MPR’s Elizabeth Baier reports on members of Palabristas, a Twin Cities' spoken word group that explores their love of poetry and performance by writing about what it's like to be Latinos in the Midwest.
Some of the artists talk about the challenges they faced growing up bi-cultural.
RODRIGO SANCHEZ-CHAVARRIA: I never thought my name would ever escape me. But as a kid coming from the land of the Incas and the Inca Kolas, I was submerged by force to the idea of public education, where teachers are instructed to brand ESL on the skin of all the students of color that walk in.
ELIZABETH BAIER: Poet Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria is musing on what his life was like when his family moved from the crammed, chaotic city of Lima, Peru, to a quiet neighborhood in the Twin Cities. His family moved to the United States in the late '80s. His mother had been accepted into a graduate program at the University of Minnesota. For years, Sanchez-Chavarria struggled to fit in.
RODRIGO SANCHEZ-CHAVARRIA: Kids laughing at me on a daily basis because I was the breeding, walking joke. I found myself a brown kid so segregated and hated upon that I lost hope. Learn English as my second language not by choice. But little by little, I started to create my strong voice. Spending resources alone and hours on my own is how the years passed until high school came.
ELIZABETH BAIER: How to balance two languages, cultures and identities is the lifelong question for a lot of Latinos who live in the United States but have roots around the hemisphere. For Sanchez-Chavarria, the answer came through poetry. The 30-year-old is one of the members of Palabristas and says it's the only Latino spoken word group in Minnesota. The word itself, Palabristas, means wordsmith in Spanish. Like many spoken word groups, Palabristas combines the imagery of poetry with the emotion of a dramatic performance.
Lorena Duarte is another poet in the group. The 31-year-old was born in El Salvador. She moved to Minnesota with her family when she was a child, following a relative who came to study. Now, Duarte's ability to straddle two cultures is evident from her world views to her taste buds.
LORENA DUARTE: I describe myself sometimes as a Minnesotana Salvadoreña and people are like, what the? And I'm like, well, that just kind of means I love pupusas and mac and cheese.
ELIZABETH BAIER: Pupusas are the National food of El Salvador. Duarte describes what they're like.
LORENA DUARTE: It's like a tortilla, but very thick. It's stuffed with pork, and beans, and cheese, and it's dripping with grease and it's fantastic. You put pickled cabbage on top, and it just runs down your face. Fabulous.
And then you have that, and then you go to a potluck and you have hot dish. So that's the Minnesota Latino experience.
ELIZABETH BAIER: The Minnesota Latinos who are part of Palabristas represent six Latin American countries from as far South as Peru to the border with Mexico. They range in age from teenagers to mid 50-year-olds. And although the poets come from very different countries and backgrounds, they say the group is as much about poetry as it is about understanding each other's bi-cultural lives.
Sometimes they express this identity in simple ways, like through language. They perform their work in English and Spanish, and sometimes they use both languages to get their message across. Other times, they convey that bi-cultural identity by writing poems about politics, economics and education in the United States and their home country.
For Duarte, it's a little bit of both. She likes to have fun when she describes herself to others, but sometimes she takes a more serious tone in her poetry. During the rehearsal, she pauses, then takes a deep breath before starting a heartfelt poem about immigration and a mother's unconditional love.
LORENA DUARTE: She was my fifth client of the day, from the same tiny, miserable and defiant country as I. Worn sneakers kept carefully clean, hardened hands carefully quiet on her lap, carefully folded money order on my desk. One more immigration transaction. Perfunctory.
ELIZABETH BAIER: Duarte and the other poets say they write to give voice to their lives as Latinos living in Minnesota. And they want other people to know some of these stories of the two places they call home. Elizabeth Baier, Minnesota Public Radio News, Minneapolis.
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