Vance Miguel Johnson’s Reviews > Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women > Status Update

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.

Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro’s futuristic exploration of human emotions through what could be constituted as an AI is incredible. It was so emotional and strange. I was deeply moved.

The dictatorship in Argentina up until the late 90s targeted a crushed the country’s publishing houses, allowing Spanish publishing houses to profit off of the Argentinian loss.

‘Eurocentrism keeps Europe alone’ ~ Rita Laura Segato

‘Whoever debases another debases themselves’ ~ James Baldwin

This is the message carried by intellectuals attacking colonialism, racism, toxic masculinity and so much more. I’m over joyed to add Rita Segato’s critique of eurocentrism within Raphael García Marquez’s speech.

The first short narrative by Aracelis Girmay about how the African identity changed during the Ebola virus in Latin America, and how white Spaniards called the Africans stuck in a place Palestinos is shocking