Status Updates From Daughters of Latin America ...

C’mon! Halfway

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s segment from her novel A Woman of Endurance reads as terrible as the strongest of horror cinema. The second to last sentence, “she did not know it then, but he had bought her as he would buy a breeding mare” makes me sick to my stomach. Horror.

I remember why I had to pause this anthology. Part of the time the stories feel so far away from relatable, and the others so directly scream humanity that I can’t help but burst into tears and want to put down the book to live life with the vigor of what was written. I will finish this.

Yesika Salgado description of people in El Salvador is so beautiful it makes me tear up : “Women with no teeth and stained aprons, who laugh as if beauty was something the years give you.” The fact is, colonialism and capitalism didn’t just take land and language, it also took cultural understandings like that beauty is something that age gives to women. It breaks my heart.

Adriana Gallardo’s essay Buena Gente made me cry. The lives of Latine people who worked without almost any rest for their whole lives will always make me tear up.

“It also entered the nose of the wolf, his eyes open as if he’d aged. He swelled, puffing up with that Jasmin air, and in the end he burst. The smell of his limbs was so powerful, it spread through that old house growing ever old; spills through the city of Buenos Aires.” HE BURST?! BANGER FROM Kcomt