Karina Oliva Alvarado

On Salvadoran Diasporic Poetry: William Archila, Mario Escobar and Javier Zamora.
Interviews

University of California, Los Angeles, EE.UU.
karinaoliva@ucla.edu

 

The following interviews focus on William Archila (b.1968), Mario A. Escobar (b.1978), and Javier Zamora (b.1990) as Salvadoran born poets living in the United States. The writers share commonalities such as they lived through the decades of the Salvadoran civil war (1979-1992), or the immediate postwar. The poets developed a sense of trauma (due to their embodied experiences in El Salvador), but also in migrating to the United States, the challenges they faced through assimilation, and for Escobar and Zamora, for U.S. persecution as undocumented immigrants. The growing prominence of these poets is representative of growing Central American visibility in the United States as shown by the anthology The Wandering Song. Central American Writing in the United States (2017), edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Héctor Tobar and Rubén Martínez, and the integration of the Salvadoran diaspora in the Salvadoran imaginary as shown in the bilingual anthology Theatre Under My Skin / Teatro Bajo Mi Piel (2014), edited by Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Lucía Sola and Tania Pleitez Vela. The interviews ask Archila, Escobar, Zamora, and the readers, to consider the extent to which they have committed their creative expression as writers to the unique ways they articulate their identities as Salvadorans while living and writing in the United States.

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