conquistador

Demetria Martinez reads work from The Devil's Workshop (2002), Breathing Between the Lines (1997), and Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana (2005). She also reads a short story from the manuscript of The Block Captain's Daughter, which would go on to be published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2012. This reading was originally given alongside Rebecca Seiferle. 

Mexican poet Homero Aridjis reads work reflecting his environmental activism and engagement with Mexican history, drawn from his 2001 bilingual publication Ojos de otro mirar / Eyes to See Otherwise: Selected Poems. The English translations of Aridjis's poems (by Eliot Weinberger, George McWhirter, and Betty Ferber) are read aloud by Alison Hawthorne Deming.

Natasha Wimmer reads her translations from the Spanish of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, and Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. She opens with a translation-in-progress of Dalton's poems written in 1970s Cuba before turning to Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires (2024), a novel about the Spanish conquistadors' stay in Tenochtitlan in 1519. She closes with an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives (2007), which follows fictional young poets in Mexico City.