Cynthia Guardado explores the inherited past of her Salvadorian roots in Cenizas

FROM: Cultural Daily

For poet and professor Cynthia Guardado, family, El Salvador and her Salvadorian American identity plays huge roles in her life. It began before she was born in 1984, when her parents fled the country’s brutal civil war as undocumented refugees and made their way to Los Ángeles. That put borders and thousands of miles between them and their cantón—Buena Vista—the land of their ancestors.

Guardado was two when her father wanted his daughters to be connected to family, to Buena Vista and El Salvador, and still undocumented, took his daughters back to meet their great-grandmother, Momma Juana. To make El Salvador real, despite the dangers of the civil war, and not to hold some distant, abstract importance. Ever since, Guardado has repeatedly returned to her homeland.

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The importance El Salvador and family play in Guardado’s life, is first seen in her debut collection Endeavor (World Stage Press, 2017) in a handful of heavy, personal, heartfelt poems in a collection about the harsh reality of trauma against women of color in America. In these poems—about an undocumented cousin brutally murdered, how violence in one country still haunts her in the other, the strain physical distance puts on a family, generational trauma—Guardado is already focused on how family and herself, personally, deal with the aftermath of the violence they encounter instead of depicting their traumatic violence as a way to assuage readers’ complicity in ignoring the marginalized group’s contextualized reality. This gives these poems a much-needed alternate point of view that invests readers deeper into who these people are and what El Salvador is, once the cameras are gone.

However, the poems in Guadardo’s second collection, Cenizas (University of Arizona Press, 2022), are more effective in discussing the inherited past of a family and country, than the handful of poems from Endeavor that focus more on the violence El Salvador and her family have endured through a less nuanced lens. Read Rest of Review Here