. Poetry has been, and it is part of my core.”
I ask Rosa, ¿por qué? Why? Why theatre? Why film? Why everything?
“As I have entered deeper into my spirituality as a Maya woman, as I have learned more about my nahual over time, I now understand why I’ve taken these paths. I believe we are all born under a star, under a ch’umilal, and if you fight against your calling and take a different path, you get sick. Admittedly, I have taken some paths based on uncertainty, and others based on curiosity. Poetry has always moved me, but I’ve also been moved by history, by my people’s history. All these questions steer my path. I also want to project my voice as an indigenous woman. I have taken some paths to challenge myself and try something new, and other paths based on survival. Finally, pleasure also steers my path. Music, for example, brings me joy, and I want to feel that joy again and again. I want to keep experimenting with other art forms; together, they help me weave this braid called Rosa Chávez.”
This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of the ¡Exprésate! Reporting Initiative in Latin America.
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’s a two-time Dart Center fellow. He writes in English and Spanish. He is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Central American region.
Main image credit: Victoria Castañeda
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