Memorias from the Beltway

From the announcement:

Memorias from the Beltway is our first FlowerSong Press joint publication and the fourth Red Salmon Press full-length book dedicated to poetry illuminating the words and verses of nascent and established Chicanx/ Latinx/Native American writers. Through our respective presses, we seek to rupture the hierarchical ways traditional modes of publishing insist upon only celebrating the works of the most widely-recognized or prolific authors and marginalizing the leading voices of Chicanx/ Latinx/Native American/POC communities that are constantly innovating and creating. As Red Salmon Press, we are proud that Mauricio Novoa’s provocative collection centers on the Central American experience. After over two decades, we are fulfilling a mandate to fully embrace that panoply of Chicanx/Latinx/Native American literary perspectives, which are integral to (re)defining who and what we are.

In this work, we are held at attention to listen and contend with themes of working class survivalism and ingenuity, spiritual tenacity, hip hop articulations, and el exilio via the poems of Mauricio, and his generation, to disrupt our own understandings of plural Latinidad. Poems such as “Happy Meals” to “Memorias from the Beltway” encapsulate nuances about salvadoreño masculinity through imagery of everyday forms of violence and resistance marking a thread between state-sponsored, insurgent, street sites for these expressions. Other pieces demonstrate a quiet invocation of memory, place, and intergenerationality that transports us to the perennial beats of the East Coast and prayers of abuelas. Last, the layers of familial strife, bonds, and strength depicted are a subtle ode to Mauricio’s immigrant parents that is neither nostalgic nor cloying.

Twenty-five years after the publication the East of the Freeway by raúlrsalinas, Memorias from the Beltway is a much needed repuesta to the recollections, which raúl explores in another time of vast global, sociopolitical transformation and popular, grassroots uprisings. The intimate manner in which both Mauricio and raúl communicate the soulfulness of our rebellion through sparse and intentional words is certainly one point of commonality. Their love of la vida cotidiana is another moment of intersection. Undoubtedly, it is in these small acts of calling our existence that we persevere. Memorias from the Beltway implores us to dwell in these remembrances, mourn our losses, and honor the words we carve out as “lifelines.”

—Lilia Rosas, Ph.D. Executive Director, Red Salmon Arts Osten, Tejaztlán, Otoño 2020

Mauricio Novoa’s poetry was the first time I recognized my family’s experiences, and my own as a Salvadoran-American daughter, manifest in the pages of a book. Novoa’s poetry centers the present absence of Salvadoran Washingtonians in the Central American diaspora as well as an entire generation of Salvadoran-Americans hailing from “Dandelion Graves.” Memorials from the Beltway crafts new contours for U.S Central American poetry and poetics. His homage to hip-hop epistemologies weaved throughout this work, speaks to the disabling and debilitating experiences of Central American refugees, migrants, and their descendants across the United States. Novoa’s poetry is an intervention in the production of American history as he literally writes in and accounts for the slow violence of racial capitalism and U.S imperialism that plague first, second, and even third generation children of Salvadoran refugees. Poems such as “Memories from the Beltway,” “The Gold Year” and “Calluses” offers a working memory that confronts long histories of transnational state violence and invites readers to examine the intimate utterances of our diaspora. Mauricio Novoa relentlessly and incandescently offers a narrative of family, loss, survival, joy, and care. 

-Brenda G. Martinez

"Mauricio Novoa’s poems span the crucial subjects of ethnic identity, the economy, immigration, hip hop, and familial love, doing so with genuine energy and in pursuit of truth and song. Novoa’s work achieves a duality of precision and myth, and his poems are just as apt at narrative as they are at cultural and political analysis. I turn to Novoa’s poems again and again for their candor, their lush sounds, and their utmost investment in the nuances of humanity."

-Marcus Jackson

Mauricio Novoa could be my primo, mi hermano, mi mejor amigo growing up. (title of chap) is a nostalgic trip to the 80s, to abuelita's kitchen, the streets bumping gangsta' rap in my Buick Regal, to the lowering of caskets into the tierra. I felt my dead father's arms embrace me and my mother asking if I wanted mas curtido for my pupusas in these poems. This is poetry done right. This is poetry in truth for longevity.

-Edward Vidaurre, author of Pandemia & Other Poems