Event Type
As Mexico is honored as this year’s guest nation, this roundtable brings together five of the most distinctive and internationally resonant voices in contemporary Mexican poetry: Hugo García Manríquez, Sara Uribe, Karen Villeda, Román Luján, and Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola. Their work—spanning documentary poetics, conceptual writing, translingual experimentation, sound and performance art, theatre, and politically engaged lyric—reflects Mexico as a place profoundly shaped by migration, violence, precarity, displacement, neoliberal extractivism, plurilingualism, Indigenous worldviews, and transnational cultural exchange. Rather than treat “Mexican poetry” as a fixed category, this conversation investigates how these poets inhabit, resist, reconfigure, and exceed the idea of "Mexico" and of the nation state more broadly. What does it mean to write from Mexico, or from the Mexican diaspora, at a moment when the borders of "Mexican identity" are increasingly unstable, meanwhile the geopolitical lines of the nation's militarized borders remain violently fixed? How does the nation-state shape, distort, or inspire poetic practice? Where do state archives, institutions, linguicide, racial ideologies, anti-Indigenous policies, and systematic ecological harm enter the field of contemporary poetic experimentation? What new forms of collective belonging emerge when national narratives erode or collapse?