The Cha Cha Files:A Chapina Poética

by Maya Chinchilla

The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética by Maya Chinchilla is a timely debut that makes visible the Central American-Guatemalan diaspora and disentangles the myths from the mayhem of civil wars, urban wars, and the wars raging in young hearts. Part memory, part imaginary, The Cha Cha Files honors Central American feministas, Long Beach roqueras, families divided by war, lovers separated by borders, and celebrates the pleasure and heartbreak of femmes, machas, y mariconadas. These poems, stories, and snapshots traverse California coastlines and southern borderlines, cut across tense multi-culti high-school hallways, sing Solidarity Movement songs, mosh through tribal slam pits, and find home in the vibrant Bay Area where radical activists and lovers alike come of age. Chinchilla’s hopeful and uniquely Chapina voice emerges as a significant contribution to U.S. Latina/o literary works.

Genres: Poetry

130 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2014

Reviews

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a shifting memoir, a futurized holographic lexicon of multi-Guatemalas, a “rough” Now-edged literary explosión from the center of a Chinchilla-Centro-América. A refigured California, Borinquen, Caribe floating, flayed and frayed and fractal slivers of faces, bodies, intimacies, word flow encycloGuatepedia in volcanic rupture, out and “under the Huipil,” ripped and dressed up herstory-skirts, skin, skinless, that is, Latina, Queer, borderless Letters – Maya’s undulating “third eye.” It is all a ferocious seeing motion – deep knowledge, open diary, activist journal, a burning vermillion life-scape over Kahlo’s bed, Anzaldúa’s unloosened workshop, María Sabina’s black splattered visions, a Golden Gate bridgless. A first of its kind – Brava, bravissima, GuateBrava power. A game changer.”
- Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California

[Katherine Lara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 2.8 stars
This is a book that is really hard for me to rate. I really liked the important themes and messages that Chinchilla presents in her poems but I'm just not a fan of poetry. There were some poems that I really liked but for the most part I felt that some were not executed as well as I would have liked. There were some that I had no idea what they were about. I don't know. It just feels wrong to judge this book too harshly since I'm not a big poetry reader and only read the book because it was assigned reading for my Latin American Studies class. Overall, I had an okay time with this book. Like I said before, there were some poems that I really enjoyed so those are the ones that will stay with me.

[willowdog · Rating 3 out of 5]

;Chinchilla's very personal memoir activist poetry illuminates the world of the Central American-Guatemalan diaspora. She seems to be strongest in her lesbian poems of which there are not enough--8 of 38.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 C5395c 2014