Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl

The word “vos/z,” spoken in Salvadoran Spanish, means “you” and also means “voice.” If the word ends in “s” it means “you”; ending in “z” it means “voice.” Leticia Hernández-Linares’s poetry comes in somewhere between the S and the Z, and it is, like bread, like music, for everyone. The way Hernández-Linares shares her stories speaks to the hybridity of the cultural and literary histories she hails from.

Hernández-Linares’s poemsongs are her personal flor y canto. Mexican and Central American indigenous ancestors combined the concepts “in xochitl, in cuicatl” (in flower, in song) to define poetry—the poetic oral tradition they used to teach, engage, and philosophize. Hernández-Linares’s writing excavates the faces of women in her family, silences in her community, and shapes their stories into a poetry that sings, and other times dances on the page. “I am cut from Santa Ana, El Salvador mujer steel, y qué orgullo,” says Hernández-Linares.