Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women, edited by Sandra Guzmán (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), contains works by 141 Latine contributors from 34 countries that span the Americas and the Caribbean, writing in 21 languages, including 17 Indigenous languages. Contributors include well-known writers like Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, as well as self-published writers whose writing deserves more attention. (One notable inclusion is Mazatec shaman-poet María Sabina, whose chants and spoken poems were transcribed and translated.)  On a video call from Exeter, New Hampshire, Guzmán recently spoke to us about curating this trailblazing anthology; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired the creation of Daughters of Latin America?

Oh, I love that question, because I get to talk about the work that’s been done before this work. There are ancestor anthologies that inspired [it]. One of the anthologies that inspired this anthology came out about four years ago—it’s called New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. It’s a beautiful and powerful anthology. This anthology is also inspired by This Bridge Called My Back, the iconic 1980s anthology edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as a wonderful anthology called When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry edited by Joy Harjo. These are sister anthologies.

Aside from the more typical contents like poems, stories, and essays, your anthologyincludes oral history, interviews, letters, and other materials that seem like they would be difficult to find. What was your approach to gathering materials for inclusion?

When I was curating and doing the research, I felt like the canon needed a little bit more airing out as to what is literature and who gets to decide what great literature is. These were things that were front of mind and back of mind. For oral histories, I was thinking about someone like María Sabina, who was dismissed during her lifetime, but was a great shaman poet. As I state in my intro, it has to do with the fact that she was a Mazatec Indigenous woman from the Oaxaca region [of Mexico]. She was poor, and she didn’t read or write in her own language[Mazatec]. Her poetry and chants were recorded, transcribed, and later translated. I felt it was really important to lift her voice and story. I was thinking also about women like Gabriela Mistral [the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature]. It’s just so funny—during her lifetime, guys wrote about her as a spinster. She never got married. Then you read her letters and she’s having the time of her life with all her girlfriends. I thought, Why not dig into her letters? Letters are so intimate and they give us a peek into the writer’s world. Why not get to know her a little bit more deeply? These were the moments where I felt like letters and chants could really be part of the literary experience for us. That’s kind of what I was thinking about: how to redefine the canon on our own terms.

You can look at this anthology like a house. There were four main pillars that hold the house together. One of them was queer women who have been marginalized throughout history. The second group was Indigenous women of the Americas, because many of the First Nations women are marginalized in their own countries. I wanted to lift their voices and center their voices. The third group was Black Latinas. And the fourth group was Puerto Rican women writers, because I am Puerto Rican and I was born a colonial subject. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, the euphemism for a colony. We work in liminal spaces because we’re not necessarily fully American, even though the paperwork says we are, technically. We are sometimes forgotten in the Latin American literary conversation.

You structured the anthology using the 13 moons of the year and their specific energies according to Mayan tradition for each section. At what point did you realize you were going to organize the anthology in that way?

I remembered a conversation I had with an Indigenous man in Puerto Rico. He said to me, “So you’re coming back home, but do you know the language of the moon?” And I was like, Do I know the language of the moon? No, because in immigration and modern life we have a disconnect with the moon. I started to think about my grandfathers, my uncles, and my cousins; they would never fish or go into the ocean without knowing where the moon was. My mother would never plant a seed without understanding what was happening with the moon. The Zapotec people [of Mexico] believe that when the woman gets her period, the moon descends. I started to think, Oh, of course, the moon. That’s our abuela. That’s our ancestral connection. She’s the one that’s been speaking to us for so long. It made perfect sense.

I reached out to some of the Indigenous sisters in the group [of contributors] and asked, “Do you know any elder who can talk to me about the moon?” It opened up all these new portals—not just to the moon, but also the sacred calendars, the ancient calendars that the Maya still live by. The number 13 kept resonating. Anyway, all of those confluences of ancient tradition started to open up within me this deep interest and connection. And it just made sense. It tied us in a way that was so divine.

Speaking of Indigenous writers, you note in your acknowledgments that about half of the pieces were translated from a non-English language. You and other writers translated them. Was commissioning their translation a part of the process?

Yes, about 50% of the women that I reached out to wrote or write in non-English languages including Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Indigenous languages. I had to commission translators. I mention this statistic in my intro, but every 12 to 14 days an Indigenous language dies around the world. The Maya poet Rosa Chávez said to me, “What you’ve done with this is language justice, because when you center non-English voices in their Indigenous mother tongues, you are saying something really powerful about the importance of these languages and literatures.”

Did anything surprise you as you were curating Daughters of Latin America?

I guess it’s not a surprise, but an affirmation of the sisterhood that exists in the Latine community, in the women writers of the world. It was so beautiful to experience the magnanimous way in which women support each other. I would reach out to a writer like Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, who’s Puerto Rican from New York—she’s Afro-Boricua—and she says, “But do you know this Haitian sister, Danielle Legros Georges, or do you know this queer writer Caro De Robertis?” I’m not sure if it’s a surprise or, like I said, an affirmation of what happens within these communities of writers. I really hope that this anthology is the beginning of making sure that we know about the women who are writing, as my literary hero Toni Morrison says, “outside the margins.”

Laura Villareal is the author of the poetry collection Girl’s Guide to Leaving.