An Email Exchange with Roberto Tejada
Courtesy of Fordham University Press.
Roberto Tejada’s 2025 book of poetry, Carbonate of Copper, incorporates, as its title suggests, the most elemental materials of our earth. Written during extended periods in Texas—specifically, in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa—the book’s poems activate a geolocational function within language that operates not top-down, according to the surveillance of nations and power, but across the landscape. Tejada’s poetry attunes to the time and history of the borderlands.
“A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us.¹ “It is in a constant state of transition.” As opposed to the regimenting logic of borders, borderlands ambiguate dividing lines that would have us unnaturally separate much more complex relations in our world. Tejada’s work—a poetry of the borderlands—writes against dividing lines by providing the motivating tangents for thought to travel elsewhere, where it may inhabit a new point of view. From here, I read these poems and am reminded not only of home, family histories, and familiar landscapes but am also touched by the emotional residue of a place “in a constant state of transition.”
Over the month of March, I had a series of email exchanges with Tejada about Carbonate of Copper. Apart from my deep admiration for his writing, I have been excited by his growing relationship to the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost region of Texas that is a prominent location for much of Tejada’s book. I grew up in “the Valley,” as inhabitants refer to it, and found myself at the beginning of our exchange about to take flight to visit family and friends.
Intervenxions staff edited the following conversations for clarity and concision. All unattributed quotations are from Carbonate of Copper.
March 2, 2025
Dear Roberto,
I thought it would be fitting to write from the Rio Grande Valley, my home, which I’ll be visiting in the coming week, but I’m thinking about your Wyeth Lecture in American Art on Latinx Art and the Intimacy of Dislocation in 2024. Apropos of “[having] in mind an order that disarticulates a view from its environs,” perhaps writing from Brooklyn might be my backdrop against which I can envision my home and better formulate in this exchange the intimacy I have with such a singular place that I now have the pleasure to share with you.
I have been reading your new book and it transported me back home in a way that transforms, as you mention in your generous postscript to the book, “perceiver and vicinity.” Reading your work takes me home even as the particularity and particles of my experience are scaled in relation to the itinerant, flare-like “I” of your poems. Your poems “telescope between the historical past and the political imagination of our uniquely distressing present” and provide a variety of accounts—some distressing, many galvanizing—of life on the border.
The Valley is not the only site of writing in Carbonate of Copper, of course. Presidio County, Matamoros, as well as dreams and your personal past, mark its pages. Even so, I’d love to hear how your travels to the Valley have opened up a space for your writing. How has spending seasons in the Valley, writing Carbonate of Copper, re-situated your knowledge of, and questions about, the borderlands?
Yours,
Christopher
March 9, 2025
Dear Christopher,
You may well be in transit, possibly now back home in the Rio Grande Valley, a region unlike others along the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. As you know from lived experience and from the personal genealogies you chronicle in your essay, “Uninhabitable Places to Feel I Was Carrying My Head,” the RGV is a profound, contrasting configuration of histories, peoples, cities, countryside, industrial spaces, and a militarized surveillance landscape along the Rio Grande River, a delta adjoining the southernmost counties of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. I was drawn to its distinct geographic and cultural lifeworld when I began to spend weeks at a time, first in McAllen, later in Brownsville, beginning in February 2021.
I’ve since become very attached to this place with its rich history and vexed present that only appears in the national imaginary when depicted with contempt by lawmakers and mass-media messages around organized crime, drug-related violence when it serves as a convenient electoral battleground, and in dehumanizing narratives that ignore the circumstances leading people to migrate or seek asylum with the sheer hope of a thriving life on this side of the dividing line.
I had partial knowledge from classic accounts: Américo Paredes on the folk traditions of Mexican-American communities in the Valley, or the evocations of the region as “an arid and semi-arid land of irrigated farming, intense sunlight and heat, citrus groves next to chaparral and cactus,” in the writings of poet-theorist Gloria Anzaldúa.² Both writers depicted the historical oppression of Mexican descendent peoples by powerful Anglo landowners, the Texas Rangers, and a segregationist school system. I had begun to draw a personal map of journalists, fiction writers, media artists, and other poets who, like you, register its past and contemporary cultural geography: Cecilia Ballí, Fernando A. Flores, Emmy Pérez as well as two artists I discuss in that Wyeth Lecture, Angel Lartigue and Verónica Gaona.
Others working together with Lartigue on a project called CENOTE—Tere García and poet Matt Flores—had ties to the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, founded by the late Eddie Canales with a mission to promote policies that prevent migrant death and increase public awareness about the militarization of the border. In subsequent visits to Brownsville, I reached out to Brian Strassburger and Louis Hotop, two Jesuit priests devoted to the needs of migrants along the U.S.–Mexico border, and I was welcomed with them into the camps and shelters of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, where they and others have worked in humanitarian aid efforts and to encourage hospitality toward migrants.
The poems in Carbonate of Copper emerged as a response to this equally distressing and galvanizing confluence of the Rio Grande Valley’s expressive culture and political realities, its deep past and present accounts of dispossession—with SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica among the most recent menacing iteration of that narrative—but so, too, its critical forms that align the region’s lifeways to the familiar strangeness of home within the shifting boundaries of public and private spheres through art and activism.
Warmly,
Roberto
March 13, 2025
Dear Roberto,
Reading your response now from the Rio Grande Valley, from my home within “a subdivision between citrus / and palm,” is a reminder of the different kinds of accounting, some of them at odds with each other, that go on here. Because you bring up SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, I’m thinking about how in light of Elon Musk’s fascist advisory to the Trump administration, voices such as Anzaldúa’s, Paredes’, those of the dispossessed, and yours, too, which splits and multiplies into “human and non-human lifeforms” in Carbonate of Copper, provide a counter response to the discursive regimes that would have us imagine differently what life is and can be like in the RGV.
In my prior email, I pulled some of the language about the telescopic reach of your writing from your description of the fourth section 4, the photo essay titled “Signs for a Bridge: Fable.” It presents images from the Library of Congress, featuring life along the RGV and El Paso–Juárez border, as documented by Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange. I get the sense from this section and from the rest of Carbonate of Copper that the need for offering these fables comes from an urgency that has the ability to animate the materials, the debris, with which we give shape to our own narration.
How do you think about the conditions of accounting—of fabulating—in your book, given that there lies an attendant, and I would say complementary, desire for refusal throughout its pages? In the poem “Speaking Part,” the opening line begins with “I leave something out another form of refusal.” Many of the poems read as testimonies coming from a speaker who is in tension with the witness’s injunction to disclose: “I dodge. I take cover again”—from “Season,” also quoted in my opening sentence.
Sending fuerza,
Christopher
March 16, 2025
Dear Christopher,
Thank you for highlighting that photo essay as a kind of twin rehearsal and counterpart storyline to the poems. The Farm Security Administration Photograph Collection available online at the Library of Congress offered me a view into the lifeworld of the Rio Grande Valley from 1939–1942, in scores of images captured by those renown photographers, and from which I assembled a sequence. My hope, prompted by Walter Benjamin’s understanding that a “materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state,”³ was to fashion a universe that could serve as a fable at once for personal and collective grieving—the pre-pandemic passing of my parents; the unfathomable global death toll inflicted by the coronavirus—and to suggest, as well, connections between this corner of the world and the larger historic processes taking place beyond the frame: the final years of the Great Depression, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and the U.S. entry into World War II with its massive mobilization against the Axis powers.
The image of an iconic art deco sign lost to history but once leading to the International Bridge between Brownsville and Matamoros; a filling-station tableau of Mexican migrants on their return home to the Rio Grande Valley after seasonal work in Mississippi; images of farm labor in the beanfields of Cameron County; of moviegoers outside a cinema in Pharr, or at a hamburger stand in Harlingen; a sign from the United States Department of Agriculture prohibiting entry of plants, fruits and vegetables from Mexico; a type of countryside dwelling, a trailer camp in McAllen, and a departing view of the open road on Highway U.S. 54, north of El Paso, a westward route for migrants.
I configured these images as a “telescoping of the past through the present.” A past where 400,000 to 500,000 Mexican Americans fought in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, with thousands killed or wounded, while returning GIs faced discriminatory housing practices and racist segregation. For example, there was when Sergeant Macario García was refused service at a cafe in Sugar Land, Texas, or when a funeral home in Three Rivers refused to provide burial services to the widow of fallen soldier Félix Longoria. A present now inseparable from the militarization of the border, the weaponization of a terrain hostile to human crossing, the enforcement and removal of migrants, the separation of children from families by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more recently Operation Lone Star, and the continued stigmatizing of migrants and asylum seekers by self-interested lawmakers and the cynical mass media.
Your insight into the vitality that fables are prone to marshal as urgently fashioned from all the attachments and losses with which “we give shape to our own narration” aligns with the critical speculation of French Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau.⁴ In his writings on history, he located in the fable as a form of “drifting away,” an overlapping or digression, a “poetry of the present” that can so defy the seeming incontrovertibility of the law, the administered world, and common sense, as to enact “another form of refusal” that lays a wager on the possibility of another world.
The book opens with a poem eclipsed by the ominous figure of a hangman who presides over the body of the poem and of my person enduring the anxious strains of a crossing over, from the tribulations of family authority and its punishing sense of self, to careening lines of flight, ascendant scenes of risk-taking and escape, of accident-prone rebellion, uncertain but intersecting pathways leading to horizons of hope, parting glances, and the vanishing point of an open road, as though depicted in the shades and “highest inhale” of deliverance.
Yours in hope,
Roberto
March 17, 2025
Dear Roberto,
Regarding the ways in which we bear the past as a kind of sense-making that intuits against a world we no longer need to accept as incontrovertible, I was reminded of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro who mentions in “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” that common sense is not common at all and that it is in the incommensurability of notions of seeing the world that a comparison of culture can be made.
I’d like to talk about breath, since your ending sentence in your last exchange reminded me of not only the recurring imagery of lungs but also the use of segmentation throughout the book: how you break the line and break within the line, as if the speaker is actively listening to where words have taken them.
Might you say more about your desire for a “lyric of breath” in Carbonate of Copper? Considering our work together on the “extraordinarily apotropaic” power of art, I don’t think the analogy of prayer would be far off but I’m wondering how else music, spoken word, and even sound figure into your lung-centered poetics.
Yours,
Christopher
March 21, 2025
Dear Christopher,
That’s a nice entry point into the “contradictory consciousness”⁵ I hope to befriend in the language of a poem when voiced by personas whose attitude, faith, and behavior are abruptly thrown into relief, now in jeopardy, inclined to collapse, or on the verge of regenerating—yes, released at last from the monophonic field of common-sense conformity in the shifting circumstances of encounter at once environmental, cultural, and existential. This relates to what I specify as the “intimacy of dislocation” in the work of artists and writers I discuss in Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness, in that Wyeth Lecture, and in a forthcoming collection of my essays on art of the Americas.
My thoughts on the “lyric of breath” have been deeply influenced by an appreciation of sound artist Pauline Oliveros, whose vast body of work as a composer, improvisor, writer, and teacher uniquely resonates in the present given the general acceleration of the world with the venomous political and technological assault on our attention and autonomy.
Soon after I moved to Houston in 2014, I became active in the music-sound community around Nameless Sound, the arts organization cofounded by Oliveros—who was Mexican-descendant and a Houston native—together with David Dove, its current director. Nameless Sound showcases contemporary improvisation-based music. Its artists collaborate directly with young people—refugee youth, the underserved, the neurodivergent, and the homeless in schools, community centers, and shelters; I’ve served on its board for the last several years.
Oliveros’ concept of “deep listening” encourages the experience of one’s environs beyond the auditory faculties. She suggested that deeper levels of awareness can emerge from listening to “everything all the time,” further amplified during moments that call attention to the act of listening itself. This method of discernment—a double movement of distress and plenitude—primes those willing to participate in the democratic experiment of sociability. I wrote those poems hoping to convey an openness to acoustic qualities that, as Oliveros explained, “can lead to the possibility of shaping chaotic sounds of technology and of urban environments and machinery.”
I began Carbonate of Copper in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. So from a geopolitical viewpoint along the U.S.–Mexico border—and given the horror show of a global health crisis with its scapegoating of migrants that laid bare the system’s capacity to dictate who may live and who must die—I sought respiratory realities and psychoacoustic phenomena by way of negative space, visual-sonic splintering, and a consequent modulation of breath that could prompt a careful orientation to others and to the murmur of the world attuned to the aspiration of justice.
With care and complicity,
Roberto
Roberto Tejada. Photo by Paola Valenzuela.
March 22, 2025
Dear Roberto,
I'm glad to see Oliveros invoked, as she's someone I have been hoping to learn from more committedly. In one of her exercises, “Ear Piece,” she offers a list of questions for deep listening, such as “What causes you to listen?” I often return to this exercise whenever I feel like I may benefit from reconfiguring my attention. I’ve returned to it just now to reflect on how our epistolary exchange has helped me take the time to listen more carefully to how you talk about Carbonate of Copper.
As a way of bookending this time (I’m also returning to Brooklyn tomorrow), is there a poem from Carbonate of Copper that you’d like to share, perhaps one that you enjoy reading aloud?
Gratefully,
Christopher
March 22, 2025
Dear Christopher,
Those exercises challenge us to recalibrate our focus and to be open to the amplitude of our surroundings. Thanks so much for the generosity of attention and insight and for helping me listen to myself in retrospect. I thought I’d offer a poem that, in the end, I decided not to include in the book. It can live here as a hidden track or alternate ending, appropriately titled “Envoi.”
Warmly,
Roberto
Envoi
Clove tree and roses for
these broken chords
for the speed and scale
that thrive to kindle
ache into index
or loudest sound
affirming anon
in effusion of flame
in deference to mouths
that make matter
a style of molten
rock a landslide
the color of hoping
to make Mars habitable ~
¹ Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987, pg 3.
² Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987, pg 89.
³ Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p 471.
⁴ De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History, translated by Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p 217.
⁵ Gramsci, Antonio. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, edited by David Forgacs. New York: New York University Press, 2000, p 333.