I was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, and migrated with my family to the United States at the commencement of El Salvador’s civil war. Growing up on the Mexico/US Border and being a part of the Central American diaspora have informed the nature of my work, which borrows from postlyric, docupoetic, and hybrid compositional practices. As have my experiences of living through the structural inequality, hate, and racial supremacy of Southern California’s political landscape during the late 1990s, including the various examples of xenophobic legislation, police abuse, and the militarization of the border. Of late, the persistence of inherited trauma and the work of retrieving events from nonlingual and prelingual memories have played a large role in how I interact with various aspects of archive and archival poetics, poetic emotion, and apostrophe. I use vector design software when composing as a way of mimicking the individuality of source texts, setting type meant to capture discreet registers, and bridging ocular and acoustic resemblances. The effect are texts that explore dimensions of fragmentation, but move towards a wholeness. Though critical of nationalistic practices I write towards the discovery of Nation. In these characteristics, of retrieving and/or aspiring towards language to clarify what the immediacy of experience overwhelms, I often feel an affinity with works of the 20th- and 21st-Centuries that similarly explore repertoires of traumatic recovery and historical/collective trauma towards a “core language” binding Nation and individual, history and memory, love and disavowal.
