On The Queer Sanctuaries of Roy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos
Arriving to the end of Roy G. Guzmán’s electrifying debut we encounter the genesis of the word that titles their collection—Catrachos. Its arrival into the world is one of celebratory utterance—un grito de independencia—during the 1860 victory parade that welcomed those brave Honduran and Salvadoran alike who fought under the military leadership of Florencio Xatruch, an upper class Honduran captured in the historical ledger as the emancipator of Central America. The name ‘Xatruch’ became the misfired pronunciation that would give name to the isthmus’ most valiant soldiers: Catrachos from Honduras and Salvatruchos from El Salvador—they who foreclosed the ambitions of the United States American, William Walker.
William Walker is an infamous figure in the early history of U.S. intervention in Central America. His rise to power came with the support of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the shipping and railroad titan whose industry stretched from New York to San Francisco and who proposed building a canal through Nicaragua during the onset of the California Gold Rush. Vanderbilt, sensing Walker’s instability as a leader, allied with Great Britain, who contracted the region’s local military and turned Walker over to the forces led by General Xatruch. Walker was immediately executed by firing squad.
Walker reminds us of another unstable leader, one whose shutdown of the U.S. border, in light of the pandemic added a terrifying layer to border security and the unmerciful enforcement felt in every working class colónia in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It is this interventionist haunting that animates the poems in Catrachos, such as this section from the poem that opens the collection:
Fold your hands / boy / walk straight / never graduate your hungers / Befuddlement sloths on their tongues / their eyes chapels of pebbles / We mount the izote tree / Tía Mamá watchtowers from the kitchen / a large pot of soup on the stove / pataste rapunzelled with dollars / Mom's Moneygrammed early / in the morning / I heed my accuser's orders: / Perch on the boulders our mothers / lay their clothes to mummify / jostle against the lengthy hammock / Abuelo bought en el mercado / They knot my wrists / with hands that buried only mothers / I become their hummingbird embroidery
excerpt from “Catrachos”
Tomb of William Walker. (Scott Raine / Public Domain).
The tensions in these unsettling snapshots are tempered by slashes that live on lines unbroken; that isolate the mounted izote tree that, like its speakers, travels outside of the Central American isthmus and labors quietly like the hammock, another exported sibling. These images sing amidst the short-circuited voice of some imagined overseer rings. These poems echo against the state agent or the managerial classed cog or the internalized loathing that evacuates the remaining traces of indigenous metaphysics or black labor from subjectivities often objectified. These hauntings hatch in the belly of each child that springs from the bellies of belittled itinerant mothers, brow beaten into submission in the day in, day out ontology of abject survival within the bellies of bigger imperial beasts.
How many brown bodies will give up their bodies
so other brown bodies
might live?
excerpt from “Amor Eterno”
Yet these inequities persist. According to the World Bank, remittances account for nearly one-fifth of the economic output in Honduras. This economic reality underpins “Preparations For A Trip Home,” a six-sectioned free verse poem that begins with the speaker’s mother offering experienced counsel on when to notify those who had been good to you when you were down on your luck that you’re coming back in fatter times with gifts a-flowing. There is always an incentive in returning to the places first known to us early in life. It can be kinship and nostalgia for most of us. Or how we finally enjoy those places, a multiplication of home, and forgive their accompanying poverties—both economic and emotional—that drive us away. Guzmán asks us to consider what it might mean to return home, demonstrative of the spoils that empire has lavished on our conscriptions into the elusive American citizenry.
The idea that home is both in the here and abroad is present throughout Catrachos and echoed in what Los Angeles-based Salvadoran visual artist and philosopher Beatriz Cortez says “is one of the gifts of immigration, about being in different places at once, moving back and forth through space and time, through different types of modernities.” As the disempowered child of two immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, I found myself needing a release valve for the pressure of recognition in poems laden with a familiar affliction of navigating a hostile U.S. culture. And the doubling of that pressure as those two immigrants’ queer child. There are incredibly potent moments where Guzmán takes these estrangements—made legible by the fact of queer desire—and writes them into sanctuary.
We renamed all things to delay their expiration.
Etymology declined to residue. Wasn’t it in the coverage / of fire that we turned most introspective? What I could’ve / done to an entire generation. Nothing is as explosive as refuge.
excerpt from Queerodactyl (#8)
The generative excesses reside in the suite of Queerodactyl poems located at different junctions throughout the collection. While the Queerodactyl is a queer dinosaur character, its connective tissue relies on a Babel-like convergence of accents and registers. This feels reminiscent of what José Muñoz calls an Althusserian swerve; or what a series of high key chance meet-cutes and their unorthodox substitutions that call in the language of nightlife might look like. I was taken to the rainbow sherbert-lit corners of the club, the sex app encounter, and the play that the proliferation of queer identities affords a sonically satisfying oblivion. The only thing missing was the 4am visit to Waffle House. But from within these poems erupt the transformative climax of belonging. Like the early morning light, it contracts these ecstasies towards a needful abstraction for the safety of its speaker. While it is often a fun flirtation, not everyone can readily revel in the spoils of visibility.
The Queerodactyl poems help brace me for the clearest of these distresses in “Restored Mural for Orlando.” It is here within the transnational angst and utopian longings of the speaker, that Guzmán mourns the departed club patrons who danced their last dance at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando in 2016.
Our mothers gave us names / so we would know what goes at the
head of a tombstone / bare précis / & our duty is to feel the
isolation that any alignment of letters can trigger when they’re
carved out of grief /
excerpt from “Restored Mural for Orlando”
Grief aggregates in the remembering of Orlando as a space of childhood fantasy, free of the softer violences against immigrants and their children—debt and self-negation. To bear witness to the loss of life of the speaker’s queer siblings on that dancefloor demands a reckoning with the social death that mandates immigrant life. It reverberates in this loss of livelihoods as recessions come to collect what has been eked out in the penumbras of precarity. Guzmán queers mourning by naming those losses that socially condition brown life.
The 2008 recession arrived on the heels of George W. Bush’s presidential exit and persists as the economic specter that marks Guzmán’s generation’s troubled and debt-laden entry into the public sphere. This burden is represented best in the collection’s penultimate section “Self-Portrait According to George W. Bush,” an incredible genre-bending suite of poems both innovative in form (in Colores/Drones a Spanglish-language Chinese food menu serves classed resentments between first year college students) and content. This section serves as a resounding response to a 2006 televised speech where Bush addressed the nation’s need for stricter immigration laws. It is with pieces such as SOMBRAS/DETENTION FACILITY and FONDO/CRIMINAL BACKGROUND CHECK where American tales of chance and survival begets the xenophobic discourse that becomes realized in deadly ways a decade later.
Catrachos is a significant contribution to U.S.-based Central American poetry. By grounding the collection in urgencies that critically echo the legacies of intervention of both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations, Guzmán eulogizes a people failed by the state. The poet summons a ragtag army of ghosts to honor a matrilineal impulse towards healing and homecoming. Catrachos is also a coordinated desire to unravel the interventionist’s most damning artifact—the image of a Central America as ill-prepared and complicit in its own plundering.
Raquel Gutiérrez currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where they just completed two MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. A 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Raquel also runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects (est. 2014), which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. Their poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in ArtNet, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, FENCE, Huizache, The Georgia Review, The Texas Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Raquel’s first book of prose, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in the Spring of 2021.