Desgraciado: The Collected Letters

Angel Dominguez’s Desgraciado is comprised of more than a hundred letters addressed to the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizer Fray Diego de Landa, which combine bardic oratory with post-colonial critique to offer a capacious account of the brutalities of New World colonization and its ramifications for current-day American capitalism, fascism, and white supremacy. Spanish is a central part of Dominguez’s critique, the language having been “transmitted with violence,” and they note that English is a better alternative for them: “it breathes with my body. It doesn’t hurt me, at least not always.” 

Dominguez grapples with the erasure of their own Mayan culture, ancestors, and history, which has left the poet in purgatorial estrangement: “I keep smashing this continent against my blood and nothing sticks.” But these poems are not all focused on the past; in some, we witness the poet’s struggles with debt and with the failures of capitalism for working people (“Today, I can’t afford a bus to see my little brother’s graduation”), with white entitlement, racism, and with their own conflicted feelings about their conservative family, whose beliefs have manifested, at times, in a violent refusal to accept the poet’s sexuality.

By treating the figure of Diego as both enemy and lover, Dominguez attempts to subvert his enduring influence, holding the colonizer in his own purgatory: “I think of us as two ropes of light, entwined and gathering galaxies, undisturbed in endless space.” This is an intimate embrace of personal struggle, but Dominguez also takes many opportunities to highlight the resiliency of all those who were colonized across centuries of violence: “We are still here. We are alive, and every day we continue to grow like roses under snow.”