From the Editor
- From the Editor
It is our privilege to share with you this special issue on the “Poetics of the Body.” Inspired by the poetic legacy of Andrés Montoya (1968–1999), the essays herein amplify Montoya’s poetic vision. Montoya’s poetic voice came out of the lived experience of labor and social organizing, and for Montoya, experience was always corporeal and spiritual, where the banal inspires the beautiful and the everyday portends the memorable. Montoya’s poetry and his larger artistic imagination speak of a world where circumstance refuses to foreclose the possibility of an unbounded future. Poverty and violence are facets of a reality but not its determinant. As such, Montoya’s poetry articulates a resolute persistence, of renewal and determination, of carrying the past with you as you press softly into the plasticine film between the now and the future pulling you into it.
This special issue is about being in and being of our embodied experience, but also of the ways that our bodies tether us to each other and the world. Many thinkers (from Gloria Anzaldúa to bell hooks to Roderick Ferguson, and numerous others) have reminded us of the importance of how our skins and bodies impact our social experience. We come to know—about our selves, our worlds, our people—both through and outside of inhabited experience. Pushing on the tension of the mind/body duality, the essays build on this millennia-old debate in new and fascinating ways, ways that simultaneously affirm the connections to body without reducing them to it.
To confront and find comfort in the everyday, despite the hardship faced; to transform out of the experience of labor and adversity a poetic voice flush with beauty and joy, wrought from struggle; these essays build upon this, crafting a critical vision that reflects on the spiritual, the bodily, on injury as opportunity, on contagion as connectedness. This is the critical vision emanating out of poetic legacy.
This issue, too, marks a transition point in the journal. It is the first special issue under the current editorial team, and like special issues in the past, demonstrates Chiricú Journal’s commitment to collaborative scholarship. It marks the first of several upcoming, exciting special issues developed through our ongoing collaboration with scholars, artists, and practitioners of Latinx cultures in its myriad [End Page 1] expansiveness, artifacts of the community conversation in which we are deeply embedded. We are excited to bring these to you. [End Page 2]
Alberto Varon is Associate Professor of English and Latino Studies and Director of the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University. He is the author of Before Chicano: Citizenship and the Making of Mexican American Manhood, 1848–1959.
