ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín, translated from the Spanish by Noah Mazer, Cardboard House Press, 2024
In his manifesto of New Brazilian Cinema, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” filmmaker Glauber Rocha called for art that communicates the poverty and misery of Latin America, and that could contribute to liberating the region from the “debilitating delirium of hunger.” He wrote this in 1964, at a time of global upheaval when Latin American cultural circles began to grapple with the torment of those left behind by globalization. Sadly, today, sixty years later, Latin America remains one the most economically unequal regions on Earth. Decades-long neoliberal developmentalism keeps failing at what it—allegedly—has set out to do: eradicating the entrenched social disparities of the region. Instead, inequality only intensifies. The World Inequality Database reports that in 2020, the top 10% of Latin America owned 77.6% of the region’s wealth, a 2% increase from the 75.6% reported in 2000. The trend of increasing inequality is not unique to Latin America, but it is particularly extreme there. In Europe, the top 1% share of wealth rose from 24.9% in 2000 to 25% in 2020, while in the United States it increased from 32.0% to 34.9% in 2020. Capitalism confirms—time and time again—the falsehood of its mythical self-conception as a system that bolsters the progressive enrichment of everyone. Responding to this context, different Latin American groups have, of course, questioned the region’s unequal social conditions, calling for justice and change. In 2011, thousands of Chilean students dressed up as zombies in massive protests against educational debt and the privatization of public universities. More recently, Latin American women have taken to the streets in yearly Women’s Strikes to demand the recognition of care work as unpaid labor and to protest rising femicide numbers. Their demands for justice and their achievements are sources of light in an otherwise darkening global political landscape, and literary communities have taken up the same fight. The book ana c. buena, a 2021 poetry collection by the Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín, presents a critique of capitalism that highlights its disastrous impact on the daily lives of working women. Indeed, the book’s main figure—Ana C. Buena, a woman under precarious and insecure work conditions—also functions as an allegory of the countries wounded by historical colonialism, current neocolonialism, and insatiable global capital.
Román Marroquín belongs to the Sub25 collective, a group of young poets that are challenging fossilized cultural institutions in Peru and advocating for the renovation of Peruvian poetry. They run a magazine, a publishing house, and a series of community events called the “Antisemana de Literatura,” (Literature anti-week), attended by poets from all over the Hispanic world. ana c. buena was published in Spanish by the independent poetry publisher La Balanza, and translated in 2024 by Noah Mazer for Cardboard House Press. It consists of three main sections, each one delving into different aspects of Ana C. Buena’s precarious life, from her job as a house cleaner to her torturous struggle with hunger. The poetic speaker shifts between the extended apostrophe (addressing Ana in the second person), the first-person observer, and Ana’s own voice. This heterogenous focalization strengthens the book’s core critique of capitalist individualism, joining a growing library of Latin American poetry criticizing capitalist society, often through a feminist lens. A recent outstanding poetry collection exploring similar themes is Roque Salas Rivera’s Lo terciario / the tertiary (Nightboat, 2018), which appropriates passages from Marx’s Capital to reflect about colonialism, social inequality, and national debt in Puerto Rico. Another one, from Mexico, is Yolanda Segura’s 2021 Serie de circunstancias posibles en torno a una mujer mexicana de clase trabajadora (A series of possible circumstances surrounding a Mexican working-class woman, Almadía). Alongside ana c. buena, these books highlight the ongoing hardship suffered by the most disadvantaged people under capitalist hegemony, those who, in Latin America and beyond, experience first-hand “the pace of death / local and international.”
The title of the book refers to the name of the poet’s initial addressee, a young woman who, in the words of Mazer, “could be from any capitalist society.” Regardless of the specific identity of Ana, we know that she experiences job precariousness and insecurity. We see her cooking food while at the same time feeling hungry, “crushing peppers / chopping onions, settling the shrinking stomach / —other peoples’ stomachs—”. We see her cleaning other’s toilets, and taking multiple shifts because her “salary gets hacked away.” Ana is, thereby, a representative of the deepest human gears of capitalism, whose labor allows those at higher ranks in the economy to keep the system moving. She is the migrants who work underpaid jobs at the same NATO countries that impoverish their homes. She is the nomad who moves from the countryside to the city in search of opportunities. She is all the people whose bodies take the harshest toll under globalized capital, but who enjoy the smallest portion—if any—of the system’s wealth. If Empire, according to cultural theorists Hardt and Negri, is the postmodern form of yesterday’s imperialisms, based on the production of data and untied to specific nations but led by the United States, Ana represents the impoverished country whose people clean and keep the offices and estates of the McKinseys, Blackrocks, and JPMorgans of the world. And more than an individual character, Ana is also all of us outside of the globalized C-Suites of NATO.
Not only does Román Marroquín critique how capitalism encourages spurious individualist desires, including the “fantasy of the individual empire / and the model life,” she also stresses how today’s global structure and its false promises remain grounded in patriarchy, and sustained by artificial gender inequality with deep historical roots. The poet emphasizes how Ana’s plight derives from “generations of women / their fingers blistered,” and how despite the centrality of women’s labor for capitalism, their work is devalued just as much as it is abused and exploited. Román Marroquín’s critique of capitalism as a patriarchal system reminds us of how the colonial and imperial relation between global capital and Latin America has historically relied on a gendered conception of the continent as a woman ready to be conquered by yesterday’s conquistador, and by today’s foreign investor. Such allegorical representation of the continent is best captured by Theodore Galle’s seventeenth century plate “America.” In this image, the naked woman representing the Americas appears as the object of desire and possession for Amerigo Vespucci. Today, Román Marroquín suggests, a similar gender structure operates. Within it, the continent works as the object of desire for the NATO investor, but only inasmuch as it remains subordinated in the global hierarchy of gender and labor. Under this colonialist macho viewpoint, the powerful neocolonialist countries position themselves as the heterosexual males atop the global political hierarchy.
But Román Marroquín’s book does not only denounce exploitation. It also stresses the importance of resistance based on collective action and class consciousness. Towards the last third of the book, Ana notices that other people around her experience a similar hunger. In a subtle but significant section that contrasts with the first pages of the book, the poetic speaker shifts from the first-person singular into the second person plural, dissolving the boundaries between individual and collective. We walk alongside Ana (the “I” of these lines) seeing from her perspective the people in her everyday life. These are some of the most evocative lines of the collection:
i know what it’s like to go hungry
they tell you
at the market
at the clock-in
for the night shift
at social services
on line
at the bank
when you cash the check
when you pay the check
when the card reader is down
if you have cash please thank you
when the currency is devalued
when there’s a pre-approved loan
with this delicious juicy irresistible interest
when congealed accumulated labor
when bureaucratic capacity collapses
when you weigh out the onions the papayas the peppers
when you turn the tv on late at night
when you’re about to open your mouth
—peeking incisors in a dubious state
saliva rope tenses snaps—
and you’ll respondi know what it’s like to go hungry
they tell you
raising training their index
every one of them
every time
every secondand they walk on by
The community of hunger, Ana’s world of equally miserable peers, appears as the possibility for collective action for justice. Those around Ana are the “jobless mass” and the “hungry public” whom the poetic speaker summons into an assembly, inviting them to break the silence and denounce their misery. Indeed, this is perhaps the most utopian poem of the whole collection, as it proposes a strong basis for unity (hunger) for a collective movement against capitalist exploitation.
The poem’s English version quoted above also allows us to see more clearly Mazer’s translation choices. As readers will have already noticed, he does not write the pronoun “I” in uppercase. By avoiding the more conventional spelling, Mazer upsets the monumental individuality of Anglophone culture, calling attention to its historical role in the current capitalist global order, but at the same time challenging it. Similarly, Mazer sometimes leaves words untranslated, as with encebollado and coscorrón, both referring to food. Leaving these terms untranslated not only highlights their cultural specificity, but also confronts Anglophone cultural imperialism—the use of English as the anchor of capitalism, its artificial role as the world’s, and, crucially, as big business’, lingua franca. The untranslated words foreground the incapacity of any one culture to dominate all aspects of human experience. These untranslatables are signs of the fissures of hegemony, of cracks in its dominance through which other worlds can blossom. Such a critique of capitalism through translation is no surprise given Mazer’s trajectory. An Asymptote contributor, he has translated poems as fervently leftist as the communist Mexican poet Efraín Huerta’s “The Soviets,” which ends with the line, “Cheers for the Soviets and their great leader Stalin!” For a book like ana c buena, no other form of cultural mediation would be as fitting as Mazer’s militant translation.
This exhilarating collection and the leftist poetry traditions from which it emerges and to which it contributes could not be more refreshing. Today’s world does not look much different from that of Rocha or Huerta. The main contrast might be, perhaps, that most people nowadays seem more comfortable with capitalist hegemony. Against the dominant complacency, Salas Rivera, Segura, Román Marroquín, and Mazer are here to remind us that capitalism continues to have disastrous consequences on the everyday lives of many. Conformity, in times like these, equals collusion with others’ hunger, suffering, and death.
Alan Mendoza Sosa (Mexico City, 1997). He is a poet and researcher. In 2022 he published the book La bestia que habito (Herring Publishers, Querétaro). He is currently studying for a doctorate in Hispanic literature at Yale. His work has been published in multiple Spanish and English magazines.
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