I discovered Marcelo Hernandez Castillo through an online quiz—the “bookmatch” from N+1 included his book, Cenzontle, among several that, based on my answers to a series of questions, was well suited to my tastes. The review of the book began “Ugh, this book is so good,” and I was sold. I read the whole thing during the typical two-hour window between my arrival at an airport gate and the time boarding actually begins, and I was left awed. Castillo’s poetry felt like an indulgence and reminded me of the emotional hold the lyric form can have.
When I looked into Castillo’s other work, I found that he had not only gone to the University of Michigan, where I recently graduated, but that he was the first undocumented student in the University’s creative writing MFA program and that besides his own writing, he had founded Undocupoets, alongside Javier Zamora and Christopher Soto, in 2015 to break down the barriers to entry of major poetry prizes for undocumented writers. Since then, Janine Joseph and Esther Lin, both poets at one time undocumented, joined the organization (Esther as a fellow) and later took the place of Zamora and Soto. Last fall, Castillo, Joseph, and Lin published Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora, an anthology of work from undocumented or once-undocumented writers.
The collection, which was five years in the making, feels more relevant now than ever, when the risks for undocumented people in this country have been heightened dramatically. I spoke with the co-editors about how the anthology came to be, how their advocacy and writing work influence each other, the similarities termed “undocupoetics” they noticed among writers in the anthology, and how we can support undocumented writers at a time when publicly voicing their experiences could bring unprecedented dangers.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.
Erin Evans: Besides each of your own writing work, you have all worked as part of Undocupoets and published this book that has brought many undocumented writers together. I’m wondering for each of you, at what point and why you first wanted your work to extend beyond your own writing, whether that was in collaboration with other writers or in non–writing related advocacy work.
Esther Lin (EL): I’ve never thought of myself as being an activist, and I never envisioned myself becoming an organizer. The idea of being very public is kind of antithetical to the type of lifestyle that a lot of undocumented people encourage in each other. Privacy, trying to stay as low profile as possible, trying to stay undercover as long as possible is really important to your survival because there’s a fear of getting discovered and then being reported and then deported. Writing about being undocumented was a challenge. Publishing poems about being undocumented was a different challenge.
When Janine and Marcelo and Javier [Zamora] at the time invited me to join the Undocupoets because Javier was stepping down, I found that the fears that I was raised with kind of evaporated. Being able to do this with other people and on behalf of others was so much easier than doing it for myself. If the organization hadn’t already existed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that this is work that I want to do. I feel like I came out of the shadows, and who’s there to greet me? Well, I’d want somebody to greet me, so being somebody on the other side and telling other undocumented writers, “Hey, come on out, it’s okay, the water is warm here” actually felt really good.
Janine Joseph (JJ): Like Esther, I was undocumented before DACA and before conversations around DACA hit the national stage. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I found out I was undocumented in 2001 during my senior year of high school, and 2001 was the year when the first iteration of the Dream Act failed, and when that failed—and I had been waiting for that result because it was going to determine whether or not I could go to college—it was really a private letdown. There was no way of explaining to other people why I was waiting for the Dream Act to get passed, what it meant for my own future. And so much of my own experience, like Esther’s, was keeping my status a secret. Flash forward to 2015, when Marcelo, Christopher [Soto], and Javi started the Undocupoets campaign that petitioned the contests to change their eligibility requirements, that was the very first time that I saw or even read about other undocumented, formerly undocumented, or mixed-status people [who were] out with their statuses and out with their own experiences.
My first collection, Driving Without a License, was picked up by Alice James Books for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize. As soon as my book got picked up, I experienced something which is unique to people who have our experiences: I was privately excited, but I was terrified because work that I was otherwise doing in workshops and privately would suddenly expose me. I thought of it like the individual poems were friends I told parts of my story to, but they were never in the same room together on purpose, but all of a sudden it was like I’d invited them to a party. I decided to write an essay about growing up undocumented, and that came out in January of 2015.
I was in the era of [workshops in which] the writer falls silent, and everybody talks around them. That gave me a lot of actual safety because I never had to say whether I was writing from my own experience, but it also meant that I had to sit through other people’s imaginations of my work. I had peers who just assumed that I had been going to conduct interviews with people who had crossed the boarder or who had been undocumented. It never occurred to them that it could be me.
I was thinking about all this and decided “I have to get ahead of my own story and I have to begin shaping a kind of narrative before other people get to make that story for me.” Right when I put out that essay, the Undocupoets campaign petition letter came out. I messaged Christopher Soto and was just like “Oh my gosh! I’m one too! I have this experience, who are you? Who are these people? This is amazing! How can I help?” You know when people talk about “love is all about timing”? And ending up with the people you end up with is all about timing. I feel that way about my meeting of the Undocupoets cofounders and the organization.
Did you anticipate how terrifying it was going to be when your first book got picked up? If so, what got you past that to want to get it out there anyway?
JJ: It was much more important to me that the book was going to be out there. Toni Morrison writes about how “you have to write the book that you want to read.” When I was growing up undocumented, the only things to read about my “situation” was through newspapers, and it was always a crisis. A crisis and full of criminal behavior. I tried to find other kinds of narratives. If it wasn’t in the newspapers, it was journalists who are putting together interviews that they gathered while they were doing these news articles. At a certain point, I just had to accept that the work was more important than me. The work just had to be out there.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo (MHC): Even though I was one part of the founding, [Undocupoets is] celebrating ten years because of Janine and Esther. Period. It would have ended in 2015 as a letter and at very most one fellowship. Nor would we have released the anthology. To come back to that question, it led from writing to that advocacy because the advocacy led back to writing. I would not have written either of my two books were it not for Undocupoets because it made it possible to say things that I perhaps couldn’t have. Every community that I entered, there was still something that I was holding back, and that thing was documentation status. There was always a final piece of the puzzle that wasn’t allowing me to fully be myself, to fully click, to fully not dissociate in conversations. With CantoMundo, the poetry fellowship, I felt deep love for all of my fellows, some of whom were also undocumented, but we did not say that amongst each other, and because of that I was still holding back.
It was such a relief to be able to share—“Oh, this happened to you too”—because it dispelled any of my fears that I might be making this up in my head. Being part of the Undocupoets has been such a fulfilling thing of giving myself permission to demand things or feel like I am entitled—entitled is the wrong word, but feel like I also can, like, win the Pulitzer. It wasn’t necessarily a turn away from writing but a turn toward different avenues of writing that allowed me to write the first book of poems in the way that I did. The first book was released in 2018. It was accepted in 2016, and just like Janine, in 2014 I wrote an essay in which I said what I had to say. It felt cathartic to find common ground in a way that I had not before. The book that I’m writing right now, which will be out in 2027, could not be possible without seeing the kind of work that came out in the anthology. Even though I’m one of the editors, seeing the possibilities of language in there gave me permission to say what I was able to say.
I wanted to ask more specifically how the anthology Here to Stay came to be. Whose idea was that and how did you go about finding the writers and bringing all of that together?
EL: Marcelo, from the very beginning, talked about wanting to have an archive of the work of undocumented poets. For a while we were thinking we’ll have a list of references on our website, like teaching guides.
MHC: We had always been talking about what kind of form it would take to comprise a body of community beyond the fellowship. Once I was working with my editor at HarperCollins, they saw the kind of work that we were doing. They floated the idea, “You know, we’d love to continue working in any respect,” and that’s when the gears started working between Janine, Esther, and I. It was a long process; it was five years in the works because matters were so delicate. Even how we worded the call for submissions. The majority of the people who are in the anthology we had never encountered before in our fellowship applications, and it was a testament to how much need there was.
JJ: We’ve been reading submissions for the current round of the Undocupoets fellowship, and we noticed there are so many poets here who aren’t even in the anthology—and maybe we’ll have another anthology after this. Marcelo, Esther, and I get together once a year to talk about the fellowship applications. We would read all these submissions, and we would talk about the work, and then we would have this moment of realization: we can just tell when a work is coming from someone who has this experience because there are these various markers. And we talk a little bit [in the introduction to the anthology] about all of these various markers and how we define that under the umbrella term “undocupoetics.” The building of this anthology is a real act of optimism. Hoping that there will be a future that we will meet, and there will be people in the future and poets in the future that we will meet or that will go through the doorway that we’re making and then make other doorways.
You brought up the idea of “undocupoetics” and how you noticed those similarities between themes or even styles that the writers were writing in. Were there any specific similarities that were surprising or unexpected?
MHC: The obsessive nature of not throwing anything away.
JJ: That’s the one I was going to say.
MHC: The archive, right? The archive isn’t just something to point to, but something that could mean the difference between protection or not. One letter that my sister happened to send one summer…that we found in a box was responsible for an entire shift of life for one of my family members. It’s affirming that the things that [this refusal to throw things away] doesn’t come out of nowhere but that it manifested itself in the craft, in the poetics. It is validating to see that in others.
JJ: We are the most documented undocumented people. It’s poems full of receipts, poems full of dates. You know how there are those trends, “This is girl math”? There’s undocumented math: this is the month, the year, the day of arrival; this is the month, date, year of this movement; there’s this immigration interview; there’s this particular anniversary. Being able to calculate these years and track these years and knowing what all of these gaps in the years represent—those details communicate something that only we know about. When you’re going through the immigration system, it’s like (holding up fingers to demonstrate a flow chart) “Do you have this, or do you have this? Go this way. If you are here, do you have this document or do you have not this document? Then it splits here.” To a reader who doesn’t have this experience, they won’t know the difference between a three-year gap and a five-year gap between immigration paperwork being filed, whereas for me, it’s telling a completely different story—it’s telling a story, period.
EL: I had a lovely review for my book just come out, and the reviewer said my book was like my passport. It was my document, my way of saying “I do exist; I am who I say I am.” I think another interesting trend that we noticed was the use of ecopoetics. For instance, environment as a metaphor and way of talking about difference, members of different ecosystems suddenly colliding with each other. There are a lot of poems of personal experience, and then there are these big-picture points of view, poets seeing themselves as a disruption, like a volcanic explosion—actually, there is a poem here called “This poem sits atop a displaced chimeric volcano.” The self is kind of a disturbance in an ecosystem, or there’s some other force that’s disrupting something natural within the internal landscape of the poet. I’m a city kid, so I’m always struck when I read an ecologically-driven poet. The metaphorical language is particularly rich when it comes to both talking about environmental justice and human justice in the anthology.
JJ: Sometimes [as a teacher] I’ll encounter students who are really wonderful and natural storytellers, and it’s because they come from a line of other storytellers. They have grandparents who told them a lot of stories, so they’re inclined toward narrative, and they begin to write poems that are largely narrative. But then you apply that to someone who has grown up undocumented, and maybe they’ve been asked their entire life to explain their story or to explain their whereabouts or to always map out where they’ve been. Just having to do that might move them into the lyric mode, very intentionally so. Or maybe it will make them move into a surreal space, to do something that contradicts or runs counter to what’s being demanded of them at all times.
Marcelo, you left a comment in the chat about a precision of language, too.
MHC: The stakes are so high that there isn’t room for inconsistencies. Even in the lyrical mode, even in the figurative mode, even in the poets who were writing toward a more surrealistic kind of experience, it was a surrealistic experience between things, not an ambiguous surrealism. I think too often, words have been flipped on us and weaponized. It’s the premise of poetic license to bend language however you want, [and it] is a double-edged sword that you’re always balancing. The inherent danger of that makes it so that the decisions are far from just deliberate and intentional but necessary. If I’m going to say the name of a person, I have done all of the research that I need to do so that I can make sure that I can say that without putting them at risk. It’s not just you in the room speaking about yourself, writing at your desk by yourself. Every single process that we do gets complicated ten fold because even in an announcement, we have to make sure that there’s not a possibility for any of our actions to be flipped and used against us.
It was interesting to hear about how precise you have to be when you’re writing when in the intro, you talk about poetry being a form that’s powerful because it’s not as direct as prose. Sometimes it does need to be interpreted, and it doesn’t follow such straightforward rules as other types of writing. It seems counterintuitive at first that a form can be powerful because it isn’t straightforward, especially when you also talk about the necessity of that precision. Can you talk more about how those two things can both be true?
EL: For me, poetry felt like a secret language. By virtue of the fact that it was nonlinear, I could be emotionally honest while being factually dishonest and protect myself. I found relief in poetry. I don’t think this is universal for all undocumented poets, but I think the indirectness of poetry sometimes allows us to hide when we’re not ready to talk about something yet.
JJ: When I was in college in my creative writing workshops, there was a time when I was writing about my parents and what it was like growing up. And one of my poetry teachers was like, “You can write anything because who in your family is going to read your poems? Let’s be honest here.” He told me, “Free yourself,” and it was kind of freeing. I realized that the application of that advice was something that I can move to what it would mean to write about my status and growing up undocumented. I could rely on double-speak; I could rely on subtlety; I could rely on a loyalty to truth but not facts. I can give some tidbits to one poem and contradict those tidbits in another poem. I had in my dissertation five or six what I would call “arrival poems.” I can point to and say there’s no single arrival story. That was this wonderful thing that I could do in poetry. I think one of the things that I expected the least after publishing the first collection is that everyone was like, “These poems are wonderful; can you write an essay about the same thing?” And I was like, “That’s the point, not to write it all out in creative nonfiction.”
When I talked to Marcelo before, he said that the timing of this book coming out right before the election wasn’t intentional; it was going to exist regardless. But having the work of undocumented writers out now, under an administration that is making greater visibility more dangerous, is especially important. How do you think we can continue to uplift undocumented writers at this time when that could be riskier?
EL: As long as we’re still a subject—as long as we’re still part of the conversation—that helps tremendously. Please keep talking to us and talk about us. That would be really important in and out of the literary world. Chances are, you know somebody who’s undocumented—you, Erin, but also everyone. You just don’t know that they are undocumented. Get to know your neighbors. The truth that applies for supporting undocumented people is the same truth that applies [for] how to live through the current administration. I’m quoting the Times writer David French, who says “Protect people who are more vulnerable than you are, and tell the truth.”
JJ: The truth always has an asterisk. Sometimes we don’t want to tell the truth, we want to protect.
MHC: I’m thinking of how often the goal post has expanded [regarding] who they consider deportable. And what’s happening right now with the Columbia student [Mahmoud] Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was exercising free speech. And it shows us, time and time again, that when the onus falls on us to be at the tip of the spear, we continue to be the most vulnerable. Right now, we’re doing a lot of asking ourselves by reaching out to organizations, so I think the reciprocal nature of that is not being afraid to ask, “What is it that we can do?” A lot of the way that we serve our own community, even within our small bubble, is—even though we already share the experiences with a lot of our fellows—asking them first and foremost how their interests can best be served. We might have one vision of that, but there’s always something that we might be overlooking.
Was there anything you wanted to say about the book that we haven’t discussed?
MHC: This is one small piece to the puzzle. I remember particularly, in some of our submissions, people voicing their visions of a subset of the community they also are envisioning themselves spearheading. It’s really good to see that.
JJ: We provided the space, now you can move freely about the cabin. We are hoping that, as important as we feel this anthology is, that it doesn’t become the only anthology and that this is just one of many anthologies to come. Someone else who is in this anthology might decide that they are going to do a volume two and gather even more poets. I think that is most exciting to us.
MHC: The power of that access—moving forward, one thing that I envision is facilitating that.
EL: Some of [the poets in the anthology] are already part of other organizations. And it’s wonderful to be in contact with them because now we can reach out to them and say, “Would you help us do this thing? And how can we help you?”
Erin Evans is a writer from Michigan, now living in New York. She studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also worked as an arts writer and editor for The Michigan Daily. Her essays and criticism have appeared there and in Vestoj.
This post may contain affiliate links.
