March 2nd was rainy and cold. Downtown Santa Ana. Boca de Oro. A literary and arts festival. March 2nd.

In the basement of the historic Santora Arts Building, poets spitted verse, Latinx telling their stories in front of a packed audience. Over 30 listeners. Smaller than when I first attended two years ago. One could say more intimate.

My first year, 2022, reading venues were sprinkled across Downtown Santa Ana: a cafe, record store, the restaurant Chapter One’s Red Room. Walking from one venue to the next, at times between and around the Santa Ana Unified School District’s musicians and dancers headed to their performances, instruments could be heard in the mid-distance. Each reading featured vastly different writers, aesthetics, from a large swath of SoCal, reading verse and prose. Art had taken over Santa Ana.

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Like last year, readings took place in the same artist’s basement studio. It still felt tucked away, a little hidden, in Downtown Santa Ana’s Historic District. The district is characterized by a number of art deco buildings, two old movie houses (The West End and the Fox West Coast), as well as Orange County’s first courthouse. Running through Santa Ana Boulevard, are the new, nearly completed tracks of the OC Streetcar line. This year there was no walking between reading venues.

Local poets Brenda Vaca and Donato Martinez organized the four main readings that featured Paola Gutierrez, Maria Herrera, GusTavo Adolfo Guerra Vasquez, Diosa Xochiquetzalcoatl, Cecilia Sanchez, Jesenia Chavez, Iuri M. Lara, Angelina Sáenz, Davis Alvarado, Oscar Velasquez, Caesar Avelar, David A. Romero, Donato Martinez, Sandy Shakes, Carlos Ornelas, Isabella Santana and Elvia Susana Rubalcava. Each one of these poets wrote on the same topics, their Latinx identity and culture, but each in different ways—family, community, societal, in the workplace, gender, etc. As counter narratives to the ones white mainstream society tells about them and their communities.

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Jesenia Chavez, who has taught kindergarten and first grade in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 18 years and whose debut collection This Poem Might Save You (Me), opens her book with an unofficial poem that explains what the collection is about.

	A poem can be a time capsule
	Capturing a moment of distress
	A memory to revisit,
	a moment to share and release,
	to share and relive.

One poem she read during her feature was “Mangos,” the poem that opens the collection. It’s a Spanglish poem about a time when Chavez visited her family in Chihuahua, Mexico and ate the juicy mangos that grew and fell from her abuelito’s tree.

	the juice drips down onto your thighs as you 
	sit on the plastic white chairs,
	pile after pile of peels and the huesos,
	the red bucket is always full, the ripest ones 
	attract the flies, but who cares

Angelina Sáenz read from her recently released, second collection of poems Maestra. A former LAUSD elementary school teacher for 23 years, the collection “explores the complexities of classrooms, embracing hope, despair, resilience, and joy…[S]he delves into the vulnerability of children, the struggles faced by working-class and immigrant parents, the dedication of teachers, and the flaws within bureaucratic systems.” The poems are short and that enabled Sáenz to read many.

As she read, Sáenz punctuated her poetry and her journey to becoming a poet with several anecdotes of her experiences working with the racist bureaucratic systems of the United States, exemplified by her time as a creative writing graduate student at Otis College. Her professors discounted her life experiences she wrote about—the madness of her family as she grew up and continued to live as a Chicana in urban Los Ángeles—picking apart her poems and telling her to her face that she didn’t have the talent to be a poet. Instead of letting her professors’ words derail her, she said, their words proved why she needed to tell her stories.

In-between each reading—Entre héroes y heroínas embriagantes, The She(roes) Among Us, Heroes from the Hood, Unsung Heros—was when the audience could interact with the poets and purchase their books, if they’d published a collection.

However, a few emerging poets featured, such as Cecilia Sanchez and Oscar Velasquez. Both natives of Orange County, Sanchez is busy penning a poetry manuscript as her Latina American Studies masters program’s final project at Cal State L.A. As a first generation graduate student on her father’s side, she explores inclusive feminism; her identity as a Latina living in the US, living between two cultures; and the resistance to toxic and racist societal norms. These ideas come from Sanchez’s own experiences and the community and region in which she lives, where “I found myself writing about my friends and families experiences as well.” But until her poetry manuscript is published, to tide people over, Sanchez announced she’d made a zine, comprised of 10 of her poems, titled Nepantla Cries.

Oscar Velasquez spoke about how he used to live the crazy life, using hard drugs like coke, hanging out with the wrong crowd, before he found poetry to help him make sense of his life and where it was headed. He was dressed in a clean white Nike t-shirt, jeans, the cuffs of which were tucked behind the tongues of his dark blue Nike’s, tats on both arms, stubble on his head and a goatee covering his chin and upper lip. Though he read some heavy poems, one about snorting coke when he didn’t give a shit about life—“i wrote my name in shards of/powdered/glass/and said ‘FUCCKK IT!’”—he also a sweet cheesy poem about love, revealing his sweet nerdy side. The guy he had become.

	Love is Camelot,
	the arcade, in
	the 90s, when it
	was better
	known as,
	scamalot

Before Brenda Vaca introduced the final reading “Unsung Heros,” the most powerful moment occurred. Vaca brought into the room the genocide in Gaza. She wanted everyone not to forget the inexcusable destruction of hospitals, of children’s lives and civilian neighborhoods. She called for a cease fire and read a poem.

She was doing the work most all poets ascribe to, which sounds grandiose, but is still true: to be truth tellers by telling and confronting the most difficult of truths; to speak out about the atrocities in the world; to help cope with trauma and healing; to challenge readers to see from different perspectives; and to foster empathy and understanding—to create deeper connections—among people.

This unique privilege, where writers have a platform for their voices to be heard, is where many feel they have the responsibility to use it to advocate for a better world. Vaca did just that.

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For the first six years of Boca de Oro, it’s website states, it was “a gift from Community Engagement through the Santa Ana Business Council supported by the vision and leadership of Madeleine Spencer in partnership with Robyn McNair and [the] Santa Ana Unified School District.” However, that partnership fell apart. The city no longer supports the festival. This year and last, “thanks to the support and dedication of a team from SAUSD and the many creative individuals from the community sharing their voices,” Boca de Oro is able to continue. Vaca told me last year the festival came to both Donato Martinez and herself to curate the literature side of Boca de Oro and this year they agreed to return.

On this partly rainy Saturday in Santa Ana, SAUSD students danced in the backdrop of pouring rain. As SAUSD Arts said on their Facebook page, “the rain hitting the pavement while blending with the orchestra felt like your favorite Lo-Fi playlist. There is something to be said about sitting inside your local theatre watching films and performances as the rain poured outside or finding the secret basement where literary artists shared works close to their hearts.”

“We already can’t wait for next year.”