Join the Book in Common Community Read Challenge and read Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’ in preparation for the author’s visit to campus on April 10.
Community Read Challenge 3
By April 8
- Get your copy of Our Migrant Souls and read the following chapters: “Secrets,” “Ashes,” and “Lies” (pages 114–165).
- Join the Four-Week Book Club and attend the third discussion on April 8 from noon–1 p.m. in the Arts and Humanities Building (ARTS), Room 227.
- Look at discussion questions for "Secrets," "Ashes," and "Lies."
- Get your ticket for the Book in Common talk by Héctor Tobar, April 10, 7:30 p.m. at Laxson Auditorium (tickets $27, youth age 17 and under $17, free for Butte College and Chico State students).
Dr. Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj at Chico State with Dr. Hannah Burdette and students in Spanish 455 (Indigenous Literature and Translation), November 2024.
Dr. Hannah Burdette is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Dr. Burdette explains:
Indigenous literature is currently experiencing a boom in Latin America, with dozens of authors using poetic writing as a tool for cultural revitalization and political struggle. Translation is a key component, as many authors write bilingually and translate their own works from their maternal language into Spanish or vice-versa. However, only a limited number of these texts are available in English, so there is a pressing need for more translation to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps and to improve access for Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike.
With this issue in mind, I designed an upper-division Spanish course in which my students and I study poetry by several Native authors from Latin America and then engage in close reading through translation. Last semester, we had the rare opportunity to bring Dr. Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj to Chico all the way from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. The culminating event of the semester was a public poetry reading in which she read a selection from her first book of poetry, Lunas y calendarios (2018), and my students read their translations into English. Dr. Velásquez Nimatuj is a Maya K’iche’ journalist, anthropologist, and international spokeswoman who has served as an expert witness in human rights trials on genocide committed during the Guatemalan Civil War. Her poetry serves as a powerful tool for healing the wounds of history, addressing both racialized and gendered violence, while celebrating over 500 years of Maya resistance.
For my students, developing translation skills was both practical and empowering, and the opportunity to work directly with Dr. Velásquez Nimatuj and share her writing with the world encouraged them to embrace their own linguistic and cultural expertise. All the students in the class were Hispanic and bilingual, so they have had to translate their whole lives, first for parents and teachers and now in their jobs and daily lives. But never before had they attempted to translate poetry, which comes with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. We are not professional translators, but I do believe firmly that we learned a lot in the process: to inhabit the spaces between words and between worlds. I operate under the principle that grappling with translation—particularly the nuances and complexities of poetic language—promotes active, decolonial reading and critical thinking. Translation work can thus offer a powerful vehicle for unlearning privilege since it invites students to reflect on the limitations of their own worldviews and to consider other perspectives.
Check out our blog, where you can watch a recording of the poetry recital, read some of Irma’s poetry in translation, and learn more about the project.
| “One of the few times I actually spoke up against Latino clichés—with my spoken voice, in a room, with other people present—came long before I was the settled, home-owning, family-man professional I am today. I was twenty-four, and the editor of a community newspaper. I visited a San Francisco art gallery that a photojournalist and artist had filled with black-and-white images of Mexicans and others being tied up and hustled away by the Border Patrol south of San Diego. This was in the mid-1980s, long before any fence or wall was built there. The detained immigrants had the startled expressions of children caught misbehaving, or confused peasants caught up in a modern legal system they couldn’t hope to understand… I told the photographer I objected to the quantity and monotony of the images, which hit the same pathetic and melodramatic note over and over. To mount them on a wall and call it art was offensive, I told him. Each of his subjects possessed a personality he had failed to capture. ‘Dude, this isn’t who they are,’ I said. ‘This isn’t who we are’” (page 152). | “Una de las pocas veces que me pronuncié en contra de los clichés latinos—con mi voz, en una sala, con otras personas presentes—fue mucho antes de convertirme en el profesional organizado, dueño de casa y padre de familia que soy hoy. Tenía veinticuatro años y era redactor de un periódico local. Visité una galería de arte de San Francisco que un fotoperiodista y artista había llenado de imágenes en blanco y negro de mexicanos y otros inmigrantes atados y llevadas a toda prisa por la Patrulla Fronteriza en el sur de San Diego. Esto fue a mediados de la década de 1980, mucho antes de que se construyera allí ninguna cerca o muro. Los inmigrantes detenidos tenían la expresión sorprendida de los niños a los que pillan portándose mal, o de campesinos confundidos atrapados en un sistema legal moderno que no podían esperar entender… Le dije al fotógrafo que me oponía a la cantidad y monotonía de las imágenes, que repetían una y otra vez la misma nota patética y melodramática. Montarlas en una pared y llamarlo arte era ofensivo, le dije. Cada uno de sus sujetos poseía una personalidad que él no había sabido captar. ‘Ellos no son así’, le dije. ‘Esto no es lo que somos’” (página 165) Traducción de Laura Muñoz Bonilla y Tiziana Laudato |
Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. Our Migrant Souls won the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction, the Zócalo Book Prize awarded to a nonfiction work that explores community, human connectedness, and social cohesion, and it was named to best of the year lists by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Time, and NPR, among others. In addition to Our Migrant Souls, Tobar is the author of the critically acclaimed Deep Down Dark, The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Tobar is a professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.
